>Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it. Sorry but this is a sign of ignorance. Read the biography of Condorcet.

>Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it. Sorry but this is a sign of ignorance. Read the biography of Condorcet. Coming up with the metric system was extremely smart. In hacker terms, think of it as a beautiful, elegant fully rescursive and reentrant function that replaces mountains of ugly legacy code. It's amazing that at the time (1790), each profession used their own measurement system. An ounce for one trade was different from an ounce for another trade. You are somewhat aware of that of course because the difference between the US and British gallon carried to this day. Finding a way to universally cover all measurements (weight, distance, speed, etc.) so that everything is self-consistent is not committee design. It's extremely smart engineering. It removed the need for conversion constants and factors. In hacker terms, it was a major code cleanup effort.