When former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee announced he was joining the 2016 Democratic primary race, some people scratched their heads when he said switching to the metric system would be one of ...

The humorist Dave Barry has more than once suggested "millipedes" as an imaginary unit of measurement (for example, 120 miles = 2,342,424,323.3432 millipedes), poking fun at the inscrutability of the ...

Australia is taking its first brisk steps toward conversion to a fully metric system of weights and measures over the next 10 years…. The arguments for conversion to metric in Australia have been ...

December 23, 2025, marks the 50th anniversary of the Metric Conversion Act, designed to bring US weights and measures in line with the rest of the world. The United States is one of the last holdouts ...

Announcing his quirky run for the White House on Wednesday, Lincoln Chafee may have inadvertently touched one of the more obscure third rails of American politics: conversion to the metric system, or ...

America’s reluctance to convert to the metric system was once famously lampooned by television’s longest-running animated sitcom, "The Simpsons," in an episode from way back in the Nineties. During a ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American I’ve met a lot of people and learned a lot ...

Many people feel disturbed by or even hostile to the metric system. It`s strange that Americans react so emotionally to a measuring system. After all, there is nothing immoral, criminal, dangerous or ...

SEATTLE -- An announcement from Mayor Ed Murray's office on Wednesday turned out to be an April Fools' joke, much to the chagrin of Canadian visitors. The early morning post laid out the plan for the ...