Who knew that the metric system was planned by the French revolutionary Robespierre and adopting it would lead inevitably to the introduction of the guillotine? We should be thankful that there are those who are aware of this danger and want to make sure that the US sticks with the British system, even if it is out of step with the rest of the world, because is not a made up system that seeks to break our links with what the nation’s founders bequeathed to us.
We’re #1, baby, and so whatever measurement system we have must be the best and others should conform to what we have.
It is ultimately the stupidity that is going to lead to disaster.
“Hey buddy, can you change two tens for a five?”
I can design a guillotine in imperial if they want
Alec Steele, a blacksmith and knife-maker, is a young brit who recently moved to Montana to set up shop there. When he got to the US he made a batch of Tshirts that read “It’s FREEDOMheit” with a F degrees to C degrees conversion table and a grumpy looking eagle.
“It’s FREEDOMheit”
Damn it. That’s better than the “Freedom Degrees” I mockingly use when I see American temperatures.
Look, I’ll do you a deal. I’m willing to switch to driving on the right hand side of the road if you go metric. How about it?
file thirteen, deal. I’ve gone metric.
What I don’t get is that these guys don’t get is that under the metric system, they get to brag about their swingin’ 15!
But seriously, when I switched to metrics in the kitchen I found cooking to be much easier and if Panero ever ever even read one of his grandmother’s recipes, I’ll eat my copy of Diet for a Small Planet. : )
Even my mother, who couldn’t tell a kilometer from a potato, told me the Celsius system made more sense and she had figured that out as a kid.
Basically, every scientist and engineer on the planet, whether or not in the USA, uses metric. There are many good reasons for that which I’m sure everyone here is aware. Heck, even cars built in the USA are metric these days (with the exception of the speedometer and climate control user interface, although I’d bet that underneath it’s all metric with a final conversion to US customary units).
The thing is, we’re looking at Fox News. They really can’t go backwards enough. It doesn’t matter how illogical it is. To them, anything other than looking backwards is scary, and the farther you look back, the better. At this point, I would hardly be surprised if some Fox News talking head or guest declared that modern medicine is all a sham and that we should go back to the “proven methods of our ancestors”, namely, bloodletting.
@jimf
Basically, every scientist and engineer on the planet, whether or not in the USA, uses metric. There are many good reasons for that which I’m sure everyone here is aware.
The sad demise of the Mars Climate Orbiter was an expensive lesson.
The thing about the Celsius scale of temperature is, not only does it make perfect sense (0° is about the temperature where water freezes, 100° is about the temperature where water boils and 10° is the beginnings of warm enough for shorts and T-shirts), but you are allowed to use odd numbers …..
But where SI (the phrase “metric system” is a pejorative term) really wins is in not having any constants of proportionality anywhere. For instance, a force in Newtons is not merely proportional to mass and acceleration; it’s actually equal to mass (in kg) times acceleration (in metres per second squared). And when something moves against an opposing force, the work done (in Joules; there is only one unit for measuring energy, so direct comparisons are possible) is equal to the force times the distance moved.
It’s also interesting to note that NASA only really started having problems after the last of the captured German rocket scientists (who would have used SI for all calculations, even if they had to convert everything back to US units at the end) died off …..