As a scientist I have an innate desire to want to use metric measurements. But as an someone born in America I also have a desire to use obscure measurements no other sane person in the civilized world would ever consider using.

As such I have decided that from now on I will use femtoparsecs and attoparsecs for all measurements of length.

I am 57.6 attoparsecs tall

My jeep gets 344 femtoparsecs to the liter

@freemo
I think metric is the clear winner in scientific areas where you have to switch between scales at least a half dozen orders of magnitude apart.

But in engineering, Metric has no clear replacement for:
* Pounds per square inch
* Foot-pounds (torque)
* Foot-pounds (work)

These are intuitive to anyone who knows inch, foot, and pound.

Pascals and Joules are obviously not intuitive, and neither are Newton-meters because meter-long wrenches are exceedingly rare.

@cjd
An ATM is far more intuitive than a PSI even if you work with foots pounds and inches, its literally a multiple of ambient atmosphere pressure.

But the problem with your whole premise is your saying "as long as i already work with obscure and confusing measurements, and as long as i never have to work with them at large or amall scales, their great".. everything about that statement suggests their broken, especially considering that you cant in any practical sense avoid working with them at scale anyway.

@freemo
Well, if you're SCUBA diving then ATM is very useful and logical. But if you're dealing with compressed air or hydraulic, say you have a piston of 1.5 square inch area and you're running 5000psi hydraulic on that piston, you can do it in your head that you're going to have 7500 pounds of force on that piston. Now try that with ATM and Newtons...

@cjd "say you have this piston of this really obscure and confusing measurement called an inch and it is 1.5 square inch".... thats not an argument for it in my mind as it relies on the idea that PSI is more useful only if you already know an obscure measurement no one uses outside of the USA and is inherently less useful as it doesnt allow for metric prefixes...

On the other hand lets say you had a piston of an actually more useful base measurement, say 1.5 cm squared... all of a sudden metric is just as easy and with multiple additional advantages not the least of which being that the base unit is more intuitive

@freemo
Piston of 1.5 cm2 with 200 ATM pressure, how many Newtons of force, no calculator :P

@cjd @freemo but, but, what engineer uses atmospheres fo pressure? Or cm's for that matter?

And by what measure are Pascals untintuitive?

@qwazix

SCUBA engineers use ATM for pressure all the time. Though ATM isnt really used professionally too much outside of SCUBA or deep sea engineering.

cm is pretty common though, in fact I cant think of any alternative an engineer is likely to use.

@cjd