Oh God, the pain, would you guys please please please make the change? Its driving the rest of us crazy and I'm tired of arguing with baby boomer engineers.
With such a huge economy surely it makes business sense to make it easier for everyone to buy things from you?
"The European Union has a directive[21] banning non-SI markings after 31 December 2009 on any goods imported into the European Union. This applies to all markings on products, enclosed directions and papers, packaging and advertisements. On September 11, 2007, the EU announced that the United Kingdom would be exempted from this directive and imperial measurements would still be permitted indefinitely alongside with the metric system as supplementary indications.[22]"
"Three nations have not officially adopted the International System of Units as their primary or sole system of measurement: Liberia, Myanmar and the United States." !!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States
.
Co-operation?
Its a mess.
"(CNN) -- NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the agency's team used the more conventional metric system for a key spacecraft operation, according to a review finding released Thursday.
The units mismatch prevented navigation information from transferring between the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft team in at Lockheed Martin in Denver and the flight team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Lockheed Martin helped build, develop and operate the spacecraft for NASA. Its engineers provided navigation commands for Climate Orbiter's thrusters in English units although NASA has been using the metric system predominantly since at least 1990."
more at....
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/
Come on Heath, you're asking the US
to apply logic to things the rest of the world figured out a long time ago? 🙂
Take something as simple as money, paper money to be specific. Paper euros are sized according to denominations. Absolute brilliance, the larger the denomination, the larger the size of the currency, thus blind people or the visually impaired can instantly recognize change returned to them when making a purchase just by touch. In the US 1's, 5's, 10's even one hundred dollar bills are all the same size.
Owe that blind man thirty bucks, give him three singles, he'll never know the difference, appalling.
Well,
there's no excuse for what L Martin did, but. . .if it's good enough for Britain, it's good enough for her principle colony, sez I !
In thinking about what the English system does for me that metric doesn't, it comes down to some kind of material poetry, versus the driest imaginable prose, written by a soulless robot. With feet, inches and fractions thereof, the smaller the dimension becomes, the more refined the numbers used to denote it -- fractions halving each remainder, doubling in number. It just feels right.
Of course, one becomes devoted to what one knows, and abhors a revolting readjustment of a basic function. If only the world had been set out metrically to begin with. . .!
I do regret that the US pledged to reform, and then reneged. Sadly reminiscent of our treatment of the UN. . .
.
Are you being faceatious Barry?
What is actually even worse than the fact that the US hasn't made a complete change is that some industries work in metric entirely, others almost exclusively in imperial and others a mixture. It would be better if you had just stayed entirley with imperial rather than this.
I've just spent hours returning and getting a new table saw blade because the centre hole came in 25mm dia. and a 25.4mm dia. (1") and the flange...you get the picture.
The romance of imperial is something only those over 45 seem to understand. I don't get it.
.
The problem has huge practical implications, its nothing to do with nostalgia or romance. There are also safety issues I hadn't thought of until I found this link, its so much worse than I thought.
Because the US market is so huge products are inevitably specified for that market and its Europe and the rest of the world that are caught inbetween.
How much would be saved in time and resources if we had a radical international effort at standardisation? A lot, I imagine.
Thread sizes too!
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/unit-mixups.html
Heath:
we in the US also have
120 alternating electrical current,
drive on the right, and
our TV's have the NTSC format,
vs.
220 direct electrical current,
drive on the left and
your TV's have the PAL format.
Call us Imperial? Don't think so. Why can't it be cool to be different?
By the way, here, chips are potato chips (not crisps) and French Fries are your chips.
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