It really wasn't a question. Scientists and Engineers DON'T use Imperial, they use metric. Pick up science, pick up nature, ect. Scientific journals use metric. No American scientist uses imperial.

I'd rather use pounds, as newtons are equatable to pounds (2.2 pounds iirc). Pascals are what you compare to foot-pounds. And I'd rather use PSI

makes a fruit salad.

Again, the whole "getting the feel" is merely because you're not used to the units. I have no problem in measuring out approximately 10 centimetres using my hands, nor do I have any problem measuring out approximately 10 metres in strides. I can easily visualise a metre or a centimetre. This is because I only ever use metric. However, I don't have any idea how long an 'inch' or a 'foot' or a 'yard', I'd have to work that out knowing that an inch is approximately 2.5 centimetres. Because I have the 'feel' for 2.5 centimetres, but I don't for an 'inch' or a 'foot' or a 'yard'.

The whole "units almost the size of body components" is an interesting tidbit of history, but I'm still not convinced that it actually makes measuring things any easier or that it's in any way a 'natural' measurement system.
If I have to measure 10 inches, am I going to lay down my thumb ten times? 10 thumb-rules is just as abstract as 10 centimetres, or 10 centimorts.



There's nothing stopping you from using fractions in metric (or recurring decimals in imperial). That's just habit, in that you'll never be able to know if something is exactly one third of a mile or exactly one third of a metre, but fractions imply that you do.



..Except in 1999, NASA fairly obviously did, with catastrophic consequences. They're not supposed to use imperial, no.

The reason you Imperial users like Imperial more than Metric and think it has a better "feel" is solely because you're used to it. I'm in exactly the reverse position (though I can judge a foot and inch fairly accurately, since a ruler is about a foot long and also has inches and centimetres on, so I learned both. A mile and yard, on the other hand, mean nothing to me. MPH means exceptionally nothing, but KPH makes perfect sense).

Metric and Imperial are as arbitrary as each other. The sole difference is that metric is made up of a single unit for each thing, rather than half a dozen each made up of a different number of each other. This means that when building shelves we know exactly how much of 1.5 metres a 30 mm thick shelf is going to take. Do you know the same with inches and yards?

I'm sure you have lots of sensible reasons that the MM/DD/ YY dating system is superior to the rational, logical system everyone else uses, but you're wrong about that, too.

If you're such a fan of Imperial, why don't you use it for computers? Imagine you have an "inch" (a byte), a "foot" (12 bytes), a mile (however many feet that is) and a league (however many miles that is). So you have 50 leagues of space, and you want to install something that takes 6000 inches. What percentage of your drive is this?

Wookie: Is there any way in which someone does something better than the US? Since you're so adamant about your electoral and imperial systems, which are both pretty much universally derided, I suspect the answer is no...



So what? Is the human body less arbitrary than the frequency of Cesium or the distance from the North Pole to Paris?



That's ridiculous. It's only longer because you're converting from imperial to metric. I mean, 2 metres is easy to remember... but in Imperial it's 6.56160 feet! That's hugely difficult for tradesmen to remember!

Because if you have one measurement in foot and one in inches you have to convert one of them to do the cacluation making it more complicated than it needs to be. With metric, just looking at the number you can convert it.




Ok, I could say that 185cm has no symbols wheras 6'1" has one. The decimal point and the foot sybol are both seperators. You could say 1 metre 85 centimetres if you wanted. With 6'1", the foot symbol is vital to calculation. And if you want to do a calculation with the number you first need to convert it to a decimal number of feet or inches so why not just use metric?

My intro to civil engineering class used foot-pounds. It had an old stubborn guy for an instructor who would not use anything metric.

A unit of force. :p

I propose that we all move to a new system based on the speed of light, the planck length, and the mass of an electron.

One Newton is the force required to accelerate a mass of one kilogram through one metre per square second. Newton's second law of motion states that force is proportional to rate of change of momentum, the purpose of the unit 'Newton' is to make the constant of proportionality be 1, so that the law can be simplified to F = ma.

The Newton, Pascal and Lumen aren't SI units anyway. There are seven SI units:
- kilogram
- metre
- second
- ampere
- kelvin
- mole
- candela

There's also the radian and the steradian as dimensionless SI units.

The Newton is kg m s^−2
The Pascal is kg m^−1 s^−2
The Lumen is cd sr