Lars Pind

internet software, coaching, and entrepreneurship

Lars Pind - internet software, coaching, and entrepreneurship
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Why they won't go metric

November 09, 2005 · See comments

Do you think the reason those pesky Americans won’t switch to our nicely engineered metric system is that theirs just sound cooler?

I mean, “miles” rolls off the tongue a lot easier than “kilometers”, “inches” is definitely nicer than “centimeters”, “gallons” sounds better than “liters”, and I’d prefer “ounces” to “grams” or “centiliters”.

So is it a case of beautiful engineering wrapped in poor user experience design?

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Comments ↓

  • 1 Sebastiano Pilla // Nov 09, 2005 at 11:15 AM

    Well, with a 1-to-1 equivalence (1 mile = 1 Km, etc.) they could keep their names and they'll only have to change the numbers...

  • 2 Lars Pind // Nov 09, 2005 at 12:01 PM

    Now _that_ would be really confusing, wouldn't it? "You mean new miles or old miles?"

  • 3 Branimir DoliÄ?ki // Nov 09, 2005 at 09:57 PM

    You might be right. Imagine saying "Go the extra kilometer". Regarding confusion: well, introducing yet another kind of mile (call it the "metric mile") wouldn't really add much to the already existing confusion with nautical mile, survey mile, statute mile...

  • 4 Guan Yang // Nov 10, 2005 at 12:56 AM

    In the SI system, you're supposed to place prefixes in front of the base units. The base unit for mass in the SI system is "kilogram". So there is a theory that, instead of "gram", we should really say "millikilogram".