Quote Originally Posted by b_jonas View Post
If you wanted to know my opinion on this,[/url] see a recent post elsewhere.
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I don’t understand why it is considered so backwards that Americans measure some lengths in inches and feet and yards and miles and some weights in ounces and pounds. Like, do a few different non-metric units make that much of a difference? Or is a unit especially bad just because it’s “imperial”?

It does make a difference, and it is not bad because it's imperial, it is bad because there is no unit continuity. For example, you are furbishing a road. You need to estimate how many safety guardrails you'll need. Each one is about, say, 60 inches long. The road is 150 miles long. How many will you need? Heck if anyone can tell. But if the road is 150 km long, and each guardrail is 60 cm long, then it is practically trivial. (this is an actual situation I was confronted with, except with gas pipelines. A bad conversion was giving the wrong numbers, but because there is an absurd number of inches to a miles, no-one knew the values were off until I converted everything to metric, and spotted that something was not in the ballpark).

Or, in my everyday life rather than professional one: I was trying to chlorinate my child's pool. If it is 80 cm to the side, and I filled it 25 cm deep, the volume in litres is simple enough, and thus the amount of chlorine that needs to go in. But if you measured it in inches (and let's say that it's a bigger one, and it is 80 inches to the side and 25 inches deep so that it's not the numbers that are the issue)... can any American even calculate how many gallons of water there are? Or do they need to go running to a private corporation to do their basic math for them? And this is not a place where you want to be off - chlorine is only safe between 2 and 5 parts per million. If you put in the wrong number of (checks)... quarter of teaspoons (!?) you could easily cause serious damage. And good luck to you if it turns out you need 3.28 quarters of teaspoon.

I don't give a damn if the base value is based on the size of the Earth or some dead king's shoe size. I care that I can trivially convert between lengths and volumes, and scale up and down without having to depend on having an Internet connection.

Grey Wolf