Arny Krueger wrote:
I wish the U.S. Governement would get off their butts and legislate us into
100% metric. I was involved in the failed attempt at metrification in the
1970s, and still think it was a very good idea.

I think 99% of the problem, other than the cost of switching over,
was that people (especially older people) didn't know what the heck
a liter or a meter or whatever *was*. The local Mobil station tried
selling gas in liters for about 2 weeks one time back then, and my
parents (I was a kid) were furious, because (a) the old system of
gallons worked OK, and (b) they had no idea how big a liter was.

If metrification is ever going to succeed, there is going to need
to be a MASSIVE public education campaign. People need to have an
intuitive idea of how to use measurement units. They need to be
able to look at any object and make a guess about how big it is
in cm or whatever, about its mass in kg, etc., etc. Measurements
need to be immediately useful in a concrete way. So, they need to
have TV ads, billboards, radio ads, flyers, web banner ads, and so
on that say things like this:

"2 inches is about the same as 5 centimeters"
"A liter is about the same size as a quart, except about 5% larger"
"A paperclip 'weighs' about one gram"
"A quarter-pound hamburger patty would be about a tenth-kg pattie"
"A meter is about 10% longer than a yard"
"A six-foot-tall man is about 182 cm tall"
"A five-foot-tall woman is about 152 cm tall"
"A ninety-eight pound weakling is a fourty-four kg weakling"
"A centimeter is small than half an inch"

Heck, if they really want adoption, they need to have contests with
big cash prizes where the contestants compete on their ability to
estimate in metric units the volume, mass, and length of things.

Unfortunately, I think we are actually going backwards in this area.
When I was a kid in school in the 1970's, they taught us as much or
more metric stuff as they did imperial units. Apparently, they have
actually backed off from this and only teach some metric in science
classes. Which is, of course, totally stupid in my opinion.

- Logan