QOTD: Dealing With The Metric System

I promise that today's QOTD is (likely) the last one I do based on my international travel last week.

It's also something that was already on my mind long before I booked this vacation since I am an American working for a Canadian company.

Yup, we're gonna talk about the metric system.

We Yanks like to think we're in this bubble of Imperial measurements, but many of us, myself included, live within a reasonable drive of Canada -- a place that uses the metric system. I believe Mexico uses it, as well, and many of us live within a short drive of that country. The point being is you don't need to fly across the ocean to encounter the metric system -- you merely need to cross a border.

So I have a few questions for y'all. First off, what's your comfort level with using it? I personally can fairly quickly translate kilometers and kilometers per hour into miles and mph, but god help me if I try to quickly convert Celsius to Fahrenheit or vice versa.

Second, what tricks do you use for quick conversions? I read somewhere that since a kilometer is 0.62 of a mile, you can convert mpg to km/h by multiplying by 1.6. I've run a few 5Ks and since those are 3.1 miles, I just used that as a benchmark -- so for a 20 km distance, I figured it was 3.1 miles x 4, so 12.4 miles.

What do you do?

Finally, here's the big one, the one that might start comment wars -- which system do you prefer, and should America get with (most) of the rest of the world and go metric, or the other way around? Or is it just fine if we're Imperial and everyone else is metric? What about a hybrid -- some measurements are Imperial and some metric?

Sound off below.

[Image: Sylvie Bouchard/Shutterstock.com]

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