Things You Never Noticed VII: Wait, This Isnt the MitD Thread?

[Fyraltari]

Aye. The Mars probe disaster wasn't a "nobody should use USCU, everyone should use metric" issue, it was a "write the dang units!" issue. Which almost every basic math and science class I'd ever taken were consistently and uniformly insistent on.

Actually it was more a "comment your goddamn code!" issue.

EDIT:

Personally, I think preferred units are a matter of culture, as well as of measure. Units are as important as the number they're associated with, and the people using them; and unit conversion is cultural acceptance given technical form: The idea that other people's thoughts and words are no less valuable solely for being made along different lines than your own, even if you don't understand why they're different; and with a little effort you can still understand what they're saying, and it's worthwhile. Like you say, an eighth-of-a-billion-dollar Mars probe was lost because some people only looked at the numbers and just assumed their units were the only one that could matter; and that was an incident that only cost dollars instead of lives.

The thing is systems having different origins doesn't mean some aren't objectively better made. For example, I think that the way we French say 70, 80 and 90 is stupid and we should use the Swiss and Belgian words for them because the one we use don't fit with the rest anymore. It would be hard to do because habits are hard to change, but if ther were a movement to do just that I'd support it.

Likewise the USCU are defined based on the SI units, most everybody else is already using the SI, whose mission statement is to belong to all of mankind as a whole rather than a single country and many people in the U.S. are already using the SI units especially in the fields of science because it eases communication and because theya re objectively easier to use for switching from length to volule to mass to force to energy or any other combination.

So really besides tradition is there a reason not to do complete the transition? because the longer it takes, the harder it will be to do most likely. I don't really care myself since I don't really have to deal with american units with anything resembling frequency, but I am curious.