Laziness, stupidity, and egotism are why the United States doesn't use the metric system

I found this tape measure a few years ago. Makes it easier in a lot of situations for this left hander.

s-l400

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When Canada was switching to metric in the 70s, the gov’t posted stickers you could put on your speedometer. “50 is 30 mph, 80 is 50 mph”, etc. But there’s no sticker you can use on the odometer. There were apocryphal tales of road signs with text like “Reduced speed limit - 50 km/h for the next 3 miles”

If anyone has authentic pics, it’d make my day. :slight_smile:

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I had the same when I moved to Oz. Construction workers all speak millimetres for building until it gets ridiculous and shifts to meters. “Ridiculous” happens somewhere around 5 m.

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There’s one thing that will always be imperial: airline miles. Because the airlines sure as hell aren’t going to give us a point for every kilometer flown.

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Cool metric-based art: Walter De Maria’s Broken Kilometer

Definitely should be seen in person (and it’s free!).

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Nice. :slight_smile:

For the opposite; subtract 32 from the Farenheit temp, add 10% (any decimal value rounds it up to the next whole number) and divide by 2.

As a kid, I hated learning the metric system. Some prefixes like deca and deci were nearly identical but meant the opposite of each other (confusing!), while others like hecto and centi were very different, but with no apparent rhyme or reason to which meant hundred and which meant hundredth (confusing!). (Also: if the prefix is hecto, why is the unit of measurement a “hectare”? Also confusing!)

Sure, the actual math to convert between units (e.g. meters to kilometers) was easier than with the Imperial system (once you actually figured out whether to multiply or divide, and by how much), but ultimately I found it easier to simply remember the number of inches in a foot and the number of feet in a mile, than to remember all those confusing prefixes.

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There are a lot of prefixes but they are consistent whether you are measuring weight, or distance, or whatever.

Practically speaking one doesn’t use most of the prefixes on a day-to-day. For measuring small objects you usually stick with mm and cm. For distance its usually just meters and kilometers. You wouldn’t describe 1000km as a “megameter”. Capacity is either in liters or milliliters, with centiliters and deciliters being largely ignored.

Sure it’s not hard to remember how many inches are in a foot. I’d wager most people don’t know how many feet are in a mile, never mind the intermediate measurements of a yard, chain, or furlong.

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It’s kind of weird that they even make us learn those. Aside from micro, milli, centi and kilo, virtually none of them are used at all. It’s almost like they were trying to teach us Latin as a bonus lesson when learning metric.

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And if you are in a field where you have to use the extremely large or extremely small units, you’d just use exponential notation instead or a unit suitable for that measurement, such as parsecs or angstroms.

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I remember taking a physics class in college, and the postgrad teaching assistant explained how “in graduate school physics, we do not use numbers larger than ten. Everything larger than that is expressed in scientific notation.” He was exaggerating, but I got the idea.

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farmers-countries-that-use-the-metric-system-countrios-that-lose-wars-to-vietnamese-farmers

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That’s not a great comparison though. There are also countries that are both.

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Don’t forget the use of stone for weight. (Which isn’t hard to convert to lbs, but it’s just one more thing to remember.)

Then again think of how long it was until the UK switched to decimal-based currency.

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