Expats and tourists from the United States come to Costa Rica with a handicap. While most of the rest of the world, including Costa Rica, is using the metric system, the U.S., despite several efforts ...

We Americans measure things our own way. Our yardsticks are marked in feet and inches, measures that are unfathomable to foreigners, nearly all of whom have been brought up in a decimals-only ...

In 1975, the United States passed the Metric Conversion Act. The legislation was meant to slowly transition its units of measurement from feet and pounds to meters and kilograms, bringing the US up to ...

The United States is one of just three countries that "prefers" imperial measurements over the international metric standard. The motivation why has less to do with official policy than you might ...

If the United States were more like the rest of the world, a McDonald's Quarter Pounder might be known as the McDonald's 113-Grammer, John Henry's 9-pound hammer would be 4.08 kilograms, and any ...

In May of 1981, party people gathered for one of the nerdiest soirees ever to grace lower Manhattan. Billed as the “Foot Ball,” the event was an anti-metric shindig. Its revelers—including author Tom ...

The French government adopted this new metric system on April 7, 1795. A conference including scientists from France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, and Italy worked from 1798 to 1799 ...

I was at the supermarket recently when I took note of something my eyes had passed thousands of times before. The cans of my favorite sodas were 12 ounces, while the bottles were 2 liters. It caught ...