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I (usually) write in ISO 8601 for the complete avoidance of doubt, my own and anyone else's.
Unless I know that my audience will actually be confused by ISO 8601, that is!
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I will change my styles tomorrow![Rose | [Rose]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
diligent hands rule....
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Yes. And I wish the USA will bite the bullet for once and all and drop the idiotic imperial system and go METRIC!
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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I see that as less of an issue as it is not (usually[1]) prone to lack of clarity as dd-mm vs. mm-dd is.
One can measure accurately in Imperial or Metric, so it's purely a matter of personal preference. I see nothing inherently idiotic about Imperial. It's quirky and inconsistent but then so are many things.
Footnote:-
1: Yes, yes, I know that some very expensive things have blown up or gone off course due to Metric/Imperials mixups. But that was due to lack of project management clarity and QC/QA, rather than the existence of two measurement systems.
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Metric will only be complete when there's a metric calendar, a metric clock, and a metric angular measurement.
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Metric Angular Measure: Gradian. One down, two to go... 
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Shortly after the revolution in France there was a suggestion that the week should have 10 days, the day 10 hours and the hour 100 minutes. This was abandoned quickly. The people only had one or two free days every 10 days, so they rebelled, and all timekeeping devices would have to be swapped out. One sensible suggestion was that the year should have 12 months of 30 days plus 5 or 6 epagomenal days per year at the end of a month.
One still sees calculators with 100° in a quadrant as an option
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And I wish the UK would drop the idiotic metric system and revert to imperial. One of the many benefits of which, is that people need to use their brains when thinking about and calculating weights and measures.
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Yes this so much more logical and less idiotic than the metric system.
It is ordained that 3 grains of barley dry and round do make an inch, 12 inches make 1 foot, 3 feet make 1 yard, 5 yards and a half make a perch, and 40 perches in length and 4 in breadth make an acre.
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Tony Hill wrote: It is ordained that ...
Yea, verily! I've seen the light*, brother!
* And it is an approaching train.
Seriously, the only inherent advantages of the Metric system are that:
- It eases conversions between units (cm in a kilometer is much easier to calculate than inches in a mile)
- The Metric system has a MASS unit, while the Imperial system has a WEIGHT unit (of importance to natural scientists and to anyone or anything that goes into space)
OTOH, only the US, Liberia, and Myanmar still use the Imperial system, and the US, at least, uses a debased version where there are 16 fluid ounces to the pint, rather than the divinely ordained 20. Even in the US, scientists are taught the Metric system.
I would say that the battle for metricization has been won.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Apart from the fact the imperial system has nice familiar names there are no advantages to using imperial but I guess some people will never change.
I am only glad we were using the metric system when I did my engineering college course as some of the other imperial units are completely nuts.
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Well no, other than you can divide a foot into exactly 2 parts, or 3, or 4, or 6, or 12, all without a decimal point or fraction in sight. Similarly if you want a smaller cake, you just divide the amount of flour by 2, or 4, or 8 - again all integral results. Or a gallon into 2, or 4, or 8.
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No advantages?? The gas tank will fill almost 4 times faster when buying by the gallon vs. liter. And imperial guitar amps go to 12 whereas the metric only go to 10. That's 20% louder. 
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Some interesting observations there.
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Daniel Pfeffer wrote: OTOH, only the US, Liberia, and Myanmar still use the Imperial system, and the US, at least, uses a debased version where there are 16 fluid ounces to the pint, rather than the divinely ordained 20. Even in the US, scientists are taught the Metric system.
And of course, those fluid ounces are different, the US fluid ounce being larger than the UK imperial ounce, so the pints are *almost* the same (though the US one is still smaller!)
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And the circumference of the earth is easy to remember. Pole to Equator is 10000km. (was 'exactly', through Paris) 
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But all the measurements are based on real objects that exist in the world about us. The metric system is just random numbers. For example who can remember (or visualise) that one meter is the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second?
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It is not a random number, the metre was defined was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the north pole (a real object) in 1798.
However because of the need for greater precision using light which is constant it throws up some odd numbers when we try and use it with the older historical measures and the same applies when using yards instead of metres after all who is going to remember that the speed of light travelled in a second is 327,857,019 yards.
