Not true. I'm an American engineer, and I prefer English units for certain applications (and metric for others).
1) The proper name is English units. It has nothing to do with the present practices of England, the country; that's where they originated from, so that's what they're called. They're not "Roman" units (how ridiculous), because the Romans didn't have "inches". This is just like how the English language is called "English", even though the way it's spoken in places like the USA and India is very, very different from the way it's spoken in England presently. 2) English units are more convenient for some things, such as temperature (when relating to humans, like for setting your thermostat, not when doing calculations in a lab). The Fahrenheit scale is better scaled for the human range of temperature, and doesn't require messing with fractional units the way Celcius does. The Fahrenheit thermostats in our homes are in whole degrees only, because a half-degree of precision is pointless in Fahrenheit since humans can't really tell the difference. But half-degrees in Celcius thermostats are necessary because humans certainly can tell the difference there (being about equivalent to a whole Fahrenheit degree). 3) It's funny how UK residents like to claim they don't use English units any more, when in fact they do: the talk about speed in miles per hour, and they order beer in pints, and they relate their body weight in "stones" (whatever those are), not kilos. This isn't much different than the USA, where people's speedometers are in MPH, their weight in pounds, etc., but when they go into a science lab, everything is in metric. Metric proponents talk about how useful it is to be able to convert between units so easily with metric, like converting kilos and meters to Newtons or whatever, but what they're missing is that most people don't do this! No one is going to step on the scale, read their weight, and then need to convert that into a torque or force. No one wants to read their home temperature on their thermostat and then calculate thermal energy. There's a big difference between what regular people do in their daily lives, and what scientists and engineers do for work. That's why even here in the USA, most scientists and engineers (esp. scientists) work with metric units at work, and then go home and set their thermostat in Fahrenheit and read their weight in pounds, and don't have a big problem with this discrepancy. 4) Inches (or more importantly, mils) are still pretty useful in PCB design. It's easy to remember things like 8 mil minimum track width, 20 mil track-to-board-edge spacing, etc. Also, many many components are designed in mils: most chips have pin spacing in mils: 100 mils for DIP chips, 50 mils for SOIC, 25 mils for TQFP, etc. However, more and more components are showing up in metric, and that is annoying with Kicad since it doesn't have hard metric; instead of .1mm spacing, I have to choose .1056644353 or whatever. This really needs to be fixed; I should be able to lay out a PCB with both English and metric components without so much slop on the metric ones. Why does Kicad even have this soft-metric thing? If I want English, I'll select English. If I select mm, that means I'm working with a part designed in metric, and I need metric. Dan --- In [email protected], al davis <a...@...> wrote: > > On Thursday 09 July 2009, Robert wrote: > > America is the last country > > in the world where engineers prefer to use them. > > American engineers don't prefer traditional units. It's the > non-engineers. >
