The Metric Program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a bold, if Napoleonic, motto: “Toward a Metric America.” That is, a fanciful future in which we’ll buy decagrams of hamburger and liters of gas. Problem is, the Metric Program employs just 2 evangelists ‘hail, ye lone voices in the wilderness!’ to convert 281M recalcitrant American imperial-unit holdouts. Launched with much hope by the Federal Metric Conversion Act of 1975, the Metric Program 28 years later meekly soldiers on, advising federal bureaucracies and trying to pitch the system to – well, to anyone who will listen. The dynamic decimal duo really work only part-time on metric salesmanship. So it would seem: A spokesman for the program, when queried, didn’t know his own height in meters.

jeez people. NASA is switching to metric, and uses IP(v6?) too. i have long wondered what will happen first: us going metric, the world going IPv6, or the world going 100% unicode.

Metrication is the direct transition process that helps you to quickly, efficiently, easily, and relatively cheaply upgrade from any of the various old pre-metric measuring methods to the modern metric system.

heh. Personally, I’d like a Wikipedia for civilized people that uses metric units exclusively. Or actually, a chrome extension to auto correct pages to the proper units. And here’s 5 screw-ups that wouldn’t have happened with metric:

The fight over metric versus imperial measurements has some very real consequences. And with the US as the last holdout in the world, we’re likely to see more of these kinds of historical fuck-ups on occasion.

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