You say ‘tomato’, i say ‘anisotropy’.

The automotive industry, worldwide, including the US, is metric. All the US has to do to become metric is put up highway signs saying “Speed Limit 100 KPH”. Cars already have speed-o-meters that support this.

What ever anyone’s preference I do wish Britain would stick to one way or the other. In the UK we have road signs in miles yet the BBC refers to road distances in kilometres. It is totally ridiculous. Even the car speedos are in mph not kph..

Yeah, as I understand such things, the UK officially uses SI units. The main reason the roadsigns are all still in miles is almost certainly down to cost.

And car speedometers display both mph and km/h (unless you have one of those new digital speedometers, in the which case it’ll display one or the other but not both together).

but no, BBC executives insist their presenters use the metric. To add insult to injury they then use the American pronunciation kilomm-eter instead of the way fellow Europeans say it – kilo-meter as in kilo-gram, kilo-watt, kilo-joule, etc.

Eh?

Where I grew up, everyone called it a kill-OM-ittuh, and there was nothing American about this.

At least most of us Brits spell “metre” correctly (so it is distinguishable from a measuring device). Although you seem to have chosen to use the American spelling of kilometre. Why is that?

Which is a bit rich considering the metric system is not even used in the US!

I daresay there are plenty of scientists and engineers in the US who use the SI (calling it “metric” is so 1972!).

For me, as a professional engineer, the decimal foot and stations (100 foot lengths) worked extremely well. As a physics major, I learned the MKS (meter/kilogram/second), the cgs (centimeter/gram/second) and the English (foot/pound/second) systems.

And the ironic thing about what you USAians call the “English” system is that it hasn’t been in widespread use here for decades. And when it was we called it Imperial.

It was extremely stupid and wasteful when our idiot at the time, Dole, required all state highway departments to “go metric”. Our 12 foot lane widths worked nicely, a whole and easy number to memorize.

And what’s so difficult about 3.7 metres?

Metric conversions result in long strings of digits.

As always, it depends on the level of precision you choose to use, not the system in which you choose to work.

You could equally have 12.000 feet (and why do you use 12 feet and not 4 yards or 2 fathoms? Or 1/55 furlong? Or 144 inches?)

Now it was the inches and fractions thereof which caused many problems. Once again, the decimalization of the inch worked well, and a thousandth of an inch was a very useful measurement. Millimeters are just too large.

So? The SI has more order-of-magnitde variations for each unit than you can shake a stick at. If mm are too large, use micrometres (microns) instead.

BTW, the thousandth of an inch is way to large for some measurements, where µm, nm or pm might be more appropriate.

Whole metric measurements are either too large or too small to be useful for practical purposes.

Eh?

This makes no sense at all, except for the Farad (and, BTW, the system you call “metric” is officially the SI, so why not give it its proper name?).

The metre and kilogram are both useful measures, and the second is the same in the SI as it was in preceding systems. Is it, for instance, more sensible to say someone weighs 220 lbs or 100 kg? Quite obviously, neither system is “better” for a simple measurement such as mass.

However, when it comes to performing calculations relating mass, time and distance to such properties as velocity, acceleration, force, momentum and energy, then the SI wins hands down.

That’s not to say that some older units are not still used for the sake of familiarity (or economy). In the UK, all of our road signs show distances in miles and speed limits in miles per hour. I shudder to think how much it might cost to replace them all, but I can imagine a future in which road signs display both miles and km as a transition towards eventually displaying just km.

I don’t care much care what something is measured in.

Your preceding paragraph suggests otherwise.

I can make the conversions, and with the Internet, conversions are easy. It is transposing figures in long strings of numerical characters where most errors are made, and failure to have one person’s calculations checked by another person.

So? Use an appropriate level of precision.

How precise, for example, are your “12-foot” lane widths? Are they exactly 12 feet to the nearest thousandth of an inch? I suspect not. And neither do they need to be. So you don’t need them to be 3.6576 metres, do you? So, call ‘em 3.7 m and have done with it.

By the same token, calling a mile 1.6 km is perfectly adequate for most purposes, even though an exact mile is closer to 1.609 km.

