Thursday, June 05, 2008
What odd company to be in!
Only three nations have not officially adopted the International System of Units as their primary or sole system of measurement: Liberia, Myanmar and the United States.
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4 comments:
I used to wish we'd switch to Metric when I was a kid. Now that I'm older, I want them to wait until I'm dead. I don't want to learn anything new!
That's odd to me. I would have thought that many other small countries with heavy historic US influence (Philippines, Micronesia, etc.) would also be holding out.
Thanks--geography knowledge I didn't have!
It's in our genes. How many times in my lifetime has the government attempted to force us to accept metrics, but no, we don't like it. Maybe a liter of soda is as close as we will ever get.
When I was a kid in grade school, my parents bought me a red plastic pencil cup with sliding rings that let you do all kinds of US Standard-to-metric conversions. I always wanted to find another one like that, it was fun to slide the rings around. That was the 1970's, and it seems like there must have ben a big push to try to get everything converted to metric. It obviously didn't take, and the next time I remember encountering metric was our family trip to Victoria, BC ten years later. I remember thinking it was so cool that people were allowed to drive 90 on the highways!
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