Quote Originally Posted by Jebus View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Raistlin View Post
The metric system will never catch on in the US. It's been tried before. (and failed because it sucks).

The metric system is the best system to use in a lab setting. Science in every country uses metric measurements. But for day-to-day lives, people here like using the imperial system, including me. Fahrenheit, feet, and pounds, especially, would be hard to do away with. What do you have equivalent to a foot in metric? You jump from a tiny centimeter to a huge meter, whereas in imperial you have inches, feet, and then yards. Decimeter I guess would be a bit better, but does anyone use that?

Also, being divisible by 5 and 10 is nice, but being divisible by 3 and 4 is also really nice. There's a reason our time system is based on 60 minutes, 24 hours and everyone accepts it. Just like 12 inches in a foot, it's easily divisible by a bunch of common numbers (2, 3, 4, especially). Who needs to measure a tenth of a meter?
Millimeter -> centimeter -> decimeter -> meter.

Decimeter = 10 centimeters, with a meter being 10 decimeters.
... did you miss the part where I specifically mentioned decimeters? But I've never really seen it used, not in the way imperial systems use feet (for basically all measurements).

Quote Originally Posted by oddler
What's the reason? I'm just asking because I don't know what the reasoning behind it is.
Our time system is nice and easy to use because it's easily divisible into a bunch of common numbers: 2, 3, 4, etc. The base 10 in metric doesn't matter so much in daily live, but stuff like 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 does. Half-hour, quarter-hour, etc, are expressions heard all the time, and those times are easily calculated. The same goes for the imperial foot: 12 inches, 36 inches to a yard. You can easily divide that into half, thirds, or fourths. Whereas in a base-10 system, the numbers 10, 50, 100 are not divisible by 3, which is a fraction used much more commonly in daily life than 1/10.

There's really not much sense to Fahrenheit, but it's just what some people grow up on. Celsius is no easier in and of itself to use on a daily basis.