About halfway down this page (http://www.grotto11.com/blog/?+1188298800) is a rant on why the imperial system is not so bad, after all. And he makes a pretty good argument for why we shouldn't worry about going metric for things we deal with in a tangible format— that is, units of baking measure, rulers for drawing, etc. The imperial system is extremely useful for teaching division and fractions— because who wants to try to get a seven-year-old to understand 1/8 of a centimeter. Or even a decimeter.
Anyway, my take on it is that you should never, ever start your physics in anything other than metric. (The flip side of the argument is that metric is better for intangibles, such as physics.) Every physics class I'd ever had was in metric so the Imperial units in Statics came as a bit of a shock.
But leave the miles and gallons and yardsticks alone. Our currency is decimalized, and our sciences mostly so, so why is it a big deal to switch the rest? We're not exactly going to go sub-light on the highway...
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Anyway, my take on it is that you should never, ever start your physics in anything other than metric. (The flip side of the argument is that metric is better for intangibles, such as physics.) Every physics class I'd ever had was in metric so the Imperial units in Statics came as a bit of a shock.
But leave the miles and gallons and yardsticks alone. Our currency is decimalized, and our sciences mostly so, so why is it a big deal to switch the rest? We're not exactly going to go sub-light on the highway...