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Could Always Use both it's not confusing at all
- Using both is the worst solution there is.
  You will constantly be switching back and forth and many of times using both at the same time. As an engineer who designs things built around the world, the most frustrating thing isn't when it is built in the US and it is (almost) all Imperial. It also isn't when it is built in Europe and everything is all Metric.
  No, by far the most frustrating thing is when it is built in Mexico and our local teams have better access to Imperial raw material, but the local workers measure everything in metric. Such a damn mess - you have steel that is 1/2" thick, for example, but since it is Mexico we dimension it out to 12.7 mm, so nothing is ever a nice round number. And most threads are metric, but you can't get all components in metric, so on the same piece of equipment you could have an M10x1.25 bolt and a 3/8-16 bolt.
  
  I'm British and it's sooo fun using older things that use strange measurements don't even make much sense even cook books use a mix of metric and imperial even to this day
  
  Well we can all thank your country for this mess!
  
  I'll add it to the very long list of complete fuck ups it's a bit long now
  
  That list is like 10 feet long.... Or 3.048 meters long.
  
  Sounds about right at the moment it's probably gonna be double that by next month at the current rate
- Not confusing at all, but it confused NASA somehow.
  
  NASA also agreed with the logic of "sure, we don't know how it'll perform at low temperature, but we don't know that it won't work!" that led to the Challenger explosion. They aren't infallible and they can make extremely stupid mistakes too.
  I'm an engineer, and the unit mixup you've linked isn't a failure of different unit systems, it's just shitty engineering. You should always label your units. There's several domains where even a single unit system has ambiguity without labeling -- pressure with bars, atmospheres, and kilopascals.
  
  We use a mix of imperial and metric and some that you need a doctorate In maths to understand why we still use it
  We sell petrol in litres but measure fuel economy in miles per gallon and if that some how makes sense
  
  It was the contractor (I believe it was Lockheed?) who used pounds though NASA's documentation used metric units, cause they make actual scientific contributions.
- That's literally what we do in the U.S.

465 comments