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Comment by kawfey | Hacker News Reader

Americans don't have an intuitive sense of metric units, and Wired is based in the US and has mostly US readership. I agree with you, and I'll bet the editor also agrees, but they'd probably get FAR more comments to use imperial units because 'merica, if metric was used instead.

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That's one of the ways to develop intuitive sense - start using it everywhere. It will never develop if it's not used. Besides, officially US was supposed to switch to metric system anyway, so formally there is nothing wrong with using it and no one should be complaining. Except it takes ages and almost not moving anywhere due to complete apathy from the government about it.

When discussing speed of an object that is landing, m/s might in fact be even better for most of the world.

> Americans don't have an intuitive sense of metric units

I don't really believe that. American public schools have been teaching the metric system to middle schoolers for a few decades now. Every American I talk to understands the metric system. In some cases, particularly units of volume, they understand the metric system better than the imperial units (liters are easy, but I can never keep quarts/pints/cups/floz/etc straight in my head.) Coca Cola sells sugar water to Americans in liter-oriented packaging (.5, 1, an 2 liter bottles are ubiquitous), and Americans certainly don't balk at that. They drink it up.

Volume effort went well indeed. What's still lagging behind especially are temperature, distance and speed units. Lot's of people are still not comfortable when you are trying to use metric for them. Which probably only highlights that there should be a stronger push to use them.

Also, 24H time system is something people often don't get, and only know about it as "military time", due to army actually using it.

I think temperature is easily the most alien to Americans. Metric distances probably aren't quite as well understood as metric volumes, but I'd wager that knowledge only trails by a little. The rough equivalence between a yard and a meter is widely know by Americans, as is the rough equivalence between 100km/hr and 60mph (helpfully, American speedometers all provide this education.)

The distances you cite are pretty much the only ones (well, 2.54cm = 1 in as well) that are likely to be well-known. Yards are just not a heavily-used unit, people prefer 10s or 100s of feet instead of using yards. So when you go from tens to hundreds of meters, there is going to be no intuition about what kind of distance that actually is, and you have to mental math your way to familiar units of 100s of feet or quarter/half miles.

Meters to feet is easy, it's roughly just x3. Yards may not be common (yards are certainly common in sports, and sports are very popular), but three feet to the yard is definitely commonly known. Centimeters might be harder, but in my experience Americans suck at estimating inches too, one American's "half an inch away" is another American's "two inches away." And the average American off the street would be hopeless if asked how many feet are in a mile. They'd actually have a better chance of giving you a kilometer->feet conversion than miles->feet. At least, I certainly would (without looking it up: 1 kilometer = 1000 meters ~= 1000 yards = 3000 feet, +10% fudge, approximately 3300 feet to the kilometer.)

Anyway, my point in all of this is that if a pop-sci publication like Wired uses units like kilometers, it is unlikely that their American readers will be confused. They'll probably walk away from such an article with a casual understanding of the subject that is reasonably close to the casual understanding they'd have if the article used miles instead.

The only way to gain intuition is to use units straight, without doing mental translation.

Yep. Two years in Australia wasn't enough for metric temperature units to become instinctive for me.

Speed was easy, relatively. Even weight/height was alright, though Aussies tended to use imperial for those often anyway, including the whole 'stone' thing that threw me off at first.

I'm a late-20s American. I do have some basic understanding of metric units, although it is relative (a centimeter is about half an inch, a meter is a bit more than a yard, a kilometer is slightly more than half a mile.). That all goes out the window when you add a second unit, though - kilometers _per second_ means absolutely nothing to me.

Pardon me, the ignorant American... but this is who I am :D

In UK they managed to fix it, by stronger push to make it mandatory. In US somehow the government blew the effort that's why it's still like this today.

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