It's interesting to me that whenever I or someone else says "the metric system works really well," there are people who immediately think we're coming to kick down their door and make them give everything up they ever learned or believed in. This ain't religion, folks.
I don't give a "fig" if you use meters, feet, or mille, or stadia or li. Just don't expect other people to cater to it after a while.
Fortunately, Protactical raises some better arguments than this: thanks.
I agree that the Imperial system isn't outmoded. I use it every day, and do so without hesitation. I also use the metric system every day.
Here's what's not BS about the metric.
It's faster. Sorry, but it is. Let's use a real world example: give me the perimeter of an L-shaped room. Add up 13'-4", 12'-8", 7'-6", 5'-10", 5'-10", 6'-10". Quick. What's the perimeter? Now add up 4, 4, 2.3, 2, 1.8, and 2 meters. Who's done first? (Somewhere, someone is reading this saying 'Yeah, but how often do you need to measure linear feet in an odd-shaped room? *I* don't.")
It's easier. Let's say we're packing for a long hike. You can carry 12 more pounds of weight. There are 16 ounces to a pound. How many 12-ounce beverages can you carry? Trick question, of course: 12-ounces of water-like fluids weigh one pound. What gallon-size container can be used to substitute 12 12-ounce beverages? Even without the metric system, Imperial users like us are constantly making conversions. You lose all that in a base 10 system. If you can multiply or divide by ten, you're done.
It's more precise. What's the next unit smaller than inch? Or larger than a mile? What's less than an ounce and more than a ton? What's bigger than a gallon? In everyday use, it doesn't matter. But when you work with very large or small quantities--such as medicine, engineering, physics, manufacturing, shipping, transportation, and on and on--then it matters a lot.
My hunch is that Protactical first learned the metric system in the 1970s, like most of us. Why? His construction example: it's dependent upon unnecssary conversions.
I've worked construction projects overseas. What they don't say: "Pass me that 37mm x 89 stud." What they do say: "I need a 50x100." And, ironically, that's just as accurate as calling a 2x4 a 2x4. Doorways are 1m wide. Studs are placed 400mm apart. Ceiling tiles are 600mm x 600mm. Nice round numbers. Easy to use.
The faulty logic with this example is that metric users don't start with an imperial measurement and then convert it. They start and stop with the metric version.
Like Pict said: if you have a 9mm handgun, you don't go to the store and say "I need a box of 0.3543296-inchers...by which I mean 9mm." You simply ask for 9mm rounds. Americans have no problem with this. They have no problem with kilowatts, gigabytes, megahertz, or any of the other thousands of daily-use metric units that Americans like me happily use without thinking twice.
But thinking twice is basically what the Dept of Weights and Measures tried to do to American school kids, circa 1976-1978. Taught it all backward and screwed it up. And I think that's the second faulty line of thinking: this isn't the government taking away liberties (and actually, this is how they definitely came off looking in the late '70s).
This is driven by business needs. The demands of science and technology, which I know some of us fear, but be glad when your pharmacist knows the difference between 35mg and 350mg of something.