Since I learned scientific notation, and grew up with a slide rule, I don’t make errors that are off by a factor of 10, a common problem in our calculator/computer world.

Good for you, but I don’t see what relevance this has to the units of measure.

Easier to compute wrenches in inches than in cm/dm/m.

If by “wrenches” you mean spanners, then I disagree. Having a whole number of mm (yes, mm, not cm, dm or m) A/F (across faces) is far easier than trying to work out if the next size up from 9/16″ is 17/32″ or 19/32″!*

* Yes, I know the answer, but it’s not immediately obvious the way “metric” spanner sizing is.

For me, it’s the rounding argument that wins. 1″ is always 1″, and 1′ is always 1′. It is never the case that it is rounded up or down; it’s not a matter of choice, it simply cannot be! However, when is 1cm actually 1cm? Well, it may be, or it may not. It may be 9.95mm or 10.o4mm.

WTF?

1″ could as easily be 7/8″ or 1 1/8″ as 1″ exactly. It all depends on what level of precision you choose to work to. By the same token, 1 cm can equally well be 0.96, 1.00 or 1.04 cm, depending on how precise you are being.

Neither system is intrinsically more precise than the other.

But then [Britain] ha[s]n’t fully converted as most food is sold by the pound

Not so. UK law requires food to be sold in “metric” units. But there’s nothing to say you cannot also publicise the old Imperial quantity at the same time.

In about 1980, the Baron Knights released a single on which the B-side was called Remember Decimalisation.

Its introduction was a voice-over that commented on such strangenesses as the song 2.54-centimetres-worm, Scotland 91.44 Centimetres and Michael 30.48 Centimetres.

About 4 or 5 years ago, a British beer was advertised on telly – tongue in cheek – as “a great 0.57 of a litre”. I can’t remember the beer though, so the advert didn’t do a great job.

In the UK, it is a requirement of law that goods are sold in “metric” quantities. So we have, on our supermarket shelves, meat by the 454 g. This morning I bought 2.27 L (4 pints) of milk. And we still judge the speed of a car in mph and its fuel economy in miles per gallon (that’s an Imperial gallon of 4.5 L, not a US gallon of 3.8 L).

Which kind of brings me on to the point.

Quantities have traditionally differed from one place to another, even when they have the same name. Thus, a gallon is a different quantity depending on which side of the Atlantic you happen to be, and the same goes for tons (the Imperial ton is 20 cwt or 2240 lb, and thus is slightly heavier than the “long ton” of 2200 lb – which incidentally is pretty close to being a “metric” tonne also – and substantially more than the “short ton” of 2000 lb) and probably several other measures too. The SI transcends this confusion, providing a unified system. Not only that, but all SI units can be defined in terms of four fundamental quantities (the metre, kilogram, second and Coulomb), so calculations become heaps easier.

Outdated colloquialisms are all very well, but new colloquiallisms will arise over time. And the older ones will still retain their meaning, or not, according to their use. After all, why should a country mile be different from any other kind of mile in the first place?

No-one would dream of suggesting that Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner be re-worded thus:

And some, in dreams, assurèd were of the spirit that plagued us so;
4.938 metres* deep he had followed us from the land of mist and snow.

* “Nine fathom” in the original, and who still uses fathoms as a measure of depth?

There are people 80+ years old in France who go shopping and convert the price two times. First from Euro to Franc, and then from Franc to “old Franc”

I grew up with the Deutsche Mark (1 Euro = 1.95583 Deutsche Mark) and since I spent way too much money after we got the Euro in 2002 I started calculating in DM again just to have money left at the end of the month ^^;

Kids growing up today don’t even remember the Deutsche Mark so it all really depends on sticking with it and waiting 50 years and you’re set.

So the answer would be: not in your lifetime phil

(by the way: we still use “Siebenmeilenstiefel” for “Seven League Boots” and the fun thing about that is that we use “Meilen” in our word for it, which is “Miles” directly translated. Not “leagues” – so it’s really REALLY not about the distance you try to represent, it’s a pretty rough estimate)