Why are stone any more archaic than pounds and ounces, for example? They’re roughly the same age; the term just didn’t get used in the US. That said, the lack of pluralisation of the word is a bit odd, but there you go.
If you want real confusion, when I moved to Ireland in the mid-1990s, half the road signs were in KM and the other half were in miles. But speed limits were in mph. There was a relatively recent push to change everything road-wise over to KM, which has since been accomplished (together with an increase in speed limit on freeways, but a decrease in built-up areas, in order to round off the kmh numbers). But beer is still served in pints.
Fahrenheit for climatic temperature in the UK is comprehended by most people over the age of about 35; however, most of them can also think in C, and young people do exclusively. Being in the “understand both” category, I can attest that it’s not at all difficult to do.
In manufacturing and engineering there is a push for it but components come in both inches and millimeters. You wind up with weird stackups. Steels are increasingly more metric friendly but if you are reworking an older design ,you are forced back to inches. An inch equals 25.4 MM, so it starts out a bit ugly and gets worse.
[slight hijack]
In the interest of fighting ignorance I feel compelled to point out that capitalization is important when dealing with SI units.
Unless the unit was named after a person, the symbol is always lowercase and the symbols for prefixes are only uppercase for mega- and up.
So, it’s km for kilometer and mm for millimeter.
The U.S. has mixed metric with other things and it won’t change anytime soon. Inches are great for measuring height and pounds are a good measure for body weight. Everything else is mixed. You can buy two liter soda bottles and metric hardware at any hardware store for example.
The comments you may be referring to may be something related to this.
Oh, really? Every time I get my temperature measured, it is in Celsius, and certainly the majority of times I hear body temperature mentioned it is in Celsius. How old are you?
In the interest of fighting ignorance, most people still refer to the country as Burma, by way of refusing to recognize the military junta government that decreed the name change to Myanmar.
Using the name Myanmar is considered an implicit approval of the military dictatorship, while using the name Burma is considered to be implicit support for the horrifically victimized people of Burma. The U.S., U.K, Canada, Australia, and France, for example, still officially use “Burma,” while China and Russia use “Myanmar.”
See Wikipedia for an overview, and see Rambo for an awesome Hollywoodization of the conditions in modern-day Burma.
Yes, pot for some reason is sold in imperial units. Perhaps because it tends to be domestically grown? I’ve never heard anybody talk about cocaine or heroin in anything but grams and kilos, though. (And while that Onion article isn’t the source I remember, it does seem that the 9 millimeter pistol is the weapon of choice for drug dealers.)
In the US, inch dimensioning is very common for mechanical components. When metric components - say, nuts and bolts - started being more available, they were special. So if you wanted to buy nuts, there were plain old ordinary nuts in inch sizes, and various special modifications and versions like having nylon locking rings, or being knurled, or being made of brass, or being metric.
It’s easy to understand using K instead of k as the 1000 multiplier in SI. It is more consistent to use capitals for larger-than-1 multipliers. In some contexts it is officially allowed. For example, the Hewlett-Packard 28S calculator has a wonderful units conversion facility, and it accepts K or k. I don’t think avoiding confusion with kelvins is important; note that the m milli multiplier gets understood without being mistaken for the m meter.
It’s like spelling, it may not always make perfect sense and if you spell something wrong the reader may still understand what you mean, but that’s no excuse to ignore proper spelling.
That may be the coolest thing I have ever learned.
I’ve never been able to remember the “official” formula for converting them, and the layman’s one I do remember was always a bit off, now I see why (double the degrees C and add 30)
