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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Wondering why the United States measures things in inches and pounds? The answer will definitely surprise you All countries use the metric system to varying degrees. Most of the world has adopted the ...

As president of the U.S. Metric Association, Donald Hillger would like to think that his non-profit advocacy group had something to do with presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee's call for America to ...

On Wednesday, when former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee announced his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, his remarks on the occasion contained some of the usual sentiment about the ...

An oft-repeated "weird fact" is the claim that, if not for the scourge of Caribbean piracy, the United States would have adopted the metric system in the 1790s, making it the country's standard system ...

Mathematician and author, the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) was an aristocrat who nevertheless embraced the early stage of the French Revolution. Even as the Jacobins hunted him down during the ...

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 ...