Giant rolling rock almost crushes man

I mean… isn’t MICK JAGGER in a position to do something about that?

No, that’s pretty much the opposite of what I said!

I said it’s dumb to use a screwdriver for a hammer, only I tried to be less confrontational about it. And I gave a specific, real-world example of appropriate use of an ancient measure in a modern context, too. There are hundreds more…

In many fields of science, old-timey metric measures (remember, they are older than US customary units) are highly appropriate. In others, completely inappropriate!

As an educated person, I can use Kelvin, Centigrade or Fahrenheit as appropriate to a specific task in a specific environment. My children know how, too. (They also know the difference between a kilo and a K and a klick.) Metric zealots are anti-intellectual in this limited sense; they oppose increased capability of measurement and, like Ma Barker, want to settle on what’s good enough for them.

Anyway, if the goal is to make everyday chores cheap and easy, US customary units win, because teaspoons, tablespoons, and cups, because water weighs eight pounds a gallon, and because of the divisibility of base 12 architectural measures. If the goal is to make things more precise, then SI is not a spectacular success (Planck’s constant is 6.6262 x 10-34 kilogram-meters2 per second, Avagadro’s number is 6.0221415 × 1023, and the value of π can’t be expressed) but it’s really pretty great for wet chemistry labs and computerized trades. But! then again if the goal is to be more concise, fractions express more data in fewer characters than decimal notation, and precision can be quite harshly limited by lack of space. Computers are also pretty harshly limited by real number respresentation schemes that use fixed numbers of bytes (i.e. most of them). The key is to suit the tool to the goal.

For some people the goal is to have the annoying minority who can use the best tool for the job just shut up and go away, and for them metric is the purest and most cromulent of choices, it’ll just take a couple generations, vast treasure, and possibly a pogrom. :wink:

Hoping you take all this in good nature! I’m not emotionally invested in what people other than my own children choose to measure with, honestly, it’s just an interestingly complex topic of conversation to me, with many corners and edge cases.

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