For many people the old school measure of temperature is more intuitive for how they relate to the weather.
A measure of 0ºF is a damn cold day. It it’s 100ºF then it is damn hot. The range of 0-100 brackets the most common extremes of temperature in a temperate climate.
How is a range of -17.8ºC to 37.7ºC better or more intuitive if all I want to know is how to dress for the day and whether to take a jacket with me when I leave the house?
I wish we would switch. I can’t tell you how many times people look at me like I have two heads when I say that no, 4 oz of oregano will *not * fit in a 4 (fluid) oz container.
Er, no, it doesn’t happen. gracer was saying that you can’t do that, and so people in “metric” countries still use non-metric measurements all the time. I live in the UK and would have to stop and think if you asked me my height or weight in metric units. But I could tell you them in feet and inches and stones and pounds right away.
Likewise I think of distances in miles, but heights above sea level in metres (because that’s what’s on the maps). Annoyingly, I’ve yet to find a GPS that lets you mix units like that.
hollow laugh
Nought is cold, Ten is not.
Twenty is warm, Thirty is hot.
I’ve noticed a tendency for people dissing metric units to try to make them look ridiculous by converting a round figure in imperial units to an overly precise decimal in metric, and then saying it’s stupid. “I want to drink a pint, not 568.26 millilitres!” That’s patently silly. Why can’t I buy a kilogram of something instead of 2lb 3.2739oz? 
You are making one of the classic mistakes when converting. There is no reason to use that extra significant digit when you convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius. I doubt that you knew the temperature is 0.0 degrees F rather than 0.6 or 1.4.
When the US went through the first attempt at conversion you saw this all the time. The back wall of a baseball field might say 365 feet (111.25 m) even though the original measurement was rounded to the nearest 5 feet. This made the metric system look more complicated.
ninjaed
I will agree that, compared directly without any historical context, primarily given the fact that it has become the international standard, it would make sense to use Metric. But realistically it’s a lot more complicated than that.
I disagree. Intuition, when it comes to measurement systems, is based entirely on what you’re used to. As an American, I “think” in miles, Faranheit, pounds, etc. When I talk to people I know from other countries and they mention that it’s below zero out or something, it often takes me a second to think about it. Working with the Metric system, to me, is very much like working with a foreign language I’m not fluent in. I’m not “thinking” in Metric, I’m thinking in what I’m used to and using a conversion factor.
Factors of 10 seem great, but in most practical matters it’s not all that much of an advantage. That is, it works well in science, given that our numerical system is base 10, but for every day usage, it really doesn’t mean much. In general, I’m using measurements because I know I need so much of something, or because I’m comparing one value to another. To that end, need X lbs or Y kg of something, that base 10 aspect just doesn’t play in. And if I’m comparing two things, I’m going to compare them in the same units as well.
For the sake of consistency, I’d agree with you. But the thing is, what works well for science doesn’t necessarily work as well for every day life. And the traditional units were derived for every day usage. Acres were a meaningful measurement related to farming. A foot has the obvious means of estimation. They arose specifically because they were the intuitive measurements for their purposes to the people at the time, and now we have momentum behind them.
Even for a lot of places that have largely converted, they still have mixes of old systems in there. I’ve known plenty of non-Americans who seemed to be perfectly comfortable with Celcius, afterall, I don’t think there’s really any sort of realistic “intuitiveness” to Faranheit in the way there is for other units, but then depending on where they’re from they’ll still talk about miles or gallons or feet or stone or whatever. Hell, I even specifically remember driving and being utterly confused that the signage would be in km for some stuff and miles for other stuff.
Let me ask you this, how often do you really need to know how many yards are in a mile, other than a word problem in 5th grade math? If it’s been even once in your life, I’d be shocked. This whole idea of how “complicated” going from one unit to another is, really isn’t an issue in most cases. If I’m giving a distance to somewhere, I’ll say 3.4 miles, not 3 miles 700 yards. Yes, you could say 3.4 km is the same as 3400 m, but for daily life, it’s not much of an advantage.
