The humorist Dave Barry has more than once suggested "millipedes" as an imaginary unit of measurement (for example, 120 miles = 2,342,424,323.3432 millipedes), poking fun at the inscrutability of ...

Thomas Jefferson wanted the US to switch to the more logical metric system of measurement in the 1790s. But because of British pirates, the official kilogram never arrived here.

Turns out it’s not that simple. According to Marciano, there was a window in the mid-1970s when America was totally primed to go metric. President Ford signed an order, even.

For as long as we’ve been looking to go metric, there have been jokes about what would happen to our language if we did. A 10-gallon hat would become a 37.85-liter hat; football would have first ...

Advocates of the metric system are accustomed to such scorn. Back in 1972, Rhode Island senator Claiborne Pell was attacked by his Republican opponent for wasting time on low-priority items like ...

Entrepreneur, visionary, and thought leader George Contos understands this struggle and shares his advice on operating a business in his newly published book Growing Up Metric: Real-life Business ...

And has an important place in the education system. [If the U.S. converted to metric] we could avoid costly disasters like that embarrassment in 1999.

However, the original reason, the reason that metric never even touched down on the shores of the US, is absolutely pirates. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED Discuss (16 CommentS) ...

Fairness and justice were difficult before we looked to creation for our measurements. There are few sermon series on the metric system. There are Christian books about rulers aplenty, but always ...

Metric units have conquered the globe, but in the US and the UK, their presence has become part of a culture war between “traditional” and “progressive” values. This is an extract from ...