Metric system holdouts

Posted on 7/2/2007 by Younghusband

Metric system holdouts
Click for larger map

* USA
* Liberia
* Myanmar

_Via_ “Donklephant”:http://donklephant.com/2007/06/30/nations-who-havent-adopted-the-metric-system/.

About Younghusband

Sir Francis Edward Younghusband (1863-1942) was a British explorer, army officer, military-political officer, and foreign correspondent born in India who led expeditions into Manchuria, Kashgar, and Tibet. He three times tried and failed to scale Mt. Everest and journeyed from China to India, crossing the Gobi desert and the Mustagh Pass (alt. c.19,000 ft/5,791 m) of the Karakoram mountain range in modern day Pakistan. Convinced of Russian designs on British interests in India, Younghusband proactively engaged in the nineteenth century spying and conflict over Central Asia between the British and the Russians known as the Great Game. "Younghusband" is a Canadian who has spent a number of years bouncing back and forth between his home country and Japan. Fluent in Japanese and English with experience in numerous other languages from Spanish to Georgian, Younghusband has travelled throughout Asia. He graduated with an MA from the War Studies Department at the Royal Military College of Canada, where he focussed on the Japanese oil industry and energy security issues. He has recently returned to Canada from Japan, and is working in the technology sector.
This entry was posted in General and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

16 Responses to Metric system holdouts

  1. Grendel says:
    7/2/2007 at 9:38 am

    telling :-)

  2. Dan tdaxp says:
    7/2/2007 at 11:15 am

    To steal a criticism, are the highlighted countries places where SI is not official, where any version of the metric system is not official, or where use is not normative?

  3. Pingback: The Marmot’s Hole » In Good (Non-Metric) Company

  4. Richardson says:
    7/2/2007 at 12:03 pm

    I don’t think the Marshall Island have adopted the metric system.

  5. Nathan M says:
    7/2/2007 at 1:31 pm

    Don’t forget the UK. They still use miles for their roads, and stone and pounds to measure weight.

  6. Jenny Craig says:
    7/2/2007 at 1:37 pm

    Obese Americans would seem lighter if their bathroom scales gave weights in kilograms instead of pounds.

  7. a517dogg says:
    7/2/2007 at 2:21 pm

    And we’d seem even lighter if we measured our weight in stone, not kilos!

  8. Curzon says:
    7/2/2007 at 2:30 pm

    Yeah, this doesn’t tell the whole storyu. Plenty of other countries such as the UK use non-metric measurements when they feel like it. Just ask a Japanese person how many _tsubo_ their home is.

  9. Younghusband says:
    7/2/2007 at 2:33 pm

    Read more on “metrication in the US”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States.

    In Canada height, weight, and cooking measurements tend to be in Imperial, whereas distance, temperature and volume are in metric. Tools come in both varieties, as do guns. My parents still use miles and yards for distance though, there is somewhat of a generational gap.

  10. alec says:
    7/2/2007 at 3:54 pm

    While it’s true that other countries still use localized/regional measurement systems, I think my general concern is that if you asked the average American how many meters are in kilometer or how many millimeters are in a centimeter, they’d be stumped. This doesn’t bode well and America hasn’t learned some important lessons from using universal measurement systems, especially considering the Challenger disaster was caused by a misconversion of the metric system to the English system.

  11. Pingback: Where art thou, young progressive bloggers? | Prose Before Hos

  12. Shadowgallery says:
    7/2/2007 at 6:01 pm

    The Challenger accident was a failure of the booster’s O-rings due to very cold temperatures before launch. You’re thinking of the Mars Climate Orbiter, that crash-landed on the surface after a unit mix up.

    It seems odd that the United States doesn’t use metric as a whole, seeing as how scientists and the military all use is, and also as it is taught in school at the primary level. Personally, I have more trouble with customary units then I do with Metric units.

  13. captbbq says:
    7/3/2007 at 1:22 am

    The problem for the US is retooling all its factories to support metric measurments. Not cheap… In the end that what matters and thats where you get the benefit also.

  14. Nathan M says:
    7/3/2007 at 2:02 am

    We use both metric and customary units in the military, depending on the use and location. For obvious reasons, overseas bases use metric more often.

    As a surveyor, engineering technician, construction inspector, and soon engineer, I’m fully comfortable working in both systems (or any arbitrary make-believe units for that matter). That being said, however, I much prefer working with customary units. Partly because I grew up with them, so they’re far more intuitive, and partly because they’re honestly easier to use in many applications.

    The costs of a full-scale conversion to SI units in the US far outweigh any potential benefits.

  15. James Bennett says:
    7/4/2007 at 4:07 am

    The big advantage of SI was that one could rapidly calculate measurements in one’s head — with the advent of the calculator that’s not a big deal. The UK and the commonwealth countries probably wasted the money they spent on conversion.

  16. sun bin says:
    7/4/2007 at 8:34 am

    @ commentators above,

    you can come up with many reason to defend being in the same league with myanmar. :) but you need to do the numbers first.

    as for the other pal liberia, it was sort of an abandoned state of the US, right? so there is no coincidence there.