Remember when the nation was about to go metric?

There was a big push back when I was in elementary school to get everyone to learn the metric system.

Metric units were everywhere. We still bought milk by the gallon, or the quart; but Coke bottles came in 2-liter bottles. At school we dutifully learned in third grade to convert centimeters to decimeters and grams to kilograms. And on the weekend the U.S. Department of Education interrupted Bugs Bunny with Schoolhouse Rock-style songs about the metric system.

It was a big deal. We were going to switch over to the metric system as a nation by 1980.

Twenty-years past that target date, and we're still using English units on everything we were back in the 1970s. Even my toolkit includes English wrench sizes alongside their metric counterparts. We still haven't made the switch. My mind boggles.

I learned to "think metric" when I was an AFS student living in New Zealand back in 1987.

I still do, to an extent; but the only time I had to use the metric system in high school, or college, was for my science electives. It had no practical application to my degree in English literature, nor to my minor in religion.

Can we just switch already? What point is there in clinging to a system that everyone else in the world has abandoned? All that's holding us back is inertia, and the only time scientists use English measurements is when they work for Lockheed Martin and NASA hires them to land something on Mars.