Quirks of US Customary Units

Some would argue that the decline of manufacturing industry in the USA contributed to Mr Trump’s surprising victory in the Presidential election*. Others might say that manufacturing’s decline was due in part to the tardy adoption of the international system of measures. Here we look at some of the quirks of ‘English measures’, a throw back to the USA’s colonial past and still widely used in America today.

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The metric changeover – a continuum or a barrier to surmount?

Readers may have seen versions of world maps showing ‘non-metric’ countries, usually Liberia, Myanmar and the US. The previous article on Metric Views generated comments about the qualifications for membership of this select band, and we now consider this further.

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Will the European Commission challenge US labelling rules?

A recent posting by NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) has prompted this question: Are American labelling requirements now illegal under WTO rules?

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