May is a month full of celebrations—everything from May Day and Cinco de Mayo to Mother’s Day and Memorial Day. Largely forgotten in the cornucopia of May celebrations, however, is National Metric ...

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 ...

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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The inch, based on the length of a thumb, and the foot based on, well, the length of a foot, are inherently associated with human ...

Americans have long used diverse weights and measures, reflecting their diverse origins. From colonial times, converting from one unit to another was part of courses in commercial arithmetic. The ...

Mike Meehan’s comments in his Saturday letter to the editor on why we should convert to the metric system are all true. However, we Americans tried to convert in the 1980s and the majority resisted ...

This video breaks down why metric is the global standard, how it’s defined by the laws of physics, and why the U.S., Liberia, and Myanmar remain the last holdouts. Could the world ever fully ...

Democratic presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee did not give a centimeter on his defense of the metric system Thursday, touting the economic benefits and the symbolic importance of the United States ...

Atlas Obscura on Slate is a blog about the world’s hidden wonders. Like us on Facebook and Tumblr, or follow us on Twitter. For better or worse, the United States remains one of only three countries ...