That said, there are some cases where it comes up, like with feet and inches or cooking, but that’s as much an issue with convention. For instance, instead of say someone is 6’4", I could say 6.33’. But at the same time, this is also where I feel like base ten fails the metric system. As I said above, base ten works great for science because getting a particular calculation to make intuitive sense doesn’t mater and because our math is in base ten, it makes all that math easier. For everyday use though, we tend to break down measurments and work with simple fractions like 1/2, 1/3, 1/4. To that end, a base twelve system really does work well for daily usage.
So, if I had my druthers, I’d say we should convert from decimal to dozenal and then recreate a unified metric-like system that would unify across science and everyday usage. Of course, that conversion would be way more painful and it’s incredibly unlikely to happen, so we’re pretty much stuck with some usage of both systems for a long time.
You’re also 13 or maybe 14. Your entire life is nothing but change. You have no long-term.
As you age, habits become ingrown. You know how to do things so well that you no longer need to think about them. Think about driving a car. You haven’t done so yet, so any method of driving will become your normal. But you will need time to learn, maybe as much as a year before you become proficient and safe to trust in traffic. It’s impossible for you to understand how automatic those reflexes and responses will be, but they will be deeply ingrained. If the basics of driving a car - every single one, from putting a car into reverse and backing up, to changing lanes, to accelerating, to watching out for stop signs - were to change completely tomorrow, chaos would reign. It’s much harder to unlearn automatic reflexes than it is to learn from scratch. Change may be good, but it is hard in ways you literally can’t comprehend.
Obviously change happens and is coped with, to greater or lesser degrees. Nations have changed from English to metric successfully. It’s not impossible. It would be enormously expensive - every single object now marked in English would have to get changed; it would take years of planning; it would take more years of implementation; and there would be a long period in the middle of dual systems that will cause confusion. All of that just to make things easier for you as you grow up. That’s politically near impossible, and it’s neither liberal or conservative politics that would fight it but human politics.
Human politics have been fighting this change since long before you were born. There have been several attempts to try to move the U.S. onto metric and all were quickly crushed. People can see the advantage of moving from landlines to cellphones. They can’t see the advantage of learning the metric system. No verbal argument - it’s easier to calculate fractions of distances! - is sufficient to change minds. You have to be able to show people that the change will be obviously beneficial to them immediately and throughout their daily life. Figure out how to do that and you may have a chance to get the legislation through before you’re 50.
All the homes need the walls ripped out and the studs spaced something other than 16"O.C. And the ceilings and walls need to be pushed in or out.
I don’t know how young / old you are, but you may be too young to remember the U.S.'s failed attempt to get people to switch to the metric system in the 1970s. There was a law (the Metric Conversion Act) passed in 1975, declaring the metric system “the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce”. Some states started posting road mileage signs in both miles and kilometers. I was in grade school at the time, and we spent a lot of time getting familiar with the metric system.
Ultimately, as others have already posted, most Americans didn’t see the need for it, felt that the way they’d been doing things worked just fine, thank you very much, and believed that it was a hassle to learn the metric system. And, as it wasn’t a mandated change, people were free to ignore it. By the early 1980s, the government came to realize that the entire thing was a failure, and they scrapped it.
There does seem to be a tendency for many Americans to dig in their heels when changing something is suggested, especially when (a) it’s the government suggesting the change, and (b) one of the reasons for the change is “it works well in other countries” (see: dollar coins, universal health care, etc.)
The UK is more or less bilingual in measurements. We kept miles and pints (too costly to change), but feet and inches are supposed to be outlawed. So I buy a pint of beer in the pub, but my petrol comes in litres; I drive miles to get to work, but buy carpet in square metres; jam comes in 450 gram jars which is really a pound.
In my own life I prefer inches to centimetres but kilos to pounds.
I remember trying to explain this to my grandpa and he just couldn’t get it.
I was telling him, “In the american system, it’s difficult to convert between smaller and larger units. For example, off the top of your head, how many feet are in 3.5 miles? Well in the metric system, I could easily tell you that there are 3500 meters in 3.5 kilometers. It’s a huge advantage.”
