This article is a a bit misleading. Engineers across the fruited plains use metric for 99% of their calculations. Results are converted into feet or psi or what have you.

Those @#$%&^* metric system advocates; give 'em 2.54 cm and they'll take 1.609344 km!

Conversion to the metric system has been overtaken by technology. Numerically controlled machines produce either metric or 'English' hardware.

Posting speed limits in km/hr doesn't do any thing for the economy.

I don't see any benefit for changing any further.

steevil: The problem is, of course, that some human has to write the code that said machines run. And we all remember a few very smart folks at NASA who couldn't get it right...

A 1,200-member organization? There are more people who want us to switch to Esperanto.

But remember, 1,200 members in metric converts to 1,320 in English measurement...

Sometimes American exceptionalism is a good thing. This is not one of those times.

As an engineer I use English or Metric or both as requested by the client. Mostly its in English, but it's no big deal to convert.

American exceptionalism? How about American hubris? It was you guys who first ditched the charming and poetic pounds-shillings-pence currency and, in a fit of cold rationalism, bequeathed the drab and functional decimal dollar to us all. Now here you are touting the beauty of miles and gallons like a bunch of eccentric English squires.

Hey, come to think of it, the U.N. and jusdicial activism were your ideas too.

These are the same Euros who berate Americans for being "monolingual" who have a hard time multiplying by 1.6 or 2.5 or whatever it takes? Do they take off their shoes to count higher than ten?

We don't use metric for the same reason people uses GatesOS (aka Windows)— it's good enough. Why change when it does the job, and the cost of the change may never be recovered?

As for NASA, it's just another sign of that vast bureaucracy's problems in that they keep missing obvious small problems in their attempts to micromanage risk and failure away.

This whole thing strikes me as a pretty trivial issue, but Orrin, why do you consider the metric system "dehumanizing"? Metric seems an equally valid system to me, and in many ways is easier to use.

"The metric systemis an abstraction whose beauty lies in its indifference to the way human beings actually live their lives or feel comfortable measuring things."

That one's gonna leave a mark.

I'll start using that metric system thingy just as soon as we once again start calling the month of July "Thermador".

"The metric systemis an abstraction whose beauty lies in its indifference to the way human beings actually live their lives"

I don't know - I seem to run across the freezing and boiling of water in my life a little more often than brine.

"The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it."

The middle child, who is a math and scince major at a major national research university, and who was always two years ahead of her class in math when in elementary, middle and high school, complained bitterly whenever she was made to use the metric system.

OTOH, the traditional system has its own problems.

Of course there are pitfalls in the customary system. For instance one liquid quart is 57.75 cubic inches, but one dry quart is 67.2006 cubic inches, and one British (Imperial) quart is 69.354 cubic inches. Of course, I am sure you keep 3 sets of volume measures around the house in order to avoid that problem.

NIST Handbook 44 -- 2003 Edition -- Specifications, Tolerances, And Other Technical Requirements for Weighing and Measuring Devices as adopted by the 87th National Conference on Weights and Measures 2002 sets forth the official systems of weights and measures in the United States in Appendix C.

Note 11 helpfully explains that there are two different miles in use: "The international mile and the U.S. statute mile differ by about 3
millimeters although both are defined as being equal to 5280 feet. The international mile is based on the international foot (0.3048 meter) whereas the U.S. statute mile is based on the survey foot (1200/3937 meter)."

The explanation of the history of this phenomenon is in Appendix B:

"From 1893 until 1959, the yard was defined as equal exactly to 3600/3937 meter. In 1959, a small change was made in the definition of the yard to resolve discrepancies both in this country and abroad. Since 1959, we define the yard as equal exactly to 0.9144 meter; the new yard is shorter than the old yard by exactly two parts in a million. At the same time, it was decided that any data expressed in feet derived from geodetic surveys within the United States
would continue to bear the relationship as defined in 1893 (one foot equals 1200/3937 meter). We call this foot the U.S. Survey Foot, while the foot defined in 1959 is called the International Foot. Measurements expressed in U.S. statute miles, survey feet, rods, chains, links, or the squares thereof, and acres should be converted to the corresponding metric values by using pre-1959 conversion factors if more than five significant figure accuracy is required."

Of course there are no problems for engineers these days, except when they work for the Government:

"A failure to recognize and correct an error in a transfer of information between the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft team in Colorado and the mission navigation team in California led to the loss of the spacecraft last week, preliminary findings by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory internal peer review indicate.

"People sometimes make errors," said Dr. Edward Weiler, NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Science. "The problem here was not the error, it was the failure of NASA's systems engineering, and the checks and balances in our processes to detect the error. That's why we lost the spacecraft."

The peer review preliminary findings indicate that one team used English units (e.g., inches, feet and pounds) while the other used metric units for a key spacecraft operation. This information was critical to the maneuvers required to place the spacecraft in the proper Mars orbit."

I measure everything by the Imperial Pint. How long until the game starts? About 2 pints. How much is it worth? About 5 pints. How far away is it? So far away that if we walk, we had better stop half way for some pints.

