The United States is one of just three countries that "prefers" imperial measurements over the international metric standard. The motivation why has less to do with official policy than you might ...

When I asked in a tweet: “Has anyone got any genuine reasons why imperial is better than metric?” – I had over 2,000 replies in just over 24 hours. Did it help me make up my mind? One argument for ...

As ever more digital data is created and stored, the world needs more unit measurements to keep up with the ever-expanding numbers. To do so, the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures on ...

An oft-repeated "weird fact" is the claim that, if not for the scourge of Caribbean piracy, the United States would have adopted the metric system in the 1790s, making it the country's standard system ...

Answer: it's been too long since the last revolution. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. How people measure stuff might seem pretty ...

I was at the supermarket recently when I took note of something my eyes had passed thousands of times before. The cans of my favorite sodas were 12 ounces, while the bottles were 2 liters. It caught ...

Now that the United Kingdom is outside the European Union, it’s reviewing thousands of EU rules and regulations to see which it should jettison. Among them is the compulsory use of the metric system ...

The French government adopted this new metric system on April 7, 1795. A conference including scientists from France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, and Italy worked from 1798 to 1799 ...

When former Rhode Island senator and governor Lincoln Chafee formally jumped into the presidential race on Wednesday, he made a splash. There are good reasons to take Chafee’s bid seriously, but his ...

Following the loss of the Mars Climate Observer, the NASA Office of Inspector General initiated a review of the Agency’s use of the metric system. By law and policy, the metric system is the preferred ...

If the United States were more like the rest of the world, a McDonald's Quarter Pounder might be known as the McDonald's 113-Grammer, John Henry's 9-pound hammer would be 4.08 kilograms, and any ...

We Americans measure things our own way. Our yardsticks are marked in feet and inches, measures that are unfathomable to foreigners, nearly all of whom have been brought up in a decimals-only ...