Most engineering moved to metrics a long time ago. The ugly part is our components did not keep up. We get steel in inches, half inches, quarters etc. Most drawings show both . But when inch steel is 25.4 MM your stackups can get ugly. Components built here are often made with inch screws and hole patterns. It results in an ugly hodge podge that satisfies nobody.
And there’s just enough cat to completely cover the newspaper, when you’re trying to read it.
Good point! This clearly can’t be just coincidence. These signs are all just mere glimpses of some vast underlying system that we can grasp but faintly.
A lot of the graphic design programs I use default to decimal inches. While the decimal style system has it’s benefits, it’s also more useful in many situations to be able to divide into thirds, halves, and quarters. I think the ideal situation would be to switch everything to decimal system in base 12. Then common fractions would be simple decimals too.
And Fourteen k of g in a f p –
OW!
Who threw that?
Why is it that I feel compelled to bump this thread every so often? 
Thing is, people act as if it’s impossible to measure half a meter, or 1/3 of a meter, or 1/4 of a meter, or 1/6 of a meter, or 1/12 of a meter.
If you want a fraction of a meter, just measure a fraction of a meter. It isn’t hard. And, ta-da! You’ve eliminated the only half-assed rationalization for the American system, that it can be divided into fractions. What’s so hard about dividing a meter into fractions?
The reason we use decimal in metric is because we have a decimal numbering system. It would only make sense to use a base-12 or base-2 measuring system if we also used a base-12 or base-2 numbering system.
And of course, the reason there’s no rhyme or reason to the conversions between different traditional measures is that traditional measures were invented in isolation from each other. No one decided that a gallon would be 231 cubic inches. Rather, someone invented measuring lengths in inches (about a knuckle length), and someone else working on something else invented gallons as a measure of volume. And someone else invented bushels as a unit of volume. And someone else invented pints as a unit of volume. And someone else invented ounces as a unit of volume, forgetting that someone else had already used the word as a unit of weight.
None of these units had any relationship to each other. Eventually some were rationalized to be exactly a fraction or multiple of each other, but they didn’t start out that way. And so there are 5280 feet in a mile, since a “foot” is about the length of a big man’s foot, while a “mile” is how far a roman legion is expected to march in an hour.
So attempts to preserve traditional systems are ludicrious. They don’t make anything easier, they aren’t more intuitive–you’re just used to them.
Obligatory–and sadly, my final–bump. 
For archival purposes: http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/4541/archiveguy.jpg
On a separate note, this thread has been up for half a year (i.e. 0.1 years), and nobody was pedantic enough to point this out?
Ahem. The proper conversion for a calorie in imperial units would be inch[sup]2[/sup] * slug * s[sup]-2[/sup]. That is, pounds are units of force, not mass. The imperial unit of mass is the slug.
Damm, they have found us out. Somebody actually sat down and thought about this.
I thought you Americans liked intelligent design?
:sniff: Someone finally noticed. 
Actually, the French revolutionaries at the heart of metric did try to apply the “base 10 everywhere” concept to time as well : the revolutionary calendar had 10 days weeks, three weeks to a month (as you can see, it breaks down already. Damn that planetary rotation !).
The obvious problem with that is that a year is 365 (and a bit) days long. That does not vary. And try as you might, you can’t divide 365 by 10 and come out with an even number of weeks - you either have one week half in this year, half in the next, or the entire calendar shifts backwards over time with its 360 total days. They solved the problem in a typical French half-assed way : by shoving a few extra days in the calendar and hoping no one would notice :p.
It didn’t catch on. For one thing, day 1 in the calendar was set on the autumnal equinox - which doesn’t happen on the same day every year. I’m already confused about Easter happening at random, so… yes.
Second (and again, beautifully French, I’m so proud of my ancestors) a 10 day week means fewer days of rest over the year if you keep the regular “one day per week”. Now that would not do.
Finally, and probably most importantly, it didn’t map well with every day use and habits ingrained over centuries. Everyone was used to juggling between God only knows how many units of domestic and foreign currencies, weights and lengths, so adding one more to the mix wasn’t much of a problem to the tradesfolk and peasants (hell, they kept using the old ones on the side anyway), but every one in Europe used the same calendar, more or less.
They also tried decimal time : 10 hours to a day, 100 minutes to an hour, 100 seconds to a minute. Didn’t catch on either, for pretty much the same reason, so they tried it again, sneakier like : 24 hour days, 100 minutes to an hour. Ha-HA ! Aaaand failure again. Damn those proles, all set in their crummy ancestral ways. That’s why we’ll never get utopia, you mark my words.
Oh, and in case anyone wonders (this being the Dope, it wouldn’t surprise me), according to Wikipedia today is Duodi 2, Fructidor 207(CCXVII) in the metric calendar.
Back when I was working down at Boeing, their designs were all done in decimal inches. I don’t know what they use now.
And way back when in engineering school, things like physics and chemistry were taught in metric, while civil engineering things were all imperial. As a result I can handle either system without much problem, although I am much more comfortable with using imperial units. I never have really learned to think in metric, particularly since they stopped using the cgs system and went all the way with silly things like Pascals and Newtons. And my wonderful HP 32S calculator can calculate using either fractions or decimals as imput.
One company that I worked for was in partnership with a firm based in England, and every so often one of their engineers would be transferred over here for a few months at a time. It was always fun explaining slugs to one of these folks.
And really off subject, when they went from descriptive chess notation to algebraic, it ruined a whole body of literature for me. d1-d4? Good God!
Unless you’re using the pound as a unit of mass, and the poundal as a unit of force. Or, Og forbid, you’re using the pound as both your unit of mass and force, and throwing g willy-nilly into your equations in places it doesn’t belong.
There are other people who act as it’s impossible to measure 1/10th of an inch or 1/10th of a foot (even though I have rulers and tape measures laid out exactly this way), and that you HAVE to describe small distances in inches and long distances in miles, even though we happily talk about flying at 35,000ft.
Metric mavens seem to think that I really need the ability to easily find the number of bolt heads (13mm) that make up the distance from Schenectady to Kalamazoo (1,080km). Maybe I’ll need to do that next week.
I think you have stumbled on the most persuasive evidence for Dog that I have ever seen.
Which is exactly why we use it for time measurements!
Also for angles and it is possible to derive measurements like the Stadion back from angular earth surface measurement in a mixed 60-10 system. The only one in use now is the Nautical Mile which I think is 1 minute of latitude on the equator and ten Stadia. The Furlong evidently has its origin in something like the Stadion but has been adjusted (as has the mile extended from the Roman Thousand Paces (mille pasuum) of 5 feet each.
The Roman Standard Military Pace also gave the width of a Standard Military Axle and since nobody repaired the roads for the next thousand years, the Standard Mediaeval Rut too, meaning that they went on making carts to fit what had become pretty much tracks in the road and when they put them on rails the rails had to fit the cart. When they put a steam engine in front it had the same gauge of 5 Roman feet and in most countries, (certainly those where British engineers had any influence) still has. The Roman foot being slightly shorter than the modern, this explains the absurd Standard Rail Gauge of 4’8½" Isambard Kingdom Brunel wanted something a lot more stable and comfortable and laid his God’s Wonderful Railway on a 7’ gauge but it never caught on.
It seems no one has answered this definitively. I’ll go take a look…