In article , jj wrote:
I'm curious, has there ever been an attempt at going metric in the US? e.g.
using Celsius? How do people feel about it?

Well, there was an aborted attempt in the late 1980s/early 1990s for the
highway signs; what killed it was a lack of funding to do the conversion
fully due to some political lobbying by well heeled folks. The complaint
from businesses can be generally summarised as being 'it's going to be
prohibitively expensive'... well, the Canadians seemed to do ok on the
whole with their own conversion not too long before that...

I believe there's been several other attempts to convert the country into
the metric system over the years, but significant opposition in the right
spots managed to kill that idea completely.

Some industries may already be using partial or completely metric
measurements; U.S. aviation is used to some aspects of the metric system.

For instance, all aviation weather reports are given out in degrees
Celsius, and most folks are used to barometric pressure in either inches of
mercury or millibars. For instance, a barometric altimeter pressure setting
of 29.92 inches of mercury is equivalent to 1013 millibars. Then there's
science, which commonly deals with metric units.

In my high school honor physics course (years ago), the first day was an
immediate introduction (or review, for the experienced) of the metric
system which was firmly adhered to for the entire year of class.

To this day, I still remember the gravitational "constant" 'g' was 9.80465
m/s^2 at the precise location where the high school was. Since the textbook
assumed 9.81 m/s^2 for 'g', we went by that for the textbook exercises.

I can't speak for others, but it wouldn't really bother me a whole lot; I'm
already used to dealing with metric units with others such as Canadians,
Europeans, etc... and regularly visit Canada and other spots in the world.

I'd guess the split between acceptance and rejection would probably lie
partially on age grounds; young(er) people seems to be more flexible in way
of thinking whereas someone older (like the folks passing the laws or
budget) might be less so inclined. And in this country, if you have
sufficient amount of money, you can usually get favo(u)rable laws passed
(or shot down)...

In my case, there'd be a slight adjustment since I'm a little shaky with
metric conversion at the really small level because I don't yet easily
visualise the magnitude, but a little time and practice usually takes care
of that.

-Dan