It takes a special kind of person to resurrect a 3.5 year old thread that made no sense to start with.
I'm 50 years old and when I was at school we were taught Metric only but, outside school everything was Imperial. Now I am so used to the two systems that they are pretty much interchangeable for me and I can work equally well with either. PS, Spreadie, I like your new Sig
We were taught principally in metric, but I did an engineering apprenticeship - half the micrometers and vernier gauges were marked in imperial, as was much of the machinery. I'm rather fond of it too.
It's absolute BS of the highest order to say that traders in the UK can't use imperial measurement when they can. It's just that you've got to display the metric price as well and be able to weigh in metric. It's up to the consumer to choose. It's one of those daft dailyfail scare stories.
Or just good ol' BNP. It always rings alarm bells for me when people specifically and vehemently deny being fascists or racist. Like, if you accuse a regular person of being a fascist or racist, they just look perplexed and go "well, no, not really...what I was trying to say was-". If it yells very loudly and eagerly about how it isn't racist or fascist, it's probably racist or fascist. Anyway, how bout a thread closure up in tha hizzle. Can I get a holla?
Sometimes I like to say "I'm not racist, but..." before an unrelated comment just to throw people off their guard.
One of the advantages the imperial system in terms of length measurement is that it can be divided into common fractions 1/3 1/2 1/4 more easily. However I don't see that as useful enough to justify using it. Especially since the millimetre is such a physically small unit.
Imperial units are often strange multiples (e.g. 12, 16) of lower order units which means a fraction of a unit is often a multiple of a lower order unit, e.g. 1/3 rd of a foot is 4 inches. That said, multiples of 10 is probably second best to multiples of 12 for dividing measurements up, and since we use base 10 for our counting system...