Going Metric

I heard a couple of things from otherwise normal people in this last week that annoyed me. The first was a semi-joke that 'the government' was injecting computer chips into people when they got the swine flu inoculation. The person who said this was not an ignorant goober-head, but an office worker at a local grade school. It was one of those moments where I should have looked around to see if I had been sucked up into a cartoon vortex, but instead I changed the subject ASAP just in case she wasn't joking.
The other comment disturbed me a lot more. A local fourth grade teacher has decided she is going to teach her students the metric system, and the person who told me this added, “she doesn't care who gets mad about it.”
When it comes to any kind of science or math, the metric system is standard. Who would get mad about their kids learning how to measure, convert, and generally speak the language of science? What they should really be worried about is the binary system- because that's the language of computer chips.
Nancy Sherer