Yes the sooner that a couple of major countries finally give in with their old weights & measure systems the better off the whole world will be. ;-)

[edit] and the differences between Imperial and the US versions is ridiculous in this day and age.

Cheers.

I wonder if the U.S. will ever go Metric?

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

We are starting to lean that way but it will be a long ways off.

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Give it another 5yrs and yous will then be half a century behind us here. ;-)

some much for so called "world leaders" :-D

Cheers.

We tried in the 1970s but the public rebelled.

Nevertheless, the military measures distances in kilometers. Paramedics report patient weight to the hospital in kilos. Car engines are described in liters instead of cubic inches. Even drug dealers use grams and kilos. So people are using metric a lot now without admitting it to themselves.

I can fairly easily translate long distances in my head, but I still think in miles because I grew up with them. For short lengths, I can actually think better in cm and mm than fractions of inches. For volume, quarts and liters are close enough to not matter for casual use.

Temperature will be a tough one for me, and most of us. My mother's argument, which I couldn't disagree with, was that Fahrenheit is more precise because the degrees are smaller.

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

temperature is a tough one for me, but not for the same reason as your Mum.
As a member of the sub-one-K club all these offset zeros are so confusing.

(And using kelvin would certainly stop the "Its twice as hot here as in ...." folks in their tracks unless it gets REALLY hot, or REALLY cold.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

I prefer my bavarian Maß which is one litre.
I dont want to wait for beer ya know.

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With each crime and every kindness we birth our future.

I can't get too excited about the whole Imperial versus Metric thing. After 40 years of working around the globe in engineering, I realize there is metric, and then there is metric. Ask industries in 5 different metric countries what the standard units are for pressure, and you will get at least 6 different answers.

It all boils down to local preferences, and if you want to work in a region you need to learn to communicate with those people. Base ten makes some thing easier, but you can learn almost anything if you have to. I can still recite the decimal equivalent, and the millimetre equivalent, of most 32nd and 64th fractions of an inch. That's after two years of working in a drawing office that used inch fractions on the drawings, but bought material in inch decimals and metric.

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This of course brings to mind the Mars Climate Orbiter incident in 1999: "The 'root cause' of the loss of the spacecraft was the failed translation of English units into metric units in a segment of ground-based, navigation-related mission software - -"

This to me is still not a root cause, it is just a symptom. You don't correct problems by telling people "don't do that again". Humans don't work that way. You might be able to correct the problem if you know WHY the human made the mistake, and then fixed that. Better expressed root causes might be "a lack of fluency in multiple unit systems" and/or "a lack of understanding of the presented data because of a lack of fluency in different unit systems", and/or "a lack of understanding of the presented data because of a lack of understanding of the task described by the presented data".

Just saying you shouldn't be too quick to blame the metric system.

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The best story about issues of using two measuring system is the Gimli Glider. They made a movie about it and it shows how something that could have been a major disaster ended with no loss of life.

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The best story about issues of using two measuring system is the Gimli Glider. They made a movie about it and it shows how something that could have been a major disaster ended with no loss of life.

That was an episode on Air Crash Investigation that got screened here last month.

Cheers.

It's certainly easier to shove a decimal point, then round up and multiply,
in order to calculate a 20%tip. With pounds, shillings, etc. -- I've always
wondered what gyrations my British friends must have to go through. . .

For me, and I was brought up on both, UK family in historically European run country, and then apprentice electronics engineer, from age of 15, when some parts of the metric system where still using cgs, not mks (later SI units).

I find for every day living, Imperial works best most of the time. For engineering and scientific Metric works best.

Main complaint with Metric in every day living, they are not human friendly. Example, measure a floor without instruments.

Division of metric is not easy unless it is by 10, 5 or 2, but a dozen eggs can be divided by all numbers between 1 and 6 except for 5.

Just as a matter of interest, what size are standard pieces in the house, like door widths, drywall, timber etc.

Another question how useful is the official SI unit of volume, and it isn't the litre.

Just as a matter of interest, what size are standard pieces in the house, like door widths, drywall, timber etc.

