99%* metric for me. I hate imperial measurements. As I was educated to be a historian I always view measurements like a foot and a pint with much sceptisism. Sure after a painful act of masochism you're able to convert them from one thing to another.
Buuuut the main problem with them is that they differ in time and space. A foot in Riga (modern Latvia) was smaller than a foot in Tallinn (modern Estonia). Also in that case we're talking about 17th century feets mostly, because in 18th century the dominant foot measurement (but not the only one) in my region was the Swedish foot (actually there were 2 different Swedish feets as well to make it more fucked up). In 19th century it's the Russian one. Luckily Russians called it differently. You can tell that apart easily.
Lets take another fuck up. A pint. If I'm in a random country which is not England or US and I order a pint of beer. Do I get less than half a liter or more than half a liter? While we're in the same location on scale of time, the location differs and thuss a pint has a very different meaning. By drinking 10 imperial pints a evening it would be roughly same as 11 US pints.
Why would you want to torture yourself with such awful things???
** Only place where I still use imperial is in naval history because of the context it's easier to compare things sometimes in nautical miles, cables, calibers and inches. But to be honest when I talk about 12 or 15 inch guns with 45 caliber length it's really hard for me to keep up with what the numbers mean relatively to reality. Luckily the era of Dreadnaughts was limited and there's only few different systems you have to compare there. But in 100 years time people would have hard time understanding if I compare 12 inch Russian guns to 15cm Germans and 234mm Americans. I'd make it worse by saying that 8 inch 45 caliber gun is more effective than 9 inch 30 caliber gun.
Edited by Alyster, 21 November 2014 - 07:57 AM.
