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Imperial Measurements
I'm used to feet and pounds so I use those, but I wish I wasn't. Metric is SO much better
Comments
Same here
The sciences never use imperial (it's like using Roman numerals to do math). I've only gotten really used to them for measuring human height and weight. Even in cooking, I see everything in grams.
Panama is pretty weird, we are taught metric, we use meters for height but, thanks to the US influence most people think in pounds.
Really the only reason why the U.S. hasn't adopted metric is sheer cultural inertia.
^^Actually, engineering fields apparently use "American Engineering Units" which includes Imperial measurements.
That's certainly the reason I don't use metric. Sure, I could start looking at the temperatures in Celsius, but every time I want to talk to someone I would just have to translate it back to Fahrenheit for them anyways, you know?^^Civil? I know construction tends to use imperial, even in Canada.
^That's how the rest of us feel when we hear about going 88 miles per hour and instinctively think that isn't very fast.
And Industrial and Mechanical, at least.
And Chemical. Though it could just be an excuse to make us do more conversion problems, since we hardly ever touched anything but metric in the classes proper.
>engineers
>mathematicians
>juans
Woooooo-ee! Wouldja lookit that.
> People
needs more green.
I can't be bothered to get the "right" text color on here.
>not caring about getting the right tone of green
we can't be friends, poni if you keep doing stuff like this ;~;
The amount of benefit the US would actually gain by switching to metric is vastly, vastly outweighed by the cost of, say, relocating all highway signs so they're kilometers apart instead of miles.
unless you want to have signs with ridiculously awkward measurements, which IIRC is the reason people don't like Imperial...
But can we still be lovers, Juan, that is the question. And the reason I don't care is because fuck trying to figure out this WYSIWYG thing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzptMsPOxco
A very understandable reason. --nods--
and until the end of the world, poni.
Until the end of the world. ;')
It seems to me that you could, initially at least, use some form of transitional signage. Instead of replacing every sign outright, just patch over, say, "1 MILE" with a plaque that says "1 MILE / 1.6 km". Then when the signs are worn enough that they'd be up for replacement anyway they could be replaced with proper kilometer-based signage.
(A lot of states have done similar things when changing their highways' exit numbers from sequential to mile-based. "EXIT 7 / OLD EXIT 3" or something lie that.)
The amount of benefit the US would actually gain by switching to metric is vastly, vastly outweighed by the cost of, say, relocating all highway signs so they're kilometers apart instead of miles.
Not sure, when you consider how NASA has crashed a probe on Mars because some components were using imperial measurements instead of metric, wasting 327,6 million bucks in the process, it makes one wonder how often shit breaks because of a conflict in units between stuff made abroad and made locally.
Plus yeah, there transition solutions to lower the costs.
Hey USA, don't worry about not using metric, at least Liberia and Myanmar will make you company
You do realise that its illegal for British road signs to be metric right? (IIRC)
^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Kingdom#Road_transport
Metric v. imperial in the UK is (fairly) Serious Business. As the Wikipedia article says, officially we went metric in the early 70s, but most people and most activities still use imperial measurements most of the time.
The major exception I can think of is weather forecasting, where people seem to have accepted centigrade over fahrenheit.
Every time somebody brings this up, the contrarian/patriotic American side of me flares up immediately and I just want to go "Fuck you, the healthy body temperature of a human is close to 100 degrees. That kind of number is relevant to me, not these science and engineering numbers you international types are trying to foist on me. This is 'MMURICA! We do things RIGHT down here."
too bad Doctor Fahrenheit fucked that one up too :P
^^Wut.
I mean, if it were actually 100 degrees, that would make a lot of sense and I might consider that a slight validation of the scale. But...it's not.
^ Closer than 37 degrees, at least.