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Old 05-02-2010, 02:32 AM   #80 (permalink)
MechEngVT
Mechanical Engineer
 
Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: Richmond, VA
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There is no rational means to argue that the American system is superior to Metric. I'll buy the argument that the US will never ever switch to metric, but that isn't because the American system is better. Churchill I believe said it right when he said "Americans can be counted on to do the right thing after exhausting all other options."

Having received my degree in mechanical engineering the superiority of the metric system became clear. Some professors tried to force us to use imperial units but it was always a pain, especially since "pounds" is both a unit of force and a unit of mass and as such it plays heck with dimensional analysis, plus requires use of constants in calculations to balance uncommon base unit conversions etc. Whenever it wasn't explicitly prohibited I used to convert inputs to metric and convert back to imperial after finding the solution. A prohibition on such a practice reliably indicated the presence of a unit conversion "gotcha" problem. In my years in the workforce any calculations requiring notebook solutions I've always done in metric, even though my current company is rather stubborn about keeping US-sourced designs imperial.

Fahrenheit is another wacky scale, and the original reference point was human body temperature which was supposed to be 96 degrees, except that the scale was realigned to place the spread between water boiling and water freezing at exactly 180 degrees. This skewed what was the original index point from 96 to 98.6.
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