In response to the OP: In pieces. Since we already are doing (or have done) it as pointed out by several posts in this thread. The last big things are Farenheight to Celcius, gallons to litres, and miles to klicks.
Gallons doesn’t look so hard, 2 liter cokes and whot not, but it’ll take a while still to get used to liters of petrol in our autos and lorries. Even there, tho, how many times do you say to yourself “I’m going to buy 8 gallons of gas”? No, ususally we’ll either “Fill 'er up” or get “5 bucks worth”
Miles to kilometers will be a little harder. We can easily adapt tho, once someone comes up with an easy enough formula to figure time vs distance. Now, looking at a map, we can figure that if it’s 240 miles away, it’ll probably take about 4 hours to get there, YMMV a tad. Just use the average speed of 60mph and you get a pretty good idea of trip time. (Yeah, 60. Figure stop and go trafic outside of the interstate and 70 or so on the I-40 and 60 mph as an average works out pretty well, as personal experience shows.)
The temps, tho. Wow. That might take the longest. 30 degrees? Get a jacket. Oh shit, it’s SUMMER! Used in the sciences maybe, but getting it to go over for Joe Normal? I don’t know…
But, then again, why should we bother changing these last few things? We’re doing just fine as we are. IMHO, YMMV, BSFO
I was a college TA in the US for 3 years; organic chemistry. The glassware was graduated in ml and every term I’d get some whinnypoo complaining about decimal being “so hard”. None of them was able to tell me how many pounds to a stone or how many ounces to a pound, though.
Most places mix metric and non; us chemists love our calories and refuse to use Joules except in parentheses after the calorie value; some of the “non-metric” in Spain are derived from metric (a “quinto”, lit. “fifth”, is the fifth part of a liter; used exclusively for beer). I don’t really care which unit system I have to use so long as people actually know it, unlike those students of mine.
Not dry stuff like flour or baking soda. Jeez. What’s *wrong *with you?
It’s even trickier when I’m separating eggs. I crack an egg in my mouth and let the whites go through my teeth into the bowl. Sometimes I forget to keep a cup on hand for the yolk and I have to swallow the damn thing before holding my breath gives out.
I have this vision of you baking peanut butter cookies, and having to scrape the peanut butter off the inside your egg white coated cheeks with a spatula.
This business of dropping the OP but not the thread is pretty suspicious.
Seems to me some mod is having a joke at the rest of us all’s expense.
Well, I guess that’s OK since the main reason detre for this site is to amuse the mods
Any single conversion is fairly easy: We know a meter is a little more than a yard, a liter is a little more than a quart, and a kilo is a few ounces more than two pounds. The trouble is when a double conversion is needed to get the sense of something, for example when you have to start talking about kilometers per liter instead of miles per gallon.
On the other hand, the metric system is not totally incompatible with an avoirdupois mind. For instance, you can have metric pounds, or half-kilograms, that are only a little larger than an English pound. Maybe we should try metric feet, although I’m not sure how we would measure 33.33333333333333… centimeters on a meter stick!
The United States won’t change unless it is forced to change. It’s a classic chicken and egg problem. The predominant measurement systems will prevail. Why would anyone switch over to the system used by only 5% of the goods? Unless the government forcibly removes the imperial system through regulation, meaning that everything changes pretty much at once, it will remain the predominant system. And unless there is a real economic cost to using imperial measurements, I don’t see why it should bother. Because there sure as heck would be a huge economic cost in terms of changing all the road signs, etc.
As a South African I much prefer the metric system, since it’s so consistent (1000x into everything). But it’s really not that hard to get used to other systems, so it isn’t a big deal.
I don’t know if this is the case in other countries, but we use those cooking measurements all the time here in metric New Zealand. Most of the kitchens I’ve seen (well, the ones whose drawers I have rifled through) have a set of measuring cups, marked in cups and fractions of cups. A cup is defined around these parts as 250ml (a quarter of a litre), so it still fits in with the metric system.
We also have spoon measurements: a teaspoon is 5ml, while a tablespoon is 15ml.
Done, and it’s pretty slick. In english units, at 60 mph, your ETA is the distance in miles, as minutes. 240 miles -> 240 minutes -> 4 hours.
In metric, the similar trick is to figure a regular driving speed of 100 kph, pretty close to 60 mph. The same distance as above, 240 miles = 386 km, call it 400 km. Your ETA is the distance in klicks divided by 100 as hours.
Well in the Republic of Ireland “pint” is just an alias for glass of beer. In the UK publicans have been prosecuted for selling beer in traditional German beet steins (500ml).
In Australia, NZ, and the UK it’s still called a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, despite the quarter century absence of the Imperial System from those countries…
