Metric vs Imperial

[ian]

Imperial is all hogsheads and chains and the kind of weird shit you expect to find in the basements of West Virginian serial killers. I mostly avoid it, mainly to annoy the mulch-brained UKIP types, you know the ones who fight for their right to sell bananas by the pound. Cool, I'll pay you in farthings then.

I suppose I do miles (in cars) and pints (in beers). It doesn't help that the Americans have screwed up the already screwed up imperial units. Little pints and odd gallons. Fluid ounces? Sounds like even they can't decide. No one has ineffable kilograms.

[L CC]

Height in feet is for Merkans, and therefore I sneer at it, in a cosmopolitan Eurpan way.

(Equally miles for cyclists. Sheesh. Get with the 21st C, you quaint little colonials/throwbacks)

To sneer at and name-call everybody who doesn't use your preferred system of measurement says more about you than it does about them.
 
Guy - deeply offended by the above quote.

* bows *


Do you want to see the rest of my list of sneer-victims? It pretty much encompasses the whole world.

Audaxers use kilometres, but they're all fucking freaks anyway. But if a BRITON says "I'm 175cm and 65kg and I rode 85km at 25kmh on my 4.5m gain fixed, I immediately think: PRETENTIOUS CUNT! 

* bows again *

160cm and 80kg, mind.
(wtf is 4.5m gain? my fixed is 74inches, is that about right?)

[LittleWheelsandBig]

Guy and bobb, please feel free to stick with your overly-complex measurements derived from dead kings' anatomies and other such nonsense. The rest of us will use a sensible system.

[redshift]

Speed is best in km/h

Ahem. FTFY. This is another bugbear of mine. "kph" is meaningless. Kilo-what per hour, eh? My maths teacher would have had an apoplectic fit at kph.

Similarly I was coming home one evening when I was passed by a bendy bus, upon which was written the warning that the bus was "18MTS long", and whilst the MegaTeslaSiemens isn't a unit I've come across before I did wonder whether it worked out as 18x10⁶ Cm^-2.  It's a long time since I worried about the niceties of derived units, but flux density isn't something I thought I'd need to worry about where buses are concerned.   

[red marley]

"kph" is meaningless.

kmph is more pedantic than I'll get- mostly because 4LA are not as tongue-trippingly-lovely as TLA.

Also, kmph reads as thousands of miles per hour to me.

I generally prefer metric systems to imperial ones, both on principle and for the convenience of the maths. As for intuitive feel, it seems to work better if the unit being used has some detectable feel at the scale in which it is applied. For example, I prefer Celsius over Fahrenheit because I can just about detect the difference in air temp of 1 degree (7 degrees this morning feels just a little bit colder than 8 degrees yesterday, but I don't think I can tell the difference in 1 degree of Fahrenheit).

Audaxing certainly introduced me to km as a distance (and note Citoyen and your maths teacher, its common abbreviation to 'k' in audaxes) and it makes real sense in being able to 'feel' a km when you're riding. A mile seems too coarse in comparison. Likewise, losing or gaining a kg in weight is just about noticeable whereas lbs are hidden by the noise and stones don't change enough.

[bobb]

Guy and bobb, please feel free to stick with your overly-complex measurements derived from dead kings' anatomies and other such nonsense. The rest of us will use a sensible system.

Listen, Penis - I'll use whatver units I'm comfortable with. I'm bilingual. I'd use metric for anything mathmatical and a whole bunch of other things too. I'd generally use imperial for every day things like how much I weigh or how high a cliff is.

The point is, I decide. Not some jumped up cunt on the internet

[citoyen]

Headlines must always be the higher absolute figure for shock value. So 800 foot cliff is far better than a poxy 250m cliff.

If it's just a big number you're after, why not express it as 9,600 inches? Or 28,800 barleycorns?

[citoyen]

The point is, I decide. Not some jumped up cunt on the internet

If it's in a publication where I'm in charge of house style, I decide.

As it happens, I would agree that imperial units tend to work better in figurative and/or colloquial uses, such as the songs you mentioned. And I get equally annoyed by over-pedantic correction of the figurative "tons" to "tonnes". It's all about context, isn't it?

Facetiousness aside, growing up with metric units really doesn't prevent anyone being lyrical. Jacques Brel is