Metric is not always better. & mis-reporting by author
Preferring the older (better) measurements is nothing to do with nostalgia. New does NOT mean better.
Sometimes today people think that the Imperial system was an 'oddity', only used by Great Britain and all her many territories. Not so very similar sets of measures were used all over Europe, To my certain knowledge France, Holland, Prussia, Austria and many other German states used them. [oddity the old English foot (pre 1295-1300) was the Saxon/North German/Belgic foot which at 335mm is a third of a metre (I know 1005mm) This Belgic metre was still used in some German states until the 19th Century]
Anyway It is liked because it is practical. Each of the measures evolved to suit a given task or set of tasks as such they work well for those tasks. They are easy to use and very flexible. Metric was designed from the start to be one, all encompassing system and if the available measurement unit wasn't particularly good for any given task, tough that's what you'll use like it or not. A simple proof of this is that at first even time and the calendar were subjected to this decimal madness and not in some thought experiment. The French people suffered this decimal nonsense for many years.
In the traditional system if a task required a new measurement someone invented it and if it was useful it spread. (the Imperial reformation of some traditional measurements tidied up the centuries / millennia old measurements a little but the US strangely did not adopt them which is why they still use the older versions.)
Example: an Acre was defined as the area one Ox team could plough in one day, This is normally quoted as 660 feet by 66 feet not a square like the artificial Hectare, The Acre suits its task. That in another country the Acre might be fractionally bigger or smaller was, and is irreverent as farmers don't have fields in more than one country. Only now with very common world wide trade is a common system advantageous and even now only for international trade and science. The author of this article badly mis-reported the incident of the failed space mission. There is nothing wrong with using Imperial / traditional systems in space travel. After all the US moon landings were accomplished with them. The problem - the insanity - was that one team used Imperial measurements and another Metric measurements. Given the immence distances involved it is not surprising that there was a problem but that problem could, just as wrongly, have been said to have been caused by using the metric system.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
