Interesting. Do you think that it's significant that both of the circumstances you cite involve an instrumental relationship with height, in a context where the units are significant because they are going to be plugged into charts and/or equations?
I ask because I would say that the metric tendency has totally won out in such fields, while persisting in more sloppy everyday talk. For example: even in the imperial-measurement holdout that is the US, the armed forces have spoken in kilometers and millimeters since the 60s at least, because calculations need to be made. But in the wider society, where height-depiction needs only to be fairly visualizable to the common folk, the imperial standard seems to persist.
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I ask because I would say that the metric tendency has totally won out in such fields, while persisting in more sloppy everyday talk. For example: even in the imperial-measurement holdout that is the US, the armed forces have spoken in kilometers and millimeters since the 60s at least, because calculations need to be made. But in the wider society, where height-depiction needs only to be fairly visualizable to the common folk, the imperial standard seems to persist.