US Metric Association
us-metric.org
us-metric.org
My parents were teenagers when New Zealand went metric (and adopted decimal currency). They can still remember the musical jingles associated with helping people convert between common reference points (a pound of butter etc). They have also told me that most people just embraced it, recognising the benefits of the change. My grandparents still used imperial units into the 80's but have fully converted now.
According to the article, it's about screw thread measurements. And the cultural aspect. The fact that the abbreviation for the system is SI which is short for a French phrase makes it seem foreign. And FRENCH. Which many Americans seem to hate.
If the metric system had no value then the map would be reversed. It's already here being used by many industries, almost every other country has adopted it (to varying degrees), and there is a cost to not adopting it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_dollar#Introductio...
The reason that it should be adopted is simply because it's a far simpler system to use and understand. Units of measurement have simple relationships with other units, and there are standard prefixes.
I actually find it quite sad. Not being able to think about these things in a simple way makes learning much much harder for children, and even for adults there is no way someone using imperial measurements can perform operations anywhere near as quickly or easily as someone using metric. This is especially true of unit conversions. Not using metric makes you ostensibly dumber.
For many of us outside the US, the continued use of imperial measurements is thought of as akin to eschewing cars in favour of horse drawn carriages. For those in the US, how it is viewed from the inside?
I wonder how much this reason alone is responsible for comparatively poor results of the US in science education. It's obviously far from the whole reason, but I can't help but think that young kids would be turned off learning all of these esoteric and arbitrary rules.
My ideal temperature scale would be one where 0 is 0C and 100 is roughly 100F. Using celsius, you're basically leaving 60% of the 2-digit portion of the scale unused.
100°c is boiling water (at ~sea level).
There's no particular reason to be hung up on where water boils when it's not creating a particularly useful scale. You could just as easily set 100 to be the point at which proteins denature (~75C).