Fascinating that the second reply (or second best reply?) is an unreasonably angry response:
Who the hell needs all this .. Get lost [angry emoji]
Who the hell needs all this .. Get lost [angry emoji]
Never mind the fact that SI is generally used for engineering and other areas where it has legitimate advantages (which miles vs. kilometers doesn't really in day-to-day life).
We can't really know to what category this one belongs to.
Except when it isn't? Are you telling me SI is used in engineering everywhere in the US? I've heard too many stories (especially accidents) to believe that in any way.
Now, in Europe (excluding the UK) they also still use some weird units from the past. Calories for example, and horse (!!) power.
Pounds are one of the real bugbears of imperial in mechanical engineering with lb-f and slugs (i.e. "pounds" conflates mass and weight). Always hated that. I'd convert things to metric and then convert back when I had to work in Imperial.
And I still hear stones from time to time in the UK if you really want archaic.
They're given in N/m^2, but all the petrol station machines are in PSI, probably because the numbers just fall better.
But you're right that is sort of a weird unit from the past insofar as it's related to the SI system but isn't formally part of it. (It's basically now defined by its ratio to joules.)
Standard units are much more useful in carpentry. It's a lot easier when you can divide by 2,3,4, and 6.
Also, although not strictly a debate around metric, the Fahrenheit scale gives you more granularity without going to decimals and requires less use of negative numbers on a day to day basis. And, if one is really concerned about a scientifically relevant temperature scale, we'd be using Kelvin, not Celsius.
My point is that if you want to use a "correct" scientific measurement on a day to day basis you'd use Kelvin. As soon as you're converting, you're converting whether from Celsius or Fahrenheit.
ADDED: There's an argument for Celsius vs. Fahrenheit of course in so far as the size of the degree is baked into some other SI measurements. But there's no particular other reason that Celsius is superior on a day to day basis other than familiarity for some. There's some logic to basing easy to remember numerical points around water properties but it's not clear that actually has a lot of advantages for day-to-day questions about how hot or how cold it is.
Can anyone provide any reason to use Fahrenheit scale, apart from historical ones? Legit question.
1. Fahrenheit is far more likely to cover the range of temperatures I encounter without having to use negative numbers. 0 is really cold. Anything below zero is really freaking cold. The temperature of the boiling point of water is mostly an academic point in my day to day life.
2. Fahrenheit provides about 2x the granularity of Celsius without having to use decimals
I'm not going to argue that if Fahrenheit didn't exist, we'd invent it. But it does have some advantages as an existing system.
ADDED: For engineering using SI units, of course Celsius and Kelvin make a lot more sense.
All the makers are talking about "5/16 of an inch" and I'm trying to convert this to a metric value and it doesn't make any sense at all, because "complex" fractions like this are not used in every day life.
You can easily divide by 2 and 4 in metric, because guess what, you just add a decimal point to your measure and 10cm/4 is 2.5cm and not some crazy fraction or weird unit and the math is not harder if you're dealing with 10m as opposed to 10cm.
10cm/3 is 3.3cm or whatever the precision of your tools is. It's the same "problem" (it isn't) with dividing 1ft in 5 for example. You go by the tolerance of your tools
Using your own example, miles vs kilometers may not feel like a big difference, but the fact that you have proportional units (mm, cm, m, km) for any possible distance has the potential to save you a lot of trouble. Having completely different units for the same thing (land miles / nautical miles for distance), usually not proportional between them, is less practical than the SI at every level. Not only for an engineer but also for home owners and almost everyone of us.
I understand why there are some places in the world where they still use systems other than the SI, mainly for legacy reasons. But I think the practical benefits of a more coherent (and standard) unit system exist not only for the engineer.
On the other hand, it's pretty much an academic debate because a switch isn't happening for mainstream use. The desire and political will just aren't there. The little push that once existed is essentially gone whatever some tech types might want.
Specifically, I tend to advocate for a base 12 system based arround the inch. Base 12 because the very structured multiplication table, which also makes for easy dividing. The inch because I find my lengtg estimation accuracy to be better captured by inches.
If you have modelmaking tools measured in mm, and a bunch of legacy dimensions of trains and buildings that are often round numbers of feet, it becomes tempting to use a scale like this. After all, you tend to get round numbers of mm to make things...
It might be convenient to make a starmap where e.g. 10 light years is 1 cm. Yes, the actual dilation factor is strange, but it's pretty easy to plot a set of cartesian coordinates measured in light years on a 1 cm grid.