I was thinking of 5lb of potatoes, 1/2 lb of cheese when I was typing.
Yes body weight is usually stone and fractions, or stone and pounds. I expect everyone over 15 knows their weight in stone. I doubt most of them know how many pounds in a stone any more! :)
If the 150 years of attempting to metricate the UK is anything to go by, it'll happen by legislation otherwise barely at all outside of industry. The UK had legislation permitting metric units since the mid 1800s (as did the US apparently). Full metrication was recommended around a similar time!
It was 1965 legislation was passed to fully metricate within 10 years. We taught only metric in schools since the early 70s. A huge publicity campaign and changeover began. Only the EU really pushed it along by requiring only metric measurements, since around 2000, on packaging with a few exceptions. The previous 30 years was a weird half hearted mix of units mainly down to where something came from. So now we buy a 454g jar of jam etc. There's no need for it to be 1lb, but it almost always still is. You'll still hear folks young enough that even their parents were only taught metric ask for half a pound of something at the supermarket counter. The shop then gives them a metric marked equivalent.
Youngsters still talk of weight in pounds, and height in feet and so forth but have never been taught imperial units. A good part of must be social (hearing on tv, from parents etc), but I suspect the human friendliness of imperial units, being generally coarser (6ft or 182cm, 454g or 1lb) and often derived from body parts, is part of the reason they still stick around so tenaciously.
The thing outside EU weights and measures, weed, is also still always in ounces and quarters! :)
In the UK 2x4, 2x2 etc is still commonly available, but it's 50x100mm. Probably has been for 30 years but only sold as 50x100 for ten or less. Metricating timber was easy because no one's going to notice or care if they get 25mm instead of each inch.
Metals, fastenings, pipes etc converted much slower because metric was often incompatible sizes without adapters.
> Which actually measures 1-1/2" by 3-1/2",
Isn't that because it's 2x4 before planing. cut lumber would be actually 2x4.
When you want to fully grok C, knowing some assembly and techniques does help. It's irrelevant for those learning the language. They don't need to know about CPU saving effects from fallthrough or lazy evaluation. They're still busy tripping up mixing arrays and pointers and incrementing the wrong one, null pointer assignments or forgetting the break in the switch. When you have some years time and are exploring the edges of the language that knowledge undoubtedly helps.
It was rare for students 25 years ago to learn assembly first. Can't say it made it harder to learn or that students had issue (spent a couple of years in the 90s teaching C part time to contractors). They had issue with language beginner things. Pointer arithmetic, or confusing pointers/arrays, but can't ever remember anyone having a particular issue with switch. Fall through was a C thing, they accepted it quite happily, and forgot break sometimes as learners do. People seemed to have far, far more difficulty getting comfortable with C++ and OO than C. The new C++ programmer was much more dangerous than the new C programmer!
C was often taught as first "real" language. You'd introduce pointers and here's how that aspect of computers work as part of the same scribble on the whiteboard. Same for memory allocation, stacks, heaps and byte sizes/packing. The fact that C was so directly close to those concepts made grasping them that much easier.
We lost a lot when we moved beyond expecting people to be aware of those basics. PHP isn't even sure itself what data is. Being able to pack your data or have app data that's optimal would be appreciated by those "few" smartphone users outside SV where dropping data or fallback to GPRS happens often. Data is rarely thought of in terms of size, it's just a blob of some types/objects. Little surprise when the app spits JSON of epic size and spends half its time "thinking".
Yes body weight is usually stone and fractions, or stone and pounds. I expect everyone over 15 knows their weight in stone. I doubt most of them know how many pounds in a stone any more! :)