To which he replied something like, “Well if metric is so easy then how many meters are in 3.5 miles?” And I just had to say “no, that’s converting between two different systems. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m saying that even within its own system, converting between larger and smaller units is easier in metric.” and he just kept going on about how it’s hard to convert between American and metric and that’s why we shouldn’t use it.
Actually, I just did a quick search and it turns out this is only the second time this has been discussed on the SDMB.
I suspect a whoosh. Gold is measured in troy ounces, which are almost 10% heavier than avoirdupois ounces.
I don’t remember the dates, but Caltrans (California Department of Transportation) tried going metric. (Looking it up.) In 1995 they converted all their forms and manuals and required all construction plans to be submitted in metric. In 1997 they conceded that it was usually not possible to get rebar steel in metric sizes and added “soft conversion” tables. It wasn’t 'til 2006 that they threw in the towel.
Born in 1998. Basically, my dad was in grade school in India at this time. 
Don’t use the in-board search, it sucks. Search using Google. These are from just the first two pages of results (omitting duplicates and non-relevant threads):
Use of non metric units in the US for scientific purposes
The Metric System in the US of A
LOL! Yeah, no.
Before stating it so conclusively, did you really not consider the possibility that your search might have been flawed? And if you used the board’s search function, that possibility becomes probability. I mean, just a passing familiarity with this board’s nature should be enough to realize that this topic had to have been discussed ad nauseam.
LOL thanks Colophon We definitely have freedom of speech too AU! I was trying to say: how do you plan on enforcing the new measurements on an unwilling population? If you just change the default measurement the government uses, but nobody wants to go along with it, you just end up with government signs nobody understands.
To those asking when it actually helps with converting: all the time! Mostly when cooking and DIYing. For example, dividing 79 blobs over a 28 meter fence is easier in m/cm than it is in yards/inches, and you wouldn’t know the length of your garden in inches, would you? Other times might be walking, talking about km/m. Perhaps it’s just something you learn to avoid if it’s an annoying task? Or you find other ways of doing it. But I definitely do those kinds of calculations a lot.
The fluid ounce is not part of that system, but is part of the common measures, with several possible equivalents. The ounceitself as a measure of weight has a huge variety of historic meanings.
What we’re talking about here is the non-standard, non-official everyday systems of weights and measures, which is far removed from scientific standards, definitions, and precisions.
Does it? Everywhere I look, it’s mass (if not both). Even if it’s both, now it’s even more ambiguous - oz can refer to 3 units and has 5 commonly accepted values.
Er, it may come naturally to you, but if a large soft drink is 32 oz and costs $2, and a quart bottle of the same drink costs $3, I can’t compare because I have no idea how many oz there are in a quart. Same for oz and pound. And it’s not even a consistent ratio, you have to memorise the conversion for every single unit.
OK, that would be a great argument for keeping metric. What’s your argument for instead keeping a system that most people don’t understand?
For those who don’t think conversions actually come up that often, I can give a few examples:
1: You have a rectangular fish tank, and you want to know its volume. OK, so you get out your yardstick, and measure its length, width, and height, and multiply them. But that’s its volume in cubic inches-- How many gallons is that?
2: You have a recipe for cookies or brownies or something that you really like. A lot of the ingredients are measured in teaspoons or tablespoons. But that’s only for a single batch. There’s a bake sale coming up, and you want to make a whole bunch of batches. It’s too inconvenient to measure out all of those things in tablespoons, so you want to measure using cups instead. How many tablespoons are in a cup?
3: You’re training for a marathon by running on the track at your local gym. The track is 200 yards long. How many laps around the track do you need for a mile?
4: You’re interested in buying a vacant lot. You know how many feet long and wide the lot is. What is that in acres?
5: (bonus question) You go to Ireland and stay in a bed and breakfast. They serve a really good bread at breakfast, and you ask for the recipe. The recipe is measured in quarts, teaspoons, and tablespoons. What is that in quarts, teaspoons, and tablespoons? (this one actually happened to me)
Can anyone in this thread who’s a fan of the American system answer all of these questions? Better yet, can you answer them without a calculator? Because if we were using the metric system, most people would be able to answer all of the equivalent questions, in their head.