Inches is a measure that still are used in Europe.
Especially on sawmills. (I believe that they changed to cm some years back, but it’s still used by many to measure bits of woods)
Actually, I suspect that most every American who has gone through high school in the past 30 years knows the metric measures. For me, it’s always been an issue of visualization.
Because of my early education, English measures are inculcated into my perception. I see a stick and I can make a pretty good guess as to how long it is, in inches or feet. I can’t do that in centimeters or meters. To guess its metric length, I have to estimate it in inches, then convert.
This happens all the time when I see billboards that give the current temperature in centigrade. If I don’t catch the Farenheit temperature as well, I quickly do the conversion in my head to figure out how cold or warm it is.
Sua
Actually, the meter is now defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in a certain period of time. The meter was originally defined relative to the size of the earth, though.
How ironic that a cutting-edge industry like computers seems to be among the feet-draggers on this. My diskettes are 3 1/2 inches – How big are yours?
In sharp contrast, we’ve had soft drinks in liters for a few decades already.
I think that a very real comparison can be made between switching from English to Metric measurements, and switching from paper $1 bills to coins. In both cases, Merkins just don’t like making changes, whether there’s a good reason or not.
I don’t know that anyone likes making changes! We dumped our royalty over 200 years ago, and we’re still waiting for the Your-a-peein’s to catch up! 
SUA sez:
This is the sign of a very smart Merican. Lots of us don’t know how to do the coversion, much less in our heads. If we don’t see the F display, we drive by thinking “Nine degrees? What the fuck is ‘nine’? Now I have to drive around the block again to see what the temperature really is.”
A not-so-distant relative (originally from Europe) came to visit us for the first time. He mentioned that one of his pleasures is to drive a nice car, and drive it fast. “How fast?” I ask. “Ninety? A hundred?”
“Nah,” he says. “About two hundred on an open road.” I choked briefly, then remembered to do a conversion.
I’ll convert when they get metric time right. As long as I have to remember 60 seconds in a minute, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 30 days in these months, 31 days in those months, 28 or sometimes 29 days in that month… I may as well remember 12 inches in a foot and 16 ounces in a pound too.
Sorry, although I hate to destroy a good jest; I have to point out that this is not metric, but Gregorian. In a long and still standing French tradition of legislating nature, metric time was tested in France during the revolution by the introduction of the decimal week and the decimal day, i.e. a ten-hour day instead of twelve and a ten-day week instead of seven. They scraped it when they saw how confused everyone got trying to divide 365 and some fractions solar days into some kind of sensible decimal yearly calendar - not to mention all the expensive clocks they had just confiscated from all those royal castles being suddenly rather useless. 
Sparc
Jodi wrote, re temperature displays in Celsius:
Note that a European, who’d grown up with degrees Celsius, would have the same conundrum if he were presented with a Fahrenheit display.
The real problem is not that a lot of Americans don’t know how to do the conversion. The real problem is that Americans are brought up on Fahrenheit, and then have to learn how to convert from Celsius to Fahrenheit later. If Americans were taught Celsius from the get-go, they wouldn’t need to know how to convert.
My first introduction to the metric system came in (American) elementary school. Every single one of the homework problems we had to work out, without exception, was a conversion problem. We had to convert meters into feet and inches, or kilograms into pounds and ounces, or Fahrenheit into Celsius (which was called “centigrade” at the time), or kilometers into miles, or liters into quarts. Why? Because we had already learned what a foot, inch, pound, ounce, degree Fahrenheit, mile, and quart were!
What needs to happen is that schoolkids need to be exposed, from a VERY young age, to how long a meter stick is, how heavy a kilogram weighs, what a temperature of 25 degrees Celsius feels like, how big a liter is, etc… Then the “metric” problems in our homework won’t need to involve conversions at all. They’ll be things like “Johnny is 130 cm tall, and Jane is 95 cm tall. How much taller is Johnny?”. Then, later, out of necessity, we can teach the kids how to convert from old Imperial units to the metric system they’ve already learned. If we were to teach the metric system this way, the Imperial system would vanish within a generation.
tracer, I think your analysis misses a key point - kids are taught the basics of the English system of measurement before they step into a classroom.
