"Ivan Jager" <aij+nospam@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote in message Pine.LNX.4.64-044.0706141230450.6017@unix33.andrew.cmu.edu">news:Pine.LNX.4.64-044.0706141230450.6017@unix33.andrew.cmu.edu...
Ouch. That sucks. I agree that US engeneers need to be confortable with the imperial units, as they will need to use them all too often, and some of it can be a bit obscure. I agree however that in general use of metric units is preferable. Engineers definaely ned to be familiar with them. Further there is no problem of the pound being a unit of two different dimentions (namely force (weight), and mass). That is a major problem with Imperial units. Also just rembering the exact conversion factors for Imperial untis can be a problem especially with some of the more obscure units.On Wed, 13 Jun 2007, Wesley J. Landaker wrote:On Wednesday 13 June 2007 14:03:51 Lionel Elie Mamane wrote:On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 05:33:12PM -0600, Wesley J. Landaker wrote:Even in the US all legitimate science and engineering is done in SI units.Suurre... That's why in 1999 the NASA Mars orbiter didn't crash because one (NASA) team worked in metric units and the other (private contractor) in imperial units.I am happy to very brutally assert that the team who didn't use SI was notdoing legitimate science or engineering. But whether it's from unskilled employees or bad management, it's quite unfortunate. =(Over here we have two sieres of intro physics courses. One is for science students, and the other is for engineers. Guess what the biggest difference is.Yes, I know it's sad, but apparently engineers need to learn their physics in imperial units... :(Ivan