2007-05-20-Maker-Faire

The first comment from most people is a variant on "Like your shirt" but the overwhelming sentiment was that of being stuck with the measurement system we have. Comments like "The middle will never change", a sentiment that non-engineering type geeks just don't understand metric (hey, what's this fair about anyway!?!?!) and the like were unfortunately common but I managed to get more people thinking about the problems they're used to just dealing with and how much easier it is in metric.

One particular conversation involved a gentleman who'd built a monorail. All the electronics were in metric (Newtons for the electric motor as an example) but all the wood and a few other bits were local and thus in US customary units. Yes, he had had a number of issues with having to do conversions and there had been mistakes along the way caused by dealing with conversions and he'd had to get two sets of tools to do the project, one for each system.

For those thinking metric is too hard to learn, the guy who built the monorail mentioned that he had lived in Europe for a while while studying architecture and said it'd only taken him about a month to get used to metric and that after he'd gotten used to it he found it much easier than US customary units.