JWAN said:
It took those countries years to do it, NASA explained that if they changed everything on their schematics to metric it would cost 370 million dollars. Meaning they wouldn't be able to launch space shuttles for the first half of the year.
Yeah, Ip prettu sure NASA uses Metric already, at least for their missions. They are scientists, that work with ESA and Russians, and Metric is the standard for both scientists and the colaborating nations. Carl Sagan talks in kilometers and kilograms a lot in a Pale Blue Dot. And they were the ones that built the Mars Climate Orbiter, so that the software in the machine was in SI tells me that is was probably Lockheed which gave the non-SI units.
ardias014 said:
But knowing the safe temperature for your survival is better and metric sucks at that. With Fahrenheit, 1 - 100 is survivable human range, with Celsius it isn't. It is also not the best for science because of kelvin.
How often do you find 1°F? Or 100°F? Also, at 0°F you can survive for what I gather, almost 10 hours, which is more or less the same for 50% humidity and 100° F (and even more than an hour at 100% humidity) so in spite of what Farenheit wanted, his scale is terrible at determining the habitable range for humans, so it is not a good scale for that. Habitable temperatures are horrible emtric considering there is no standard meassure of that. Also, with Celsius you can determine those limits with the same certainty. Just because you are unused to them, doens't make Farenheit a better scale. Celsius is just as useful for cooking, room temperature and everything in the daily life, you are just not tha used to them. And Kelvin and Celsius are almost the same, just add or substract 273°, the change between degrees is the same, so it is still useful (not used, but the conversion is minimal).
Metric is just better and easier. Say, how many square feet are there in a square mile? And in half an square mile? In pi square miles? How many cubic inches are there in an ounce? In a gallon? Because those are easy conversions in Metric. Metric is easy all the time. You can change every unit by moving the decimal point. It is faster just to change the point than to write in a calculator the operetion to do it. You don't have to do anything. And even easier if you sue scientific notation. Need teh speed of ligh in meters per second and not kilometer becasue the rest of the equation is in meter? Just add three to that exponential.
The concertion isn't going to be immediate. Nobody would reasonably ask just to forget Imperial. But fase it out. Start using both, while making Imperial obsolete. It will take time, but believe me, the only thing standing between you and metric is inertia (things don't soudn better o worse in a system or another, you are only more used to one), and in a generation, that Imperial nosnsense can be over. Metric is more accurate since it is the base of both (an inch is defined as so many centimetres, not the other way round), it is easier to use and learn (anumeric people can do metric calculation with ease) and you could be part of a bigger world. Imperial needs to go. there is no reason to keep it and many to change.
EDit:
Ryotknife said:
uh...no.
Its mostly foreign pressure. The vast majority of Americans don't give a hoot about metric because imperial works just as well for the average American. There is zero advantage to metric in the day to day usage. Hell, even some engineers don't care because some engineering companies use imperial exclusively. I worked as an Electrial Engineer on dams, and guess what? Everything was in Imperial.
Switching to metric would make SOME engineers/scientists life easier, but for the vast vast VAST majority (as in 99+%) it would be an inconvenience to try to do a non-gradual switch. Even NASA tried to switch and found out they could not. The only people who would really benefit from the US switching is Europe and a few engineers.
http://nasawatch.com/archives/2009/06/nasa-finds-the-metric-system-too-hard-to-implement-for-constellation.html
Don't get me wrong, I like metric, but there are very few benefits to switching nor is there an immediate need to. Gradually replacing signs and whatnot with both imperial and metric and gradually phasing out imperial over the course of 100 years or so is fine.
Did you read the whole link? Because only the first paragraph talked about not implementing SI units. QUoting
"By law and policy, the metric system is the preferred system of measurement within NASA."
"ll new programs and projects covered by NPR 7120.5 shall use the SI system of measurement for design, development and operations, in preference to customary U.S. measurement units, for all internal activities, related NASA procurements, grants, and business activities."
So NASA would be happier if they switched to SI units. The problem with Imperial indeed caused problems, but NASA policy is SI units, and a discrepancy between hardware, being that Metric was used in design (in other words, what NASA did, not outside engineers). NASA is moslty metric. NASA doesn't have to change to metric. They already have. They already did. Please read the sources you are citing. ALL the scientific community uses SI, that includes NASA.