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RE: How Can an American Get a Feel for Metric // Ask Me Japan
You know, I find the old line that "there are two types of countries: those that use metric and those that have walked on the moon" very amusing, but we got to the moon using the metric system! It just makes a lot more sense, and although daily life has been done in the US with our standards of measurement just fine, I do think it would make sense to convert. Sharing the same standards as the rest of the world would make things easier. The part I think I would have the most trouble with is Celsius--there's no simple way to understand that, you just have to throw Fahrenheit in the trash and start over like a baby. The only shame would be that Fahrenheit 451 sounds a lot cooler than Celsius 232.778.
haha yeah I like that joke, and have used it before in good fun. The public in the US will never change. Hell, look at the UK. They officially went metric 50 years ago, but the public still clings to Imperial for a great many things: stone for weight, feet and inches for height, pints for liquid, etc. The only way to force that change is to... well, force it. Forbid the old system—make people use the new one. And the US gov isn't going to do that. But I agree with you, changing would make things easier. Celsius is ok. Easy enough to get used to. Doesn't make a lick of sense, tho. We are humans, not water. Not to mention limiting us to (basically) 0-30 feels less informative than having 32-100 to work with. Fahrenheit is by far the better system for humans.