If you love books and maps, then Dorothy Collective (previously on Neatorama) has got the cartographical wonder for you: their Book Map features titles of over 600 books by literature's greatest authors - from Thomas Hardy to Virginia Woolf, and Tolkien to Kurt Vonnegut - in form of a street map in the style of a turn of the century London.
The litho print Book Map features "classics such as Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Bleak House, Vanity Fair and Wuthering Heights as well as 20th and 21st Century works such as The Waste Land, To the Lighthouse, Animal Farm, Slaughterhouse 5, The Catcher in the Rye, The Wasp Factory, Norwegian Wood and The Road."
Is your favorite book listed? Peruse some detailed shots of the map below:
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The thing is, most US trades people (unless residential construction) are already fluent in metric and sae, and I'm guessing use metric for the majority of their work. How many vehicles, which are sent the world over, would use imperial size fasteners? I'd guess that mechanics are only breaking out the sae for older vehicles.
The fact that it was introduced in the US, but done so poorly from an education level upwards.... and then just given up on is crazy. USA, Liberia, and Myanmar (Burma). And Myanmar, they've only not officially switched to metric. Fluids are mostly sold in litres. New speed limit signs have been posted in km/h for almost a decade.. etc, etc. Government publications contain a lot of metric.
Since Canaderp is officially metric, but obviously our largest trading partner is the US, plus the fact that we simply have residual imperial practices floating about similar to the UK, we can basically switch from one to the other without issue. And agreed that one isn't better than the other, though metric is obviously very much simpler in regards to math since it's base 10... it just would be nice and easy to have a universal standard. That would be like being unilingual.
The really annoying thing is that most of the world seems to kind of know approximate values to convert metric to imperial, so when we're talking to Americans (and Liberians I guess) they'll understand the reference. Meters to feet, celcius to farenheit.. etc. Can do quick approximately accurate conversions on the fly. I have never mentioned celcius in conversation with an american however and had them understand. Not even have the slightest idea of the general conversion, as if I had stated a temp in kelvins. Watch some YouTube channels that are non-american and comments will be "what's that in normal temperature?".
Apologies. That was not meant to be a bashing of Americans (and I've really stereotyped here, where obviously there are many Americans who are fluent in metric). Your governments for the past 50+ years are to blame. The world is getting smaller, and borders mean less and less (well, not the southern US one apparently) as we deal with, trade, watch, and interact with people the world over on a daily basis. That's a statement that has become more true every decade for many, many moons, far before the internet. The rest of the world speaks English (I mean this as: English is generally accepted as the standard international language), so you're set on that front in the global communications line in not having to learn, but please, get your shit together and at least learn the basics of metric! It's aboot time.
Angry responses start..... now:
So no "Metric Martyrs" in the USA, they have the liberty to describe distances in "smoots" and speeds in "furlongs per fortnight" if they choose to do so.
Also the need to standardize for commerce (and calculating tarriffs!) that existed between pre-metric European states doesn't exist so urgently because of the vast size of the US market with its pre-existing standard of measurement already settled.
I find any efforts to describe a country's traditional units as "arbitrary" and SI units as "scientific" as pretty amusing. In many cases it is a Chesterton's fence issue - for example the Fahrenheit scale has a unit size that is equivalent to the "just noticeable difference" in temperature of the average human and the range of 0°F to 100°F is adequate to describe outdoor temperature in all but the most extreme weather in populous places. There is often a lot of cultural knowledge and utility buried in tradition.