It is a mess but we will have this mess forever. My address is 1869 Hwy 7. 18.69 miles from a certain location. Who wants to change all the addresses? All American brand cars have both inch and metric fasteners. Now it is more metric but not entirely. We will have two systems as will Canada and Great Britain for hundreds of years. We will deal with it without many problems as we do now. Compared to learning to read and write in Chinese it is easy.
Advantages to Imperial units
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Dan
Contributor
Dan
Contributor
20 years ago I got a project to build 4 reactors. I decided to work with a German company, Krauss Maffei. Back then they were big in making industrial centrifuges, bullet trains and Leopard armor tanks. In fact when I was in Munich, they just had a contract to supply Greece Defence Department with 6 Leopard armor tanks. I got a change to ride with one of them in their snowy terrain testing facility in December. Any way, back to my project. Upon checking on the size of the reactor, cost & logistics, the housing would be too big & expensive to fit in a cargo airplane so we decided to let them just make the reactor internal and we contracted Astros Cosmos in Cincinnati to build the reactor housings. There were some heated debates on which measurement unit (metric or Imperial) to use in terms of cost & delivery time. We finally decided to let Krauss Maffei to build the reactor internals in metric with their metric machine tools & Astro Cosmos to built the reactor housings in Imperial unit. We provided the plant maintenance machinists with 2 sets of tools for repairing the reactors, metric tools to fix the reactor internals and Imperial tools to fix the housings & connectors (piping & fittings) & external auxiliary instruments.
I guess the reactors are still doing fine with the finely built German machinery. I haven't heard much complain from the maintenance people (knock on wood)
I guess the reactors are still doing fine with the finely built German machinery. I haven't heard much complain from the maintenance people (knock on wood)
UFOrb
Contributor
Yeah Stones / lb, rather than just pounds, like in the US. My wife, who's not British uses kg which really meant nothing to me body weight-wise earlier in our relationship but I'm getting used to it now, and I sometimes check my weight in both if kg is going to be useful for something specific. It still drives me nuts when she changes the units on our weighing scales without switching back though!
This thread has reminded me how messed up it is using different units for different things, and sometimes the same things, but I actually quite like it in a way. It keeps you on yours toes and gets the grey matter working. Metric is much easier and more logical though.
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UFOrb
Contributor
Hey, one thing every country now has in common is the decimal monetary system 
Time is more complicated, as humans originally tied time to natural phenomena such as the earth's rotation on its axis (length of a day) and revolution around the sun (year). None of these are exactly constant, nor does the number of days fit evenly into a year. 360 days / year was good enough once upon a time, which led to the definition of 360 degrees in a circle (AFAIK). 360 is divided evenly by 24, hence 24 hours in a day.
I'm not sure why we use 60 seconds / minute instead of 100. I'll speculate it's because 60 is closer to the resting human pulse, but my google-fu isn't strong tonight. 100 minutes / hour would be possible, but then 100 seconds / decimal minute would make a second inconveniently short (about 0.36 "decimal second" per normal second.)
For most other things, the preferred system is tied to the base of our most common numbering system (decimal), which in turn is a result of the number of *digits* on two hands. If a typical human had only 8 fingers we would count using the octal system and "metric" would work on powers of 8. There is *nothing* particularly special about powers of 10 (other than most humans are trained to think that way.)
"There are 10 types of people: those who understand binary and those who don't"
BTW, according to NIST the SI definition of time is as follows:
The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.
I'm not sure why we use 60 seconds / minute instead of 100. I'll speculate it's because 60 is closer to the resting human pulse, but my google-fu isn't strong tonight. 100 minutes / hour would be possible, but then 100 seconds / decimal minute would make a second inconveniently short (about 0.36 "decimal second" per normal second.)
For most other things, the preferred system is tied to the base of our most common numbering system (decimal), which in turn is a result of the number of *digits* on two hands. If a typical human had only 8 fingers we would count using the octal system and "metric" would work on powers of 8. There is *nothing* particularly special about powers of 10 (other than most humans are trained to think that way.)
"There are 10 types of people: those who understand binary and those who don't"
BTW, according to NIST the SI definition of time is as follows:
The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.
10 hours to a day, 100 centihours to an hour.1000 millihours to an hour, It wouldn't be much different than the relationship between inches and centimeters. Eventually everybody in the world would be better off. So much simpler. Computers use decimal time and have to convert it to hours and minutes.
StefinSB
Contributor
To answer the OPs question: there are none.
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