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why is the US not Metric
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soldar:
Metric joke remembered from my childhood.

- Johnny, at what temperature does water boil?
- 90 degrees, Miss.
- No Johnny, water boils at 100 degrees.
- Oh, yes, now I remember what boils at 90 degrees is the right angle.
bsfeechannel:

--- Quote from: Altair8800 on November 05, 2019, 09:50:46 am ---Well in Avoirdupois its 437.5, in Apothecary its 480 and the other
one is... What other one?

--- End quote ---

There are 450 grains in an English Tower Ounce.
bsfeechannel:

--- Quote from: Cerebus on November 05, 2019, 11:28:22 am ---
--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on November 05, 2019, 04:49:20 am ---AvE likes to play a joke on degrees celsius by calling them degrees "science", as if science had a bad effect over machinists. He likes to pronounce métrique, instead of metric, as if anything metric was foreign. Granted, it is a joke, and I laugh at it, but this is far from the truth. 

--- End quote ---

He always says "degrees Science!" with gusto and enthusiasm, more in the form of an affirmation than an approbation. And have you not noticed that he speaks to his daughter in French? Saying métrique instead of metric is an affectation, but I suspect the motivation behind doing it is much more to do with the fact that he's French Canadian than to inject a sense of 'foreignness' - to a French Canadian there's nothing 'foreign' about le patois Français, to them it's a domestic product. It's easy to forget that for some of those Snow Mexicans sneaking over the border to raid the Hazard Fraught, French is their everyday language.

--- End quote ---

I know all that. When he gives units in "métrique", people complain "What is a key low?"
schmitt trigger:
@ Altair8800:
I don't know how long it took you to compose that, but it is certainly the post of the month.  :-+
KL27x:

--- Quote ---besides its many shortcomings
--- End quote ---
If the French people were united in using imperial in the 1800's they would not have invented metric. And today's scientists would have settled on using a single unit-base (say inches for distance and lb's for weight, but it really doesn't matter which ones we use) for ease of comparing apples to apples and doing conversions with a formula vs writing it all out. There would be zero difference in science, engineering, and chemistry.

There are 437.5 grains in "an oz." An oz is an oz, unless otherwise specified. The other oz's continue to exist because people still use them in specific industries. If an industry decided they want to use Troy kilograms, which are 958 grams, that would not be the fault of metric.

There's a drawback to metric. After an asteroid hits earth, the length of a meter will change, and of our constants will have to be adjusted. >:D
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