Actually, temperature is measured in Kelvin,with a 1K unit (not 1°K) such that

The kelvin, unit of thermodynamic temperature, is the fraction 1/273.16 of the thermodynamic temperature of the triple point of water. Unit of thermodynamic temperature (kelvin)

Which has little to do with freezing or boiling water, other than the definiton adopted just happens to be the same size as the old Celsius degree. Again, entirely arbitrary in a reasonable sort of way.

And if decimilization was so great, why, when coming up with time measurement for Mars, did the NASA folks go with a "sol" of 24 hours, instead of just using "deci-sols" and "centi-sols" and "deka-sols"? Talk about your lost opportunities and mixed measurement systems.

"Which has little to do with freezing or boiling water, other than the definiton adopted just happens to be the same size as the old Celsius degree. Again, entirely arbitrary in a reasonable sort of way."

Let me get this straight: assigning the number 273.16 as absolute zero came before the freezing and boiling points of water were defined as 0 degrees and 100 degrees centigrade? Pick 273.16, and look, it just so happens that those markers fall on such conveniently easy numbers?

Don't you think it's a little more likely that someone picked the freezing and boiling points of water as relatively easily reproduced events and assigned nice round numbers to them... and then found that absolute zero would be -273.16 on the basis of this scale?

I've learned than often when important surveys like boundarys and such are made, the instruments used are documented and kept. When the surveys are repeated, one of the first steps is to recalibrate the new instruments to match the old, so that the results on the ground will match, even if the numbers won't. Once a boundary is surveyed and agreed to, it can't be changed just because you find errors later. (Which explains lots of jogs on detailed maps.)

There're been several cases of geologic resurveys which showed "bulges" in the earth. The most famous was the "Palmdale Bulge", which some thought was a precursor to a San Andreas earthquake. Another was inflation of the Yellowstone Caldera. In both cases, it turned out that some of the instruments used in some of the surveys were bad. In the case of Palmdale, the bulge just went away when it was found that one of the measuring rods was slightly off (Too long? I forget.). It was a tiny amount, like a millimeter or so, but it mattered. Adjusting the data accordingly, and no bulge.

And you do all your metric angle measurements in Radians, not Degrees, right? And for an example of metric arbitrariness, check out the definition of the "kilogram" at the NIST website.

OH, geez, Robert, I just use metal cups for dry ingredients and pyrex for liquid.

Besides, in Chicago we can have a 100 degree swing in temperature in a year, who wants to convert that?

100 degrees sounds much more impressive, people get that.

I prefer miles over klicks any day.

If we're going to ignore history and go to a coldly-rational system, we clearly should drop base-ten systems (like the metric system) and do everything in base sixteen.

How many ounces are there in a pound again?

Hey Joe, please bring me a C oz can of beer.

So let's state this in terms even a product of America's public schools or a voter for Democrats can understand: The metric system may have started with the notion of somehow being rationally natural, part of the mindset of the French Revolution with reinventing everything. One of the specific goals was universal reproducibility, in that the standard values could be determined by anyone, anwhere. Those goals got lost along the way when better quality equipment became availableand it was realized that it wasn't quite so easy as was optimistically first thought (see "Kilogram, definiton of"). Yes, water temperature played a part in setting the size of a "degree". But note that "boiling", and to a lesser extent, "freezing" are dependent on pressure, and so dependent on location (and weather). The 0-100 scale only works at sea-level for 30"Hg barometric pressure. (I'm too lazy to look this up for the exact values or metric equivalents, but you get the idea). For example, boiling at 7200ft (2200m) is 92.9°C. So to salvage the system, various constraints were placed on the definition, eventually abandoning "freezing" and "boiling" entirely when they went to the triple point, where pressure by definition doesn't play a part, only tempeature does, and then set the number such that the earlier values for a "degree" would match, hence "276.16". So it is most definitely arbritary and abstract.

But I could argue that when dealing with temperature, Farenheit is more "natural" in that it more closes captures the range of temperature experiences of the human body. Temperatures outside that range in the great outdoors are found only in god-forsaken places like the Arabian desert or most of Canada. Most people aren't concerned with boiling water as something natural, as the magic point marking "hot".

If anything, a failing of the metric system is its insistence on keeping old values like "degree" or "second" around but giving them shiny new convoluted definitions. If you really do want a rational system not tied to human experiences, then why not start with making the speed of light exactly 300,000 km/s (or even 1,000,000 m/s,which would give a meter a length around a foot., depending on how you define a "second")

(Another side note-- 98.6°F is 37°C, not 37.0°C. The decimal place is an artifact of the conversion, and more properly, should be rounded to 99°F. Can't add significant digits, you know...)

I'm beginning to sound like a calendar crank, a closely related species.

ZZZzzzz ZZZZZZzzzzzz ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzz.....

Raoul: These physicists are working on a system based on the fundamental constants of nature.

Raoul: The metric unit for angular measurement is the grad:
Grad - The grad is a metric unit of measure found on some foreign maps. There are 400 grads in a circle (a 90-degree right angle equals 100 grads). The grad is divided into 100 centesimal minutes (centigrads) and the minute into 100 centesimal seconds (milligrads).

"If we're going to ignore history and go to a coldly-rational system, we clearly should drop base-ten systems (like the metric system) and do everything in base sixteen."

Which demonstrates that the decimal system isn't that dehumanized at all. Seeing as it's based on human anatomy, of all things.

There are, of course, 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary notation, and those who don't.