[Jones Bob]

I love how reactionary people are here. 

It's not reactionary to know your history.

 

[frenchbat]

I'll tell that to Paulet, Damblanc and Tsiolkovski.

 

[Ableza]

Please give generously to the Society for Educating the Satire Challenged.  The humor you save might be your own.

 

[Jones Bob]

Sorry, sarcasm is easily misinterpreted online.

 

[GearMe]

Perhaps you missed how firmly my tongue is planted in my cheek.

I love how reactionary people are here. 

Please give generously to the Society for Educating the Satire Challenged.  The humor you save might be your own.

Yep...fish in barrel.

 

[AudioBear]

As a scientist I used metric all my life and much prefer it to the English system but as a pilot the whole cockpit and ATC conversation was in English--like @castleofargh said, there are some things that remain English system because that's the way they always were.  It does scare me when I fly in a foreign country and a controller can't pronounce English--but his English is better than my Russian.  The military and many industrial products are metric as well.  Why the USA hangs onto the English system defies all logic.  Chalk it up to 'murcan exceptionalism.
 
What really bothers me about the continued use of the English system is the use of fractions.  I do woodworking and all the measurements are in fractions which one continually is forced to add or subtract.  21-3/8 minus 15-13/32s is how much?  I finally broke down and decimalized measurement in my shop.
 
The benefit of metric is that it's decimal.  The meter could be any arbitrary length and the gram could be any amount of mass, it wouldn't matter.  What matters is that they are part of a base 10 system which is easier for us simple folks to use.
 
I am so tired of rods, furlongs, pecks, roods and on and on....

 

[JohnnyCanuck]

  ...
 
I am so tired of rods, furlongs, pecks, roods and on and on....

 
Not to mention hogsheads and firkins...

 

[Exacoustatowner]

  who cares if it's SI units or not? some people drive on the right side of the road, some on the left, we don't all use the same units for money, we don't speak the same language. so what? for a unit there isn't one better than another, they were all made up anyway. the point of a unit is to unify something, to have a common ground for communication and we have it as the US actually referenced their units in metric values. so when needed we can convert and be happy.
it's very clear that the US are making their own life difficult for no particular reason, as they do not use exclusively their system. in fact most of science uses the SI units whatever the country. so in the end they just have to learn 2 stuff instead of one. if they want to, how does that hinder everybody else's life? it doesn't. 
 
I would like to make some stupid anti American comment, but the truth is that if I just take France, when I deal with photography, there are many things I will express in inches(pouce) because "that's how it is". there is zero legitimate reason, but somehow the inches stick to photography even to this day. same thing for monitors and TVs, the diagonal is usually given in both units but we're fine with inches. why is it that we're using inches, who knows? habits. and truth be told, nobody cares.
and when I'm taking a bottle of coke, the stuff is quantified in litre by habit. if we were really practical and trying to make things universal, we would be talking in cm³ for example.
and those are just stuff I come up with on the top of my head while writing. I'm sure we all have many of those weird stuff going on.
 
now taking pride in something that doesn't make much sense, it's a very different story and I have a clear opinion on that one

.

Nice! I've been using metric since my University days-and daily at work in Science.  It's great to see a tongue in cheek debate based on the discussion of a "Schiit-Tonne" vs. "Schiit-ton." At work I measure in mL and grams, at home in quarts and ounces. SOMEHOW I get by. We should let Jason and Mike define the terms when dealing with Schiit. 

 

[davidsh]

I'd say we reference a Schiit-tonne to the weight of the Ragnarok/Yggdrasil, and the schiit-load will then be the weight of a Asgard/Bifrost stack. Lastly there's the schiit-pile, which is equal to the weight of a stack of magni/modi/loki/wyrd

 

[GearMe]

I'd say we reference a Schiit-tonne to the weight of the Ragnarok/Yggdrasil, and the schiit-load will then be the weight of a Asgard/Bifrost stack. Lastly there's the schiit-pile, which is equal to the weight of a stack of magni/modi/loki/wyrd

...and the Fulla?

 

[JohnnyCanuck]

Micro Schiit

 

[GearMe]

Micro Schiit

Nice!...Wyrd? Mani? SYS?

 

[US Blues]

 

Micro Schiit

Nice!...Wyrd? Mani? SYS?

NanoSchiit.

 

[Armaegis]

I don't like it. I am happy for the English language, though.
 

 
English isn't a language. It's a bully that beats up real languages and steals their vocabulary and syntax and butchers it for its own use.

 
Or (paraphrasing a quote who's source I have forgotten)... English is to languages what chop shops are to cars.
 

  I am so tired of rods, furlongs, pecks, roods and on and on....

 
The thing I really hate about imperial is that the use of mass and weight are confusing. A pound is not a unit of mass; it is more properly denoted lbf (pound force). So what's the mass then? Oh you call it a lbm (pound-mass). Not confusing at all. Oh wait, actually you have a unit of mass called a slug which is what suits the way your numbers work (1 lbf accelerates 1 slug at the rate of 1 ft/s^2). That makes sense... except you never use it! Instead, you all use lbf and shove in correction factors to make your equations work. And those constants become useless when you are no longer on an earth environment, or high up enough that gravity has changed.
 
 
 

 

[superjawes]

Make fun of the US all you want for not using the metric system...at least we stick to the same units. The UK uses a mixture of metric and non-metric units, and that includes the stone (14 English pounds).