US switching to metric system?

[Peter7307]

Well stated.

By the way for those saying "metric is unAmerican"...what unit is your currency based on?

Peter.

[gone-ot]

...units of 10 now, but it wasn't always so.

...I can remember when °C meant DEGREES CENTRIGRADE, now it's DEGREES CELSIUS!

...at least °F still means DEGREES FAHRENHEIT!

...gotta love the British units of "Furlongs-per-Fortnight" (wink,wink)!

[Piwoslaw]

And what about the British dual tap sinks (separate cold and hot)? That's a binary system if I ever saw one!

[tjts1]

Originally Posted by Peter7307

Well stated.

By the way for those saying "metric is unAmerican"...what unit is your currency based on?

Peter.

BWAHAHAHAHAHA
Do you count your money by the metric ton?

Originally Posted by Piwoslaw

While fooling around with metric/imperial/US conversions I started wondering what are the chances of the US switching to metric?

About the same as the chances of Europe switching to feet, miles, pounds and quarts.

EDIT: We really should have forced Europe to switch to our measuring system after the war. Missed opportunity in my opinion.

[ShadeTreeMech]

4 pints to a quart
4 quarts to a gallon
16 ounces is a pound, but it is also a unit of measure, ie 2 cups. How many teaspoons in a 1/4 cup again? If they ask for 2/3 a teaspoon, how much is that? I went a mile, which is 5,280 feet, 1760 yards, and 63360 inches.

Too many odd numbers.
1 cm is 1/100th of a meter. 1000 cc is one liter, right? I think a cc=a mL. If I go 1.5 km, I know instantly it's 1500 meters and 15000 cm and 150000 mm. A gram is 1/1000th of a kilogram, and isn't the weight of the gram tied into a certain displacement of water?

It's simple, and I like it. Even though I rarely ever use it, I understand it pretty well, and can correctly use it daily. The SAE standard I use every day, and yet I still sturggle with it and have to dig out the calculator to figure things out that should be easily sorted. SAE is insanity, metric is orderly and thought out.

0 degrees farenhiet is the temperature of a nearly frozen sea, while 100 is the temperature of the blood of a freshly killed elk (or some such like that)

0 celcius is freezing temp of water and 100 is the boiling point of water.

I think the SAE system came about in a attempt to keep the poorly educated ignorant of certain facts so they could easily be taken advantage of.

[ShadeTreeMech]

from the Wikipedia article on the matter.

Originally, units for volume and mass were directly related to each other, with mass defined in terms of a volume of water. Even though that definition is no longer used, the relation is quite close at room temperature and nearly exact at 4 °C. So as a practical matter, one can fill a container with water and weigh it to get the volume. For example,

1000 litres = 1 cubic metre ≈ 1 tonne of water
1 litre = 1 cubic decimetre ≈ 1 kilogram of water
1 millilitre = 1 cubic centimetre ≈ 1 gram of water
1 microlitre = 1 cubic millimetre ≈ 1 milligram of water

[Ford Man]

Originally Posted by ShadeTreeMech

4 pints to a quart

Maybe you understand the metric system better than our current system. There are 2 pints in a quart. 16oz in a pint, 32oz in a quart.

[dcb]

Lol, everyone understands the metric system better than the current US system, even Americans

[tjts1]

No, the American system is far superior. You just fail to understanding because you're in love with the number 10.

[MechEngVT]

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.