Weight

[Anthony Roberts]

However, Canadians are metric officially, but generally when measuring a persons weight or height, we use imperial. Dont know why, really.

This is because the Canada Ministry of Education has schools teach students both Metric and Imperial due to our neighbours to the South. Knowing their system, we can easily work for the Americans, or help the Americans that work with us by knowing their system.

Mainly, though, it's from the American influence on Canadian culture. There are 300,000,000 Americans, and 30,000,000 Canadians, they overpower us in a 10 to 1 ratio, and due to such, they have a lot more of everything else than we do - Radio stations, Television stations, etc. Especially the latter effects us, because everything American on television that has to do with measurement is in Imperial, and so, we adapt to it, and find it much easier to describe ourselves as so many pounds, instead of so many kilograms - or so many feet and inches high, instead of metres and centimeters.

[Antichrist_Online]

The definitions of the seven SI bas units are (less the candela which I can't find in my notes):
The Metre (m) is the unit of length, defined in terms of the wavelength of light emitted by the krypton-86 atom.
The Kilogram (Kg) is the unit of mass, defined by the international prototype at Serves, France.
The Second (s) is the unit of time, defined in terms of the frequency of light from the caesium-133 atom.
The ampere (A) is the unit of current, defined in terms of the force between two parallel conductors, carrying equal current, one metre apart.
The Kelvin (K) is the unit of thermodynamic temperature, it is difined in terms of two fixed points called absolute zero, 0K (which is the lowest possible temperature) and the triple point of water, 273.16K, (which is the temperature at which ice, water and water vapor are in thermal equalibrium).
The mole (mol) is the unit of amount of substance, defined by a substance containing 6.023x1023 (avagardo constant) particles of the substance.
The candela (cd) is the unit of luminous intensity and isn't in my notes.

All other units are dervied from these using their formulas and the formulas of component parts.

[The Industriallist]

Are you sure about the Kg?

I think it might be defined in terms of the mass of carbon-12 (which is definitionally 12 AMU)

[Antichrist_Online]

Yup sure, I checked with my physics tutor, definately the protype, its equal mass to the mass of 1000mol hydrogen. But the mole is based on carbon-12 (the constant being based on the number of in carbon particles in 1g of carbon (carbon-12, 13 and 14 included) so that might come up as reasoning, but the actual one is based on the prototype).

[Appleide]

I think I vaguely remember from a history book that US was too proud to use the french system, even when the english gave in.

[Razorlance]

America's money system is based off the metric system, pennies, dimes, dollars. Ever try to figure out how many quid in a pound?

Just thought I would point out that 'quid' is slang for pound in the UK, we actually changed to metric in the early 70's i.e. 100 pennies in pound, much like your 100 cents in a dollar. But don't ask me to explain the previous system, it's a bit before my time

[Jur Schagen]

There were 20 shillings to the pound, and 12 pence to the shilling. This is also what allowed the one- and two-shilling coins to be widely used after the conversion, representing 5 and 10 (new) pence respectively.

Jur.

[AoM]

Man... this is the saddest topic I've read all the way through in a while.

Who cares? Really.

If you want to get technical (and you OBVIOUSLY do) even the metric system is completely arbitrary. The only reason we count by tens is because way back when we lived in caves and were learning to create fire, we realized that we had ten fingers, which were our first real counting tool. All manner of maths and counting started out this way.

What if we only had two fingers? All our precise measurements would be based off of a binary counting system. Now that would be a pain in the ass... about as much a pain in the ass it is for someone taught only the imperial system to wrap their minds around the metric, or vice versa.

It's a cultural thing. Get over it. Quit slamming America for the way they measure the height of their basketball players, there are plenty of better things to slam the USofA about.

~AoM

[Nick]

What if we only had two fingers? All our precise measurements would be based off of a binary counting system.

Or if we had 4 fingers...
1,2,3,11,12,13,21,22,23,31,32,33,100.... would be different, but we would be used to it.

[Antichrist_Online]

The highest number you can count to on a binary system using all your fingers and toes is:1048575