I believe a 2x4 is 1-3/4 x 3-1/2.

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

It's a total mess, 1/2 and 1/2 in the building and construction trade!!

A standard door is 2ft 6in x 6ft 6in, a standard kitchen unit is 600mm wide.

Plasterboard panels (dry walling to the Yanks) are 1800mm x 900mm x 9.5mm or what we would know as 6ft x 3 ft x 3/8in, or 2400mm x 1200mm or the old 8ft x 4ft x 1/2in.

You can't buy 1 cwt sacks of cement now it's in 50Kg bags.

A 4 by 2 timber joist is now 100mm x 50mm, if you buy it rough sawn, else it's 3 1/2" x 1 3/4" planed.

Yet you can still buy a 1/2" washer, and a 2" paintbrush + litres of paint ......

Total madness.

You can get yourself in that type of mess by staying in the same system. My mom's house is about 40 year old and all the 2x4's are real 2x4's. She had her roof replaced and a small leak damage some of the wood. Current wood couldn't be used because it was smaller than the original wood so they had to get custom milled wood to replace something that was standard years ago.

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It's a total mess, 1/2 and 1/2 in the building and construction trade!!

A standard door is 2ft 6in x 6ft 6in, a standard kitchen unit is 600mm wide.

Plasterboard panels (dry walling to the Yanks) are 1800mm x 900mm x 9.5mm or what we would know as 6ft x 3 ft x 3/8in, or 2400mm x 1200mm or the old 8ft x 4ft x 1/2in.

You can't buy 1 cwt sacks of cement now it's in 50Kg bags.

A 4 by 2 timber joist is now 100mm x 50mm, if you buy it rough sawn, else it's 3 1/2" x 1 3/4" planed.

Yet you can still buy a 1/2" washer, and a 2" paintbrush + litres of paint ......

Total madness.

The first time I had popped into B&Q for while to discover all the lumber marked in millimeters just had me shaking my head in disbelief. Good thing I never go there without my tape measure :)

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Member of the People Encouraging Niceness In Society club.

It's a total mess, 1/2 and 1/2 in the building and construction trade!!

A standard door is 2ft 6in x 6ft 6in, a standard kitchen unit is 600mm wide.

Plasterboard panels (dry walling to the Yanks) are 1800mm x 900mm x 9.5mm or what we would know as 6ft x 3 ft x 3/8in, or 2400mm x 1200mm or the old 8ft x 4ft x 1/2in.

You can't buy 1 cwt sacks of cement now it's in 50Kg bags.

A 4 by 2 timber joist is now 100mm x 50mm, if you buy it rough sawn, else it's 3 1/2" x 1 3/4" planed.

Yet you can still buy a 1/2" washer, and a 2" paintbrush + litres of paint ......

Total madness.

The first time I had popped into B&Q for while to discover all the lumber marked in millimeters just had me shaking my head in disbelief. Good thing I never go there without my tape measure :)

And with regards to Chris's assumption that 4x2's have gone to 100x50's, if you check the B&Q sizes they are the mm equivalent of finished 4x2's, etc.

You people who live in modern houses don't have that much to complain about. My Georgian house was built in 1821.

which originates from France.

Every one where I come from knows that the metric system was first thought
up in Cape Briton in 1742. Mr. Angus McNeal, who was bad at division devised
a kind of metric system as it was easer for him to work with measurements.
I heard that!

:):)

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which originates from France.

Every one where I come from knows that the metric system was first thought
up in Cape Briton in 1742. Mr. Angus McNeal, who was bad at division devised
a kind of metric system as it was easer for him to work with measurements.
I heard that!
:):)

The metric system is based on the numbers to the base tenth
Probably because we have 10 fingers (digits).
If you do Divisions it is in my opinion easier to use base 2. Right Shift for division and left shift for multiplication.
When it comes to watches and navigation we still use the base 60th
If you are on your fingers counting the number of knuckles and boones between them there will be 60 pieces.
It is still used in the Middle East when shopping at markets.
They say it's very easy to do divisions by there method.