BSFEEchannel has had very little to say, this month.
I've been busy. Sorry.
Even his last post was fairly devoid of, well, anything. Just a note to say he's still alive and that he still hates imperial (and everyone who has voiced disagreement with his brand of "logic.").
Logic appeared in the wake of democracy. Since politicians had to persuade the people to vote for them, rhetoric became an art. The most important art of the Graeco-Roman antiquity. However, rhetoric, though a powerful tool to influence and please the audience, could render speeches lacking truth. Philosophers like Aristotle set themselves the task of analyzing the truth of assertions and so logic was born.
What I'm doing here is not "criticizing" the US' "position and stance on the metric system". What I'm doing is trying to determine the truth in the assertions given.
The US is really behind in terms of metrication when compared to the whole world. Metrication there goes at a sluggish--almost indolent--creeping pace. This is a fact. This is true, and is admitted by many in the US. Of course that's an embarrassment. Having two competing systems of units in a globalized world is ridiculous. Especially when one of them is outdated, based on principles and concepts obsoleted long ago.
To mitigate that discomforting predicament, assertions like "the US is metricated where it makes sense", "no country is fully metricated", "metrication is expensive" or "shut up because we landed on the moon" are designed to persuade people inside and outside the US that the state of affairs is not that absurd as it really is.
But we are engineers, and we smell bullshit 20,000 km away. So this kind of argument can't survive here. We like to vapulate them without getting tired, and some of us even do that for a living. Here it is better to admit the truth than try to cover it up with that vacuous rhetoric that no one is buying.