> > But as for the rest of the metric system... kilograms, liters, the Celcius scale, and measurements of force in Newtons and Pascals... they make SO much more sense than the old Imperial measures that it's nothing sort of idiotic to retain the latter. And "forcing SI down people's throats" -- i.e., teaching our children to know metric and love it -- is basically the only way we'll get metric permanently into the North American lifestyle diet.
>
> Why? I personally despise the Imperial units of force, energy, and power, but these are not used outside of technical fields. When I'm doing physics calculations, I use meters, newtons, joules, and so forth.

I feel I ought to apologize here. At the time that I wrote my previous, I hadn't seen your (Sam's) own post stating your "staunchly Imperial side of things", so I wouldn't have used such strong invective in describing my own position (I did use the word "idiotic" to describe Imperial :-(). I had felt that f2m had worded her/his case quite strongly, so I felt as free to respond in equally strong measure. But I could have, and should have, written otherwise.


> Outside of physical sciences, I use Imperial units, because they're better all around. There's no sense throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Imperial is better than metric in everyday life? I kind of disagree there. Many's the time of sworn at recipes given in Imperial, because whoever wrote the instructions was interchanging weight and volume measures (ounce and fluid ounce) willy-nilly without realizing it. I suppose the only way to present my point adequately would be with an article (humourous) that shows the difficulty of doing *combined* weight/volume/length Imperial calculations on the fly. Speedball wasn't joking when he said that metric was ideal for non-scientific people WHO HATE MATH. I'll have to dig it up...


> I *absolutely* support educating children in both systems. Education is always a good thing. People should know both systems, because like it or not, they're going to encounter both and should know how to deal with both. Whether that's feet and meters or pounds and newtons. But any step to FORCE people to use one or the other is just ridiculous. And currently, the only evangelical measurers out there seem to be the metricists, except for those Imperialists that are purely reactive to the contrary social tides.

I'm not sure it's so much that metricists are FORCING people to use one of the other. Of course, given that I'm in Canada, I don't know what kind of fanatical lobbying that metricists have exposed Americans to. But my understanding is that the issue of where "mandatory" came into play is that to establish metric at the consumer level -- and to give it the necessary exposure -- required legislation that FORCED producers and retailers to package and sell products with metric or dual metrial/Imperial labelling. And the expense -- and inconvenience -- involved in retooling and relabelling consumer goods rankled a considerable number of people, who didn't see any immediate advantages. The genuine advantages are shown by actual example, and 10 to 1 if you gave school-kids some tedious real-world problems to solve in both metric and Imperial, they'd prefer metric by far.

Some of the cooks in my family have wished the old system would die out faster, so we'd get more reliable recipes. Until then, I'll have to be content with dual bondage... before Imperial goes out quietly through sheer attrition.