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You're not going to say 20 mil and the context not be clear if you mean 0.508mm or 20mm, are you?

Now's where one needs the Wikipedia article titled something like "Engineering Failures Caused By American/Metric Confusion".

There's at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter and TBH I was hoping there'd be a link to such a list on that one.

I seriously hope I'm Poe's Law-ing your post too, and there's an implied /s on there, because if you could see the level of communication effort I see at work … yeah, I'd absolutely believe that someone would use it in a confusable context.

Oh this is my cue to share my favourite story stemming out of this confusion, the story of the Gimli Glider [0]. It is full of incredible events, each of which would be a good story in its own right - and it still has nothing to do with our favourite Dwarf.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

A machined feature could be either.

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