Re: Charles Stross, GLASSHOUSE

Jim Battista wrote:
The reason that the US has not gone fully metric is that there's no
pressing reason to do so. The parts that most frequently deal with
the rest of the world *have* gone more or less fully metric, and
there's little reason to upset voters by changing all the road signs
or forcing grocery stores to use measurements their customers don't
want.

I hadn't thought of it in quite that way, but you're right -- the
half-assed metricization here is "good enough."

Thinking back to the 60's when I first encountered the metricization
rampup, the most and loudest objections -- and apparently the most
worrisome -- I remember hearing were for socket wrenches for
automobiles -- as if 5/16' wasn't odd and out-of-the-way enough
already.

I do think the real inconvenience is on the conversion boundary. No
huhu so long as you're thinking in metric or thinking in English; the
confusion starts coming when you have to convert from one to the other.
Oddly enough, I had as much frustration converting from MKS to CGS in
high school physics as Englishto MKS. I wound up converting everything
into cgs units because I could "taste" them.

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