USMA: Going the Extra Kilometer For Metrication

EagleHasLanded writes "The U.S. Metric Association has been advocating for metrication since 1916 – without much success. In the mid-1970s, the U.S. government passed the Metric Conversion Act, but now it seems the time for complete conversion has come and gone. Or could U.S. educators and health & safety advocates put this issue back on Congress' radar screen?"

Comments

Cut out the intermediary step.

[BasilBrush]

Cut out the intermediary step. Adopt the units of the future world superpower now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_units_of_measurement

Re:Cut out the intermediary step.

[AmiMoJo]

Your height in cm.

I prefer mm. 1820mm sounds pretty damn impressive.

Your weight is in kgs.

I prefer tonnes. 0.105 sounds far less depressing.

The US likes being different

[Anonymous Coward]

Pissing the rest of the world off is just a bonus.

Re:The US likes being different

[Chess_the_cat]

Chinese engineers can't figure out imperial? Cool story bro.

You have to have the right selling point...

[ClaraBow]

All you have to do is convince the male congressional leaders that they will gain manhood size once we convert over to metric! 15 is a whole lot bigger than 6 :)

Re:You have to have the right selling point...

[slashgordo.]

If Jesus were using the metric system while riding a dinosaur, we might could convince the US congressional leaders to switch to metric.

Boggle

[Tim Ward]

Are the Colonies really still using Imperial units? - thought they must have stopped doing that yonks ago, after losing all those space probes to erroneous conversions between foot-slug-poundals and furlongs-per-fortnight.

Or is it like their refusal to use global standard paper sizes, or basically follow any other international standards - if it was invented in Europe it must de facto be Communist and therefore can't be touched with a barge pole?

Re:Boggle

[arth1]

2- You can shove your commie paper sizes up your "arse".

Yes, far more easily. See, when I cut or fold my A4, I get an A5. And I cut or fold that again, and get A6. Then A7. All the same shape, with no bits and pieces leftover to be cut off. So I end up with 16 nice wipes of A8 and no shit on my hands.

Re:Boggle

[Rob the Bold]

Good point.

I come across this when calculating how much fuel to put in an aeroplane - the bowser dispenses litres, I need to know what that is in pounds for the weight and balance calculation, and the fuel burn (and thus how much fuel I need) is specified in the POH in gallons per hour ... ... but these are indeed American gallons, not Imperial ones, and getting that sort of thing wrong can kill people.

Well that makes my example of a quiche baked from an English cookbook turning out kind of dry seem rather trivial in comparison.

Re:Boggle

[Anonymous Coward]

That's OK, I don't think I've ever seen an A4 sheet of paper. In fact, I can't even tell you its dimensions. I know a piece of Letter paper, which is what I would use to write a letter (if such things still exist), is 8.5"x11". Maybe it's not nice round numbers, but it's 2 significant figures (like all ANSI paper sizes), easy to remember, and can be measured with any ruler.

The ISO paper sizes, OTOH, are completely irrational. And I say that because they're based on the square root of 2, which unfortunately is not a rational number. So you end up with an A4 size of 210mmx297mm. Of course if I don't remember that, I can always just calculate it if I remember the formula: An A0 sheet of paper is a square meter with a 1:1.414 aspect ratio, so its dimensions are the 4th root of 2 by the 4th root of 2 divided by the square root of 2 (2^(1/4) x 2^(1/4)/2^(1/5)). I don't need a calculator to tell you that's 1.189mx0.x841m. Then you just fold it in half 4 times and round down, so you get 2^(1/4) / 4 * 1000 = 297mm by 2^(1/4) / 2^(1/2) / 4 * 1000 = 210mm. See? Easy as pi!

dom

Yet another step towards godless communism

[mtrachtenberg]

First the United Nations, then Darwinism, then Galileo. If they force us to use litres, we'll all be living in the USSR before the decade ends.

Re:Long Live Roman measurements

[wonkey_monkey]

I did a little fact checking before posting

Sacrilege.

Re:Long Live Roman measurements

[dkleinsc]

Alright, but apart from better sanitation, medicine, education, irrigation, public health, roads, a freshwater system, public order and an automobile suspension... what have the Romans done for us?