> when it comes to cooking, the old system's units tend to be easier
Having been schooled old time and come later to metric systems, I can as a keen cook firmly disagree with this view Alex. The metric
units make no difference since you just get as empirically used to the look of 200g of pasta as you might to 4 cupfuls or whatever of rice; but the clear advantage with metric systems comes whenever you need to scale the quantities in a recipe. It's far easier to make a mistake when you have to change the unit of measurement rather than just the numerical value.
Then there is the additional advantage of ease of communication, since most of the civilised world uses the superior system! Of course I wouldn't want to make an American blush by mentioning communication problems, so I will avoid all discussion of failed mars landing probes due to cocked up arithmetic in a mish-mash of units...
