tino_11 wrote:Now then, I am a huge fan of the metric system as an engineer who works both in the EU and US. Last year we transfered a product line and were faced with this dilema, my die hard position was we keep it the same (imperial) to make life easy, and it won out. However its not the best solution, and certainly confuses people. Saying that Imperial is the only way I recognise certain things:
Altitude
Snow depth
Height
Depth
Distance (local)
Therefore I propose this thread as a petition to someone we can later determine as suitable, to rebrand the world in feet and inches as these are about the only metrics that count.
I really do have nothing better to be doing today.
I can only imagine how hard it is for people not brought up with imperial (referred to as standard in the US), to have to work with American engineering. When I had to take classes here in the US, it was so frustratingly inefficient to do any calculations, requiring so many extra steps. Fortunately, I grew up with imperial and joined the electrical industry in Britain as it switched to metric in the seventies. So I'm used to thinking in both systems at the same time. Totally ridiculous is the sizing of electrical wire. This is measured in AWG (American wire gauge), a totally arbitrary system of assigning a number to a size of wire.
Unfortunately, there is no hope of any real change and it must cost the US economy dearly in incompatibility and inefficiency.
Trencher