alt Hacker NewsI'm fine with math, but that doesn't make it less annoying.
The real advantage of metric is that you only have to do math once to calculate something. A cc is a ml is a gram. A liter is a cubic decimeter is a kg. It's just easy. A deep lake over a few square km? O(1) GT. Understanding orders of magnitude is a useful trait in a democracy.
You hit the nail on the head here though:
> My Canadian friends learned metric as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.
Like any language, as long as you're translating you're loosing. Post signs in km and report temperature as C and everyone will understand it in less than a decade. A few years after I had a metric thermometer in my car C seemed easy.
It's not like the US failed to think of this. In the 80s they were posting signs in km. But back then there was a real economic cost to conversion for factories and machines. Now that's mostly gone, what remains is cultural resistance.
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> A cc is a ml is a gram. A liter is a cubic decimeter is a kg
Okay but what about the off chance you’re measuring something other than water?
We have a saying in the US, "a pint's a pound, the world around." As the other post mentions, not everything has the same density, but a lot of stuff is pretty close to water.
The ironic thing is that an Imperial pint of water weighs more than a pound.