>>Why on earth the conversion failed in the US is beyond me... I guess it made too much sense...< s >...
>
>No kidding. When I was working on my mech engineering degree 20 odd years ago, the metric system up here was still in early days, so we had to work in both imperial and metric units. If it was imperial, we were taught to convert the inputs to metric, do the calculations in metric, then convert the results back to imperial. Saved a *lot* of errors in the calculations phase.
>
>I was under the impression that engineers in the U.S. have been taught that way for some time, as well...

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Al,
I was appalled to hear that NASA lost a probe because all of the scientists did everything including instructions in metric units, but the engineers and operators were using imperial units.

PS. Am I late for yesterday, or early for today?