Ahhhh that must be a metric cow!! Thats why its square.

The whole world is screed up when it comes to measuring things. IE people say things like ' its one and a half centimeters ' aaargghhhh thats mixing imperial and metric together.
Americans measure engine sizes in cubic inches and the English in cubic centimeters, surely thats backwards.
In England distance is measured in miles but everything else is metric.
Ship speeds are still measured in Knotts which is a unit of 2000 yards.
You go into a pub and ask for half a litre of lager and see what you get.
Aircraft still fly at 30,000 feet not x.x meters.

plus loads of others probably

...and don't forget measuring weight in "stone"

Why is one and a half centimeters wrong? It means 1.5, same as "one point five" centimeters. I mean, do you honestly expect somebody to say "zero point three three three et cetera centimeters" when told to divide 1cm by 3?

You wouldn't say "zero point three three three et cetera centimeters", rogue. You would say 33 millimeters. Or 33,333 micrometers. Or 33,333,333 nanometers. It really depends on just how precise you want to be.

That's the beauty of the metric system. In fact, all of the English Imperial units (that's inches and gallons and stuff like that) are defined by metric units.

Go me for actually paying attention in class. And if I'm wrong, would one of you nice SI using Europeans please correct me?

Ooookay. You wouldnt say 'one point seven five inches' would you ?
Thats mixing metric and imperial just like one and a half centimeters.
Its 15mm or 1 POINT 5 centimeters.

I AM in Europe ( UK ) and it bugs the hell out of me when people mix up diffferent systems and use them together.

Isnt that why ummmm whatever space probe crashed stright into Mars ?

Thought of another one, doors are still 6ft6inch and window frames are still measured in X by X inches if you goto a DIY store.

"You load 14515 kilograms, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store"

This just sounds *TOTALLY* wrong. It also assumes short tons.

"You load 16,257 kilograms, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store"

With long tons we at least get the 16 back in there but it still doesn't cut it. The metric system just doesn't lend itself to music at all.

http://www.onlineconversion.com/weight_all.htm

Well i think we should all use AU (astronomical units = 1 AU = distance from Earth to the Sun )
This would be much more sensible seeing as how this is a space simulation.

Just a 14,959,787,069,100th of an AU to the left please.

Isn't our orbit eliptical? Our distance from the Sun when? Must be the average radius or something?

Also:
>You wouldnt say 'one point seven five inches' would you?

I would say 'one and three quarters', but saying 'point seven five' isn't mixing systems. You may express in either method with a decimal, it simply doesn't apply well to metric since the scale is based on multiples of ten already.

It doesn't apply well to Standard because most things come in easy 8th of an inch fraction sizes 7/8, 3/4, ect. but you could just as well have a 1336/1337ths size wrench. I mean there are things smaller than an eight of an inch and bigger than a mil right?

Heh, I don't see the problem with one and a half either.
In Dutch it's "anderhalve centimeter" which basicly means "on and a a half of a centimeter". It shouldn't be wrong:

1 1/2 is pronounced 'one and a half' and it's perfectly fine to write it that way.

Television screens are typically in centimeters, computer screens however are in inch (altough sometimes you see the size in cm written under it). Especially n00b orientated companies seem to do that. The height of a plane is 10 km (or something).

To say that switching to metric will ruin music is pretty moot, you can still keep singing the old songs (it's not like people will forget what a furlong or stone was); and the new music will have metric stuff in it. By the time people will be born and are old enough to listen to music they wouldn't want to listen to that old crap anymore anyway. 'Tons' are used here too (tonnen), here they're 1000 kg so the song would remain unchanged.

I don't see why switching would be that hard, here they switched currency (complete with different values for money and different units... it was 0.05 0.10 0.25 1 2.5 5 10 25 50 100 250 1000 guilders and now it's 0.05 0.10 0.20 0.50 1 2 5 10 20 50 100 200 500 euro. Was that an end of the world scenario? Nah.

Its not wrong to put 1point5 inches, but when inches were in use it would be 1 and a half inches. Expressed as 1/2. Before meterification i dont think the point (.) would have been understood.
As for smaller than a millimeter, the old imperial 'thou of an inch is much smaller and more accurate. Many engineers still work in 'thou.
Me included.

1mm = approx 40 thou

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
THE SKY IS FALLLING!!!!
THE END IS NIGH!!!!!!