Americans, Wake Up: Why the Metric System Beats Inches and Pounds

You heard me right: it's time to wake up. If you haven't heard it before, let me say it to you: inches, pounds and the rest of the imperial system belong to the Stone Age.

We live in an age of scientific advancement, so perhaps it's time to put old habits aside and adopt what I call a real system of units. Let's look at two simple examples.

Measuring distance

USA: The inch and the foot grew out of old, inconsistent traditions rather than a clear scientific definition. Now compare this to the rest of the world.

The rest of the world (almost): Uses the metric system, where 1 meter is defined as the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. Now that's powerful!

Measuring heat

From Wikipedia:

"Throughout the world, except in the U.S., the Celsius temperature scale is used for practically all purposes. The only exception are some specialist fields (e.g., low-temperature physics, astrophysics, light temperature in photography) where the closely related Kelvin scale dominates instead.

Even in the U.S., almost the entire scientific world and many engineering fields, especially high-tech ones, use the Celsius scale. The general U.S. population, however, remains more accustomed to the Fahrenheit scale, which is therefore the only scale that most U.S. broadcasters use in weather forecasts."