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.

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: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?