How to save billions of dollars.

[Zenda]

Actually, we've been on the metric system since the late nineteenth century (1878).

No, the US may have been one of the signing nations of the Metre Convention, but up to this day does not officially use or mandate a metric system of units, making it one of only three countries that still use customary units.

Indeed, metric units are arbitrary. Unlike the common units they replaced, they are not based on either accepted usage or convenience for the task at hand.

Yeah, maybe we should have kept the Stunde, which represents the distance a person walks in a hour

So, we have the meter. An arbitrary unit of no particular value. Had the academicians had the brains of a peacock instead of its pride, they would have used the nautical mile and developed the length unit around it.

The original Nautical mile was not suitable for a standardized unit of length, because it varied from equator (1843 m) to poles (1862 m). It wasn't until 1929 that the (average) value of 1852 m was used internationally, and the US kept using it's own version (1853 m) until 1954.

Now, from this arbitrary unit of length, we get our unit of mass. The gram was originally defined as the mass of one cubic centimeter of water.

The base unit of mass in the Metric system is Kg, nog gramms.

The cgs systems (there were at least two) were based on the second and the gram, but used the centimeter for length because the results of using the meter were ludicrous. Still, it led to a unit of energy, the erg, that is so small that "One hundred million ergs!" (a line from a really bad sci-fi movie) is about the energy content of 1/4 of a PBJ sandwich.

The international system of units is developed from the MKS system, not the CGS system, so I'm not sure why you bring that up. CGS has hardly been used since 1940, except in the US (where it is still popular in the fields of electrodynamics and astronomy, for some reason).

The MKS system, the basis for the SI units, is hardly better. The unit of force, the Newton, is too small for most practical applications. Ask a metric user what he weights, and he'll give you his mass in kilograms instead.

MKS stands for Metre-Kilogramm-Second, so I see no problem with measuring my mass in Kg. I know you asked for weight, but noone is really interested in how hard the earth pulls at me in my current location, is it?

Given our bilateral symmetry, it is pretty much inevitable that we would use an even base. Had we had four or six digits on each hand, we'd be a lot better off. Eight would be beautiful in that it would provide fast conversions between bases that are a power of 2. Twelve, though not as useful, at least has the advantage of having 2, 3, 4, and 6 as its factors.

Yeah, maybe we should all go binary. No more silly conversions for computers. Should make them a lot faster.

Apparantly you are having a problem with the decimal numbering system as well as the metric system. I'll readily agree that binary would be better, but there are plenty of higher-priority issues, don't you think?

Even trained people screw up all the time. If I were really getting the 0.5 MG daily dose of tacrolimus that my prescription bottle claims, I'd be writing this on a Ouija board instead of a keyboard.

A normal daily dose of tacrolimus happens to 0.5 mg. If you think that's wrong for you, you should contact your doctor and not blame the metric system.

It is no easier nor harder to calculate gas usage by dividing some number of miles by some number of gallons than to divide some number of kilometers by some number of liters.

That's true, but beside the point. Metrification is about standardisation and unification. If you want to compare gas usage between a European and American car, for example, you will need to choose one set of units. In other words, one of us has to do a conversion. Since you claim to be 'metric', why don't you drop the miles and gallons and give me the numbers in kilometres and liters? (btw, if you insist on miles, which one is it?)

And yes, one unit per dimension is easy. On paper. But when you are talking about the mass of stars, is it reasonable to use the same unit that you use to measure the mass of the hydrogen atom? (Hint: the first is usually given in solar masses, the second in atomic mass units. And neither have an exact conversion factor to SI units).

The metric system is not limited to 7 base units. It doesn't say you can't use your own convenient units. It only requires you to define such units in SI units. That's why solar mass and atomic mass units are so popular around the world, and noone needs to guess how much it actually is.

The US military uses those two numbers (0 F and 100 F) as indicators for when additional manpower is needed. For every degree below 0 F, the military considers a 2% loss of efficiency. There's a similar correction for above 100 F, though I can't remember the actual ratio.

I hope you are not suggesting to conduct scientific experiments using numbers defined by the US military. The exact values are propably classified

Actually, water is a terrible substance to use as a standard. First, its property of dissolving nearly everything (which earns it the title of the universal solvent) means that any water you start with is going to contain many impurities. It also means that whatever apparatus you use to purify it will probably partially dissolve, introducing its own impurities.

Water can easily be obtained in a pure enough form to measure its freezing and boiling point accurately, no worries there. Actually, there aren't many other readily available liquids that would do.

Besides, you need to distinguish between the definition of a unit and its realisation. SI is about definition, while actual measurement of the units is left to scientists.

Second, the relatively steep lines of its phase transitions mean that small errors in the pressure yields a larger error in the temperature than would be the case with other materials.

You got that backwards. A sharp phase transition is needed for accurate measurements. If ice would melt gradually between 0 and 5 degrees, how would you ever determine the exact freezing point of water?

the relation between the two scales is additive and not based on a factor of ten. So, I'm not so much saying that they are inferior to Fahrenheit as that they are inconsistent with the concept of metrication.

Your factors of 10 find their use in the prefixes of units. The metric system says nothing about conversions having to be based on factors of 10.