Also time is not a physical object but a human construct based on observation of the days and seasons going back centuries.
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Which is why some branches of physics use "natural" units - the speed of light == 1, etc.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Units are an attempt to codify something physical into a value. For things that people use every day in casual life, the best units are those that are easily visualized or understood. This is because those same people will whine in school about having to take geometry or trigonometry and then get bamboozled by a contractor because they didn't know how to do math. Making units easily quantified by things in every day use and you won't end up with a building that was built for you at half scale. In designing trajectories in the solar system, I use astronaumical units (AU) more than any other unit of distance except when performing a flyby, in which case I wouldn't care if I measured the altitude in km or mi or even nmi, but am usually dictated to use km.
Fahrenheit is useful for describing human comfort. It expands the scale where humans live. Much below zero degrees F really sucks even with extra clothing and just breathing in starts to hurt. Much above 100 degrees also really sucks as you can't shuck many extra clothes to feel comfortable. A foot is about the length of an adults foot, which makes it easy to walk off a distance. Pounds make no sense. Many imperial units are easy to estimate by using the human body, which is how a lot of imperial units came to being. They don't make doing math problems in physics easy. MPH isn't particularly relatable when driving a car and you just have to calibrate it, but neither is kph.
Because I've converted it enough I know that 40 degrees C sucks and I know that somewhere -20 degrees C also sucks. However, that really is only 60 degrees C of describing comfort. There is a big difference in an 80 degree F day and a 60 degree F day. Even between 72 degree F and 78 degree F you can easily feel the difference in comfort. A better unit for measuring human comfort would probably center around 72F with positive numbers being warmer than optimum comfort and negative numbers being colder than optimum comfort and be about the size of a degree F but maybe a little bigger. C is useful for cooking since 100C is the boiling point of water at sea level, but since a lot of the world is above sea level even that isn't super useful, but better than a random number like 212F. A meter isn't particularly useful at measuring things in the casual life of a human other than saying that human adults are typically between 1.5 and 2 meters tall. Grams don't make a lot of sense and you have to raise it to a kilogram to be useful to visualize in human life.
PSI is pretty useless, but so is pascals.
If people stress that you should consider domain specific languages, those same people should stop trying to make everyone use the same units for every domain. Also sometimes Fortran REALLY IS one of the better options.
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firegryphon wrote: Also sometimes Fortran REALLY IS one of the better options.
In my early time as a contractor I wrote a Fortran program to produce my bills.
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A few years ago I was writing a model importer for GIS data (geographic information systems), and that turned out to be an education in measurement systems. Prior to that, I thought that the USA had, in a sense, already "gone metric" since 1 foot is defined as precisely 0.3048 meters. That's not a rounded-off approximation, that's a precise definition.
But it turns out that that's merely the "international foot." In contrast, the "US survey foot" is defined as precisely 12/39.37 meters (1 US survey inch defined as precisely 1/39.37 meters). The conversion factors are almost but not quite equal, and the differences accumulate when measuring the Earth.
There are several other definitions of "foot" around the world.
The other things I learned (I knew them before, but then I learned them) are:
1) The Earth isn't a sphere; it's an ellipsoid.
2) The Earth isn't an ellipsoid; it's a geoid.
3) Latitude is defined by the normal vector at the surface, not the central vector to the surface.
4) Double-precision coordinates are essential everywhere.
5) Defining a meter as a precise fraction of the distance between the equator and a pole was bound to fail at some point.
6) We're still left with arbitrary-looking conversion factors from "natural units" (such as the speed of light) to MKS units (meters and seconds) -- but with many more digits due to the greater precision.
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I disagree.
That would be like discarding Google in favour of old fashioned printed books...
OOOPS! 
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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I know what you mean, I cannot visualise things in metric sizes I have to convert them mentally to feet and inches ( or whatever ), metric can be ambiguous to, some people say ( usually related to the building trade ) you need a 60*40 or a 600*400 - there is no ambiguity in you need something 2 foot by three foot.
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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I live in Canada and have been using metric since grade school. That being said, I still buy 2x4's for framing, and sheets of plywood come in 4x8 sheets. The crazy thing is that our plywood is often 4x8 sheet by 5mm.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
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