In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade – which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.
Whereas in the American system, the answer to “How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?” is “Go fuck yourself,” because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.
–Wild Thing, by Josh Bazell
A Pun Involving Travel 
When they started imposing this system in schools over here int he early seventies, many people thought it was a waste of time. It still took many years for everyone to speak metric, and both units exists in people of my generation.
Building materials are still in the purchased old imperial system.
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Building materials are still in base 12 because when you’re cutting things up it’s really valuable to be able to make clean halves, thirds, quarters, and sixths. 10 is basically terrible in terms of divisors.
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Yes, and the 15/32″ Canadian-grown plywood you find at Home Depot is totally normal and not metric in any way…
This country has gone metric, it just doesn’t realize it yet.
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lol
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One calorie? You mean 4.2 joules, right?
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