On 13/09/2011 4:49 PM, Ema Nymton wrote:
> On 9/13/2011 8:33 AM, Dave Smith wrote:
>>
>> It would have been nice if the US had carried through with its
>> commitment to adopt SIM. Personally, I like the metric system. I
>> learned the Imperial system in school and grew up with it. I had a
>> metric seminar at work when we went metric more than 30 years aog. I
>> learned the most valuable lesson... don't convert. Just work in
>> metric.It sure makes a lot more sense in some things, like
>> temperature. People are better able to detect a temperature change in
>> Celsius than Fahrenheit, and there is a marked change at the freezing
>> point, so it makes sense to set that as zero.
>>
>
> When I was in 3rd grade, they told is we were going to covert from
> Imperial to metric, but we never did. We continued to do conversions
> year after year, so they should have done it, already. What are they
> waiting for? It would be easier if everyone spoke in the same
> measurements. Medical professionals speak in centimeters and a doctor in
> South American weighed me in stones.
>

Some people are resistant to chance, and some countries allow political
lobbying to override the international agreements they had already
agreed too.

I don't know what the problem is. The metric system is a lot easier to
work with and while some people insist that they are too accustomed to
the Imperial system, they don't really know much about it. Never mind
that an American gallon is smaller than an Imperial gallon, many of them
have only a limited understanding of the Imperial system. They may know
how many inches in a foot and inches and feet in a yard, but they don't
know how many feet and yards there are in a mile, or square feet in a acre.

I am willing to bed that most people in this group don't know how many
yards there are in a chain, chains in a furlong or miles in a league.
They probably don't even know those are imperial measures.

I am not trying to make any kind of statement about their knowledge or
lack thereof. It's just that I don't buy the argument about them being
too used to the Imperial system when the fact is that they have only a
minimal understanding of the system.