Gallons/100 Miles (now provided by EPA)

That would require some humility, that we aren't better than the rest of the world.

But in actuality, the metric system is fairly well known here in many areas. Medical professionals use it quite a bit, people in the export/import businesses know at least the distance measurements. The military measures distance in 'klicks', which is actually a kilometer. We just don't want to admit it.

As I've told my dad (a minister and he likes things as they are for the most part), "If God wanted us to use the metric system, he'd have given us ten fingers and ten toes."

Then there's the promoters of the dozenal system, which has some merit also.

Personally I always write dates as 2009_03_01. That way it is sorted properly on the computer. In fact my company recently made that their standard policy, but with dashes instead of underscores.


And sorry to hear that about your dad. That's gotta make you stop and do some thinking about life and what we're doing with it.

 

Nah, we aren't changing until Myanmar does. And if it doesn't go smoothly for them, we won't do it.

Efficiency is not the American Way.

 

I remember watching something on History Channel, might have been Engineering Disasters; Boeing delivered an aircraft to a Canadian airline and the aircraft crashed, because Boeing filled it with xxxxxxx amount of fuel, which was what the customer ordered....except the customer wanted that in gallons, and Boeing did it in liters....(I assume because they went "Oh hey, they're Canadian, you've gotta fill up in liters). I seem to recall that no one even got hurt in the crash; I think they glided to the ground. Screwups like that can be very dangerous though

 

I still can't think about distance in feet. A meter seems more intuitive somehow.

If the US switches to metric (which I hope we eventually do) I still think certain things don't need to be converted. Like measuring [american] football field in yards, or the distance between the bases in baseball in feet, etc. Leaving those quirky historical things alone is fine with me. (Imagine all the golfers having to mentally recalculate the lengths of their various clubs. Nah...)

The US medical industry apparently has made the move to metric already. I don't recall reading about that switch. When did that happen?

 

No, that's not correct. The U.S. medical industry switched all measurements to dollars.

Tom