Will America Ever Go Metric?

poixweryth asks: "Just reading an article pointed to by a recent story in which they refer to "an object bigger than 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) in diameter". This is obviously American journalism. What I want to know is this: is the American public ever going to convert to the metric system?"

Comments

Re:Eventually

[Chris Pimlott]

Not exclusively. In my engineering courses they often stress how engineers must work in the constraints of the real world. So along with the predominate metric units, we still have problems dealing with feet, inches, psi, calories, etc. Of course, in practice that often means conversion into metric to do the calculations with reverse calculations at the end if needed.

Re:Exclusively? 'scuse me?

[Tower]

As for the food packaging...

A five pack of beer is shaped really funny, and takes more effort to pack multiple units together. Ten packs aren't so bad, but if a case turned into 20 instead of 24, we'd have a lot of upset people...

And also, why are hot dogs sold in packs of 10, when hot dog buns are sold in packs of 8 or 12!!! it just never adds up 8^)
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Re:US Engineers learn metric, but industry varies

[aidoneus]

Well, a number of people forget the basic concepts and use only 3 significant digits for conversion (e.g., 2.54cm = 1 inch).

There isn't any problem with that. 2.54cm = 1 inch. It's an exact conversion, not an estimate like many people think. There are exactly 2.54cm/inch, 30.48cm/foot, 1609.344m/mile. so as a result...

When spread over several square miles, that lack of attention can lead to someone being cheated an acre of land!

... is completely false, unless you have an incompetant surveyor who will round his/her measurements. Then there will still be problems, no matter what units are used.

I swear, these metric advocates--

[acceleriter]

Give 'em 2.54 centimeters, they'll take 1.6 kilometers :>.