This American colleague personally has no use for the metric system. It's a completely arbitrary system that has no real advantage over our ancient and traditional measurements. It makes no more sense than the ten-day week. While France has given us many great things, their preoccupation with multiples of ten is a rather silly one.
An inch, a cup, a pound, a foot, a pint and a grain all have a relationship to the practical world that is much more useful than units based on the circumference of the earth. And while it was once somewhat difficult to convert miles per hour to feet per second (or furlongs per fortnight), we have calculators and Google now. sas On 1/4/2014 7:20, Dougie Lawson wrote:
Rob, The biggest stumbling block is getting our American colleagues to stop using their Imperial (and modified Imperial) measures, AF screw threads & cups in the kitchen and switch everything to SI units. At the same time we need the Gov't here in the UK to switch from miles, miles per hour, miles per gallon and pints to Km, Km/h, Litres / 100Km and half litres (it's only 68ml short of a pint). I'm old enough to know pounds & ounces, inches & feet, grammes, kilogrammes, centimetres and metres so a switch to the full Metric system won't bother me. After we achieve that we can then consider the millis vs centis vs kilo vs mega order of magnitude problems. But it's a minor problem when we have the Luddites who won't use the nice weights and measures that the French invented for us. Regards, Dougie
