Units

I spent the past eighteen months at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan as a guest student in the Mechanical Engineering program. The school and curriculum were good but one thing drove me nuts in every class; the use of English units. English units; I hate them so. See, I spent my high school and early collegiate experience immersing myself with SI Units.

A brief overview of the two:

Item	English	SI
Distance	ft	m
Speed	ft/s	m/s
Mass	lb-m	kg
Force	lb-f	N

Do you see the problem? Yes, pounds are used for mass and force (or weight) in English units. Within text and discussion, its common to be confused about which one is which. Its ridiculous. Additionally, converting units to other units WITHIN the English system is ridiculous.

For example, lets change inches to miles:
(1 inch) * (1 foot/12 inches) * (1 mile/5280 feet) = 1.578 E-5 miles

Okay, now lets try this in the SI system converting centimeters to kilometers:
(1 cm) * (1 kilometer/100,000 cm) = 1.0 E-5 kilometers

Do you see how less messy this is? All you have to do is move the decimal point. Its fantastic. Now the reason I bring this is when I started taking classes at Oakland University it drove me nuts. They seemed to use them because the school is so focused on the automotive industry that is literally in their backyard (You can see DaimlerChrylser's headquarters from campus) and it is very entrenched in the English system. So, I kindly dealt with the annoyance. But now I'm back Penn State, or what I thought was my salvation of SI Units. Well, my dream was squashed in my first class of ME 51: Machine Design. My head up his ass professor decided that the entire course would be in English units because so much of the world uses it.

Thats funny, considering the vast majority of the world doesn't and the SI system is undeniably superior to the English system. Hell, the English don't even use the English system. The logic of this professor scares me. Going along his thinking, maybe we should all still be using slide-rules and reading to candlelight. I mean, people still use them so we should obviously ignore any advance and keep with the traditional ways. Stupid English units.