Blogging
From Abroad

Do you know what Burma, Liberia and the USA have in common? They are the only countries in the world where the imperial system is officially in use. Everywhere else on the world you buy your ham in grams and your beverages in millilitre. You pump up your tyres using the bar-scale and maximum speed is given in kilometres per hour. Water freezes at 0° and boils at 100° – Celsius of course.

For me, who knew only this system all his life, it is often hard to deal with the imperial units. The advantage of the metric system lies within its easy conversion into bigger or smaller unit, since every step is a multiple of 10, straightforward.

One example: one week ago I bought a beer-can in the supermarket. The Volume is 1 Pint, 12 ounce. I am still not sure, how much it is, although it looks pretty big. In the rest of the world the volume would be denoted using either small enough units (like millilitres) or decimal points.

This is all pretty confusing. Just take this picture as an example. I took it from one of the projects I’m working on. I have to mesure the length of hundreds of wooden pieces. Therefore I used the ruler. But I couldn’t belive it when I first saw that the inches are devided by eights. For somebody who grew up in the decimal system, this looks just … wrong. And I learned later that even 16th and 32th part of an inch are common units…

So if anybody would ever start a movement for the metric system in the USA, I’m game!