As a Canadian, I only know the metric system. I know that I am 167 cm tall, and weigh about 90 kilo's (settle down now, I know I'm heavy ). I don't know what a mile, inch, yard, foot, or a pound is.

When I write, I always use metric units. ie:

The beats that bore down on Alex was 3 meters tall and well over 150 kilos.

Will this make my writing automatically rejected? Do I need to convert everything?

SF fans tend to prefer metric (because the dimension translations are so easy), while fantasy fans are just as likely to want cubits or some such thing. So there isn't any real preference for the common English units.

I think I'll just go the corny fantasy route and use crap like "hands, spans, stones, etc." and skip imperial / metric all together.

is a useful site.

If measurement is Vital to be accurate as part of the story. make sure the reader gets a frame of reference. If A length in Meters is important, describe the height of man in Meters or the length of stride, if millimeters are important describe the size of a pen tip. If its inches, the size of a common coin. I'm sure there are better comparisons out there. But you get the idea.

If its not important, don't specify height in a unit of measurements, Slightly taller than average, Head and shoulders above his friends, etc...

Of course 25 years ago, I understood the metric system, and can still recognize that a meter is similiar to a yard, but that is about it. However, lack of use, has led to loss of the other measurement meanings.

In scfi-fantasy, most I have read, have their own unique measurement names that are in relation to something the main character would recognize, so the new term will have some meaning (such as clothing, pens, houses)

Funny, to many postindustrial age Americans metric means foreign technology, alienation and job loss. I don't know how many times I've seen farmers, housewives and laid off workers make comments to this effect. But then I live in the south, and southerners have been actively fighting against metric usage since President Grant first declared it our national system of measurement during the days of radical reconstruction.

To us aging baby boomer sci fi fans, especially those of us who were trained in the sciences, metric has surprisingly retro associations. This probably because a good minority of the writing fifty years ago used metric.

I disagree about the future being neccessarily metric. With modern CAD/CAM technology one could just as easily design a fleet of space ships using ancient Sumerian measurements. They could individually design each ship, right down to the bolts, using a base 64 version of the left thumb width of its prospective captain as its measurement key.

[This message has been edited by keldon02 to wonder if there is a story in that last idea. (edited October 22, 2005).]

I was the last class in my high school to do physics problems in the English system, and the first class to do them in metric. We had two textbooks. It had teh effect of teaching me the physics instead of the measurement system.

I learned E & M first in SI, then in CGS. Both are metric, but since many quantities are defined in different units, the equations fall out differently. Having the constants change around on you certainly teaches you to appreciate the real meanings of and relationships between quantities, no matter how they are defined.

"With modern CAD/CAM technology one could just as easily design a fleet of space ships using ancient Sumerian measurements. They could individually design each ship, right down to the bolts, using a base 64 version of the left thumb width of its prospective captain as its measurement key."

While this makes the equations much prettier, it makes you work harder once you finally get a numerical answer, converting that back to a number that makes sense.

quote:

---

Why do I see this ending in a NASA-esque disaster in which the ships navigation system is programmed in one captain's thumb width, and quantities are entered in another's...?

---

...A ruler?