Your 4th Grade Teacher Warned You

If you grew up around the same time as I did, the metric system was a threat used to strike fear into the hearts of grammar school children everywhere. "You had better learn the metric system because we're switching some day!" We'd worry aloud about figuring out how much a liter of milk is or how far 3 kilometers is. Cursed to a life of always translating metric to English in our heads. Luckily it never panned out and life went on. Well, it looks like I should have listened because NASA is officially switching to the metric system. Can everything else be far behind? I'm not sure the tenth kilogrammer has the same cache as a quarter pounder.