Talk:SI

Which countries besides US do not use SI units in everyday life? AxelBoldt

That depends in part on definitions. Britain has finally gone metric for most purposes, but have an indefinite exemption for a few things, such as selling beer by the pint, not the liter or half-liter. Hong Kong is SI, except when they're selling fruit by the catty at outdoor markets. I suspect there are other such. Vicki Rosenzweig

Ok, then: are there other countries where non-metric units are used as extensively as in the US? AxelBoldt

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I have a friend who was raised in France, speaks French and is a college-educated automobile mechanic who in 25 years went through the transition from Imperial to metric system with several lines of cars, including teaching it to other mechanics, and he has never heard the expression SI. Hence, I added the word "metric" to this article. Ortolan88

Wait a minute here. I thought that the cgs system is what is commonly called the metric system and SI is simply the International Standard used by scientists (based on m, kg, s)? I also thought that most nations use a hybrid system made up of SI and cgs units. If the opening paragraph is correct then temperatures in Europe are measured and displayed in Kelvin and not degrees Celsius. --mav

I was going by the metric article and the metric-fan additions to Wikipedia:Manual of Style. It seems both these articles are wrong, from what you say. Every time I try to speak up for the 260 million non-metric Americans, I am treated to a condescending lecture on how superior the metric system is. I have never said it isn't superior (except for temperature), but that isn't the issue. The issue is ease of use of the wikipedia by the world's largest internet nation. It is too damn bad the US has been so slow and reluctant and whatever to adopt the metric system, and it is slowly coming in now, but we still don't use it in everyday life, so if we want to know how tall a hippopotamus is, someone is going to have to help us out. It is with some schadenfreude (delight at the discomfort of those you disagree with) at this indication that even metric enthusiasts are not sure what the difference between metric and SI is. Ortolan88

The SI system is a metric system. So are cgs and MKS[?]. (I wouldn't call any temperature scale "metric", though.) See the Origin of the metric system section of the History_of_Weights_and_Measures page. --Zundark 08:31 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)

indeed. SI is a choice of base units from the overall system. It also determines the sizes of all the derived units, such as Newton, Joule etc (instead of Dyne, etc), so it's fair to say that the SI system is what we use nowadays. In everyday use, whether one choose cm, mm or m to express a measurement doesn't really matter. -- Tarquin

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I think "SI" is a better page name that "International_System_of_Units" -- a huge number of articles here refer to it as SI. Principle of least astonishment etc -- Tarquin 21:57 Jan 8, 2003 (UTC)