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hef19898

How dare you? What's next, the metric system?

One thing that particularly annoyed me about their en-gb vs en-us spelling example was "tonne" vs "ton". They are different!

I do wonder if America will _ever_ make the switch to the metric system. The French managed it in 1799; backwards Britain had mostly managed it by 1972; and yet working with US engineers means that I occasionally find myself converting units like slugs or "circular mils" into SI units for FEM modelling. Wolfram alpha is a godsend. I just really, really hate the US unit system with a passion!

As someone who is pretty indifferent about metric and US customary units on a day to day basis, the one area as a onetime mechanical engineer I think is pretty annoying is US mass/force units in engineering calculations.

Technically, America is metric in that our units are based on metric units now. So 1 yard is defined as 0.9144 meter and 1 pound (avoirdupois) is 0.45359237 kg[0].

0: https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/PUBS_LIB/FedRegister/FRdoc59-5442.p...

For developer docs as a bare minimum.

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