[Gray]

[Windstorm]

[Gray]

[ScottP]

My 8th grade science students struggle for a bit, but, like any language, they are immersed in it for the duration and quickly adapt. At some point during the unit on energy, this picture is on the projection screen when they walk into class. It's fun to watch their faces go from perplexed to laughing as they analyze, and then get it.

[MtnGoat]

I'm with Ski. But in daily life, it makes everything seem worse. It's farther to everything, but mountains are shorter. Whatever you buy by weight, seems like you're getting less of it. Yes, for science metric is easier. I use it at work. I prefer metric wrenches instead of the horrid inch fractions as well.

[Ski]

to be clear: I never had a problem with the metric system or SAE. I learned how to read a ruler and fractions very early on, so inches/feet/yards always made perfect sense to me. I got a French 10-speed in high school, so I got familiar with metric stuff too, although I still can't fathom the Farenheit-to-Celsius thing. my old man used to take me to Longacres, so I even understood rods and furlongs! but like Randy, I think having both systems is completely crazy. I mentioned the nuts and bolts thing above - that's just one little part of it - but stop and think about the millions (if not billions) of dollars tied up in inventory because we've got to have both 7/16" lag screws and 8mm x 1.25 pitch cap screws. as if that weren't bad enough, we've all got to have both SAE and metric wrenches and sockets (and hex keys and taps and dies and on and on and on...) and overall, it's just screwy: my Ford is all metric, but Briggs & Stratton is still building SAE-standard engines. again, I think that paper Steve cited above underestimates the cost in dollars and lost productivity. stop for a second and think about how long it took you to determine whether that bolt was an 8mm x 1.0 pitch or 5/16-24 NF. that's happening somewhere in this country at any given moment every day. completely insane to have both systems!

[touron]

[Ski]

[puzzlr]

We were recently in New Zealand which is completely metric, but out of respect for history the mileposts along the famous Milford track are still in miles. A fractional kilometer reading is on the side.

Milford track milepost 33

[33teeth]

When I design things in metric, our US based suppliers (machine part, sheet metal, weldments, etc) admit that they create new drawings in inches to give to their guys on the floor to produce the parts. I don't think that it's true that most industries in the US have switched over.

[mike]

[Randito]

My favorite example of how bad things can go wrong with metric/imperial confusion is the Gimli Glider incident An Air Canada 767 ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet and had to glide into an emergency landing. Fortunately the pilot just so happened to be an experience glider pilot, so was able to use those skills to land the plane will out killing anyone. The investigation revealed that the airplane had been fueled with pounds of fuel instead of kilograms -- so it had less than half the fuel required for a safe flight.

[boot up]

All my college engineering classes and books were in metric, because the USA was going to be converted by the time I graduated. That was a few years back, and still waiting. So most of my books were marginally useful as references. But I did get good at converting. I was shocked when the current "high tech" startup I am working at turned out to insist on English units. I have had to switch back and forth, depending on the company I worked for, over the years. Shocking to go back to cumbersome English units and I have to convert constantly because most of our components are metric, and most of my interaction with the PCB designers is metric. I fought for metric when I got there. Now the guy that convinced them to go with English units (aerospace background) is leaving and going to a company that uses all metric, leaving us behind with a mixed mode mess. I have gotten used to using mixed units in a single sentence in my electronics packaging design world. Even worse is that I am a thermal analysis engineer too, which is a technical area that is prone to using mixed units in one equation. I think its even worse cooking though. I would be more than happy to go all metric, because then you wouldn't have to worry about converting. I do prefer degrees F to degrees C though, just because my head is programed to have a better feel for what 70degF is than 20degC. I really hate working in English units. I much prefer being able to divide by 10.

[marzsit]

Where I work, the majority of the manual machine tools (lathes and mills) used for maintenance and repair of plant machinery are all SAE and can't be converted to metric, since they're all pretty old. The newer CNC stuff can do metric, but it's much easier to do everything in SAE and the results are always better. Designing in metric and converting to SAE has it's problems when it comes to fabrication time..

[Bernardo]

When I am in Europe I often to refer to kilometers as miles. For me, in this case, the mile is a unit of variable length that corresponds to the common unit of length in use in the area. Maybe if we redefined the length of inches, yards, and miles the metric could be implemented?