The aviation industry still uses feet to measure altitude and nautical miles to measure distance because the United States Air Force won both World War 2 and the Cold War.
They use nautical miles (6040 feet) to measure distance because it is much easier to mentally relate 6000 feet to the 60 seconds in a minute when doing time and speed calculations.
OTOW aviators cheerfully calculate air pressure in mm of mercury because that makes for easier mental math. They even calculate mm of mercury to feet of altitude because the mental calculations are simpler.
An earlier poster made a valid point about "cultural inertia" .... though I would ca it "generational inertia" because after a certain age (long and rousing debate) people can no longer learn new systems and you need to keep the old systems intact until the grandfathers die off.
That is why I had to learn the Imperial measurement system in elementary school and the metric system in high school and still use both systems every day. That also means that I need both a yard-stick and a metre-stick along with inch-wrenches and a duplicate set of metric wrenches.
Now I get it, metrification was all a plot by the tool manufacturers!
But I am still baffled as to why I cannot compare metric weights to my own body. All the other metric units are easy to relate to my body size: height, temperature, etc. Why is a gram so confusingly tiny? I cannot measure a gram by hand! Frustration!!!!! GRRRR!
It would be far easier to understand if a "gram" weighed 2.2 pounds??????????
They use nautical miles (6040 feet) to measure distance because it is much easier to mentally relate 6000 feet to the 60 seconds in a minute when doing time and speed calculations.
OTOW aviators cheerfully calculate air pressure in mm of mercury because that makes for easier mental math. They even calculate mm of mercury to feet of altitude because the mental calculations are simpler.
An earlier poster made a valid point about "cultural inertia" .... though I would ca it "generational inertia" because after a certain age (long and rousing debate) people can no longer learn new systems and you need to keep the old systems intact until the grandfathers die off.
That is why I had to learn the Imperial measurement system in elementary school and the metric system in high school and still use both systems every day. That also means that I need both a yard-stick and a metre-stick along with inch-wrenches and a duplicate set of metric wrenches.
Now I get it, metrification was all a plot by the tool manufacturers!
But I am still baffled as to why I cannot compare metric weights to my own body. All the other metric units are easy to relate to my body size: height, temperature, etc. Why is a gram so confusingly tiny? I cannot measure a gram by hand! Frustration!!!!! GRRRR!
It would be far easier to understand if a "gram" weighed 2.2 pounds??????????