Will the US ever go metric?

SW VandeCarr

It's interesting that the word "mile" comes from the Latin "mille" for one thousand. A Roman mile was 1000 full paces (about 5 feet). So the metric idea is actually ancient. The problem arose when William the Conqueror introduced his French foot to England.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile

After a lot of confusion over several centuries, England, by Royal order, settled on a mile of 5280 (French) feet. The acre was redefined in terms of this mile with one square mile being exactly 640 acres. This subdivides nicely into successive quarters of 160, 40 and 10 acres. The last step is a rectangular subdivision of ten acres into one acre strips (for plowing) of 660 by 66 feet, or 1/8 by 1/80 of a mile. So the acre makes some sense in terms of English units. Much of the US is surveyed according to square mile sections subdivided this way. I think it will be virtually impossible to superimpose a metric configuration on this huge area at this point in time. So the 43,560 square foot acre is probably here to stay.

Integral

Just not true. Consider entering measurements into a computer. The metic base of .1 when converted to binary is infintly repeteing and MUST be rounded off. While all of our inch subdivisions are powers of 2 and can be expressed exactly in binary. Further our base 12 foot has more prime divisors then then the base 10 system. I personally want to see everyone move to hexadecimal for our offical number system.

SW VandeCarr

I once read a book about someone's idea of a base 12 system. The eccentric author liked to quote "A pint's a pound the world around". Hexadecimal is interesting but converting to either base 12 or 16 measures effectively requires converting our number system as well. The hexadecimal mile consists of 4096 hexadecimal feet (16 inches) which is written as 1000 in hex.

The real reason for converting to metric is not so much the fact that it's decimal. It's because it has worldwide use and any nation that exports or imports must use it to a certain extent. It's very inefficient to do business in two systems.'