Mommy and Daddy measure the kid and tell her she is 3 feet tall and weighs 50 pounds. They ask her to pick up the gallon of milk from the shelf in the supermarket. They tell the kid that the beach where they are going on vacation is 60 miles away. Etc.
Sua
I still don’t understand what we really gain from the metric system. Why is it a big deal again? I missed that day of class.
FTR, I measure small distances (less than one or two meters) in metric and anything approaching a quarter of a mile I use, well, miles. This is my intuitive grasp of measurement.
I perform terribly when guessing distances in inches or fractions thereof.
short distances in inches, or fractions thereof. (sheesh)
I had a similar experience in Canada. I’m old enough (or young enough, depending on your perspective) to have been an elementary school age kid when Canada switched to metric. (I remember the headline in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix that day: “Say Goodnight to Fahrenheit”) Sua, I too had learned English measurements at home and then was taught metric in school. As a child, learning this new language of measurements was nearly effortless. And thanks to my nifty MetricCanon calculator and other reinforcements like rulers with both centimeters and inches, thermometers with both Celcius and Fahrenheit, speedometers with both miles and kilometers it was easy to become and remain “bilingual”. It was harder for my parents, of course, but after a couple of decades they were thinking primarily in kilometers, liters, degrees Celcius, or converting between the two without any problem at all.
Whether or not the switch is even necessary for the US is another debate. But once the deed is done, switching really isn’t such a big deal. Even for the grumpy old-timers like my folks and others of their generation.
rivulus
Erislover,
The gain from using the metric system is twofold:
[ul][li]No requirement to convert foreign measures to traditional measures.[/li][li]Ease of multiplying and dividing units since it’s based on the decimal system.[/ul][/li]
To me, at least, the second gain is more important.
It won’t help where funky definitions are involved, though.
F’rinstance, many of us Americans are familiar with how a house’s floor plan size is measured in “square feet.” Whan you may not know is how this square footage calculation is performed: the area of the entire outside perimeter is measured, and then the size of any attached garage is subtracted for that. (For two-story houses, the calculation is even more convoluted – I believe, but am not 100% certain, that the staircase gets counted twice.) Switching from square feet to square meters will not in any way alleviate the screwiness of this measurement.
And speaking of area measurements: You do know that there’s more than one metic unit for measuring the area of a plot of land, right? There’s the square meter, the square kilometer, and the are. One “are” is 100 square meters, and of course a hectare is 100 ares (10,000 sq. meters). Why not just call an “are” a square dekameter and a “hectare” a square hectometer? That’s what they are, after all. Hmph!
Oh … and of course, a liter is just an unnecessary extra word for a cubic decimeter.
I wouldn’t be so bold. Try taking a poll of your relatives in non-technical fields, and asking the question “how big is a meter?” You’ll be surprised at the answers you get.
As to the OP, a large part of the reason that the US hasn’t converted is that it would require a law forcing us to use metric in our private transactions. We Merkins don’t take to the gummint telling us what to do with our private lives. As it is, business can use metric when it makes sense to do so (which is almost always nowadays), and Grandpa Simpson can state his car’s fuel efficiency (notice I didn’t say “mileage”) in rods to the hogshead. That’s the way I likes it.
CurtC wrote:
“It’s about a foot tall and eight inches thick. The gas company uses it to see how much gas we use each month.”
Oh yeah, one other useful tidbit I forgot to interject here:
When you go to the supermarket and buy a “quart” of strawberries, you’re really buying a dry quart of strawberries. One dry quart is equal to 1.16365 liquid quarts.
So a quart of Diet Pepsi is smaller than a liter of Diet Pepsi, but a quart of strawberries is bigger than a liter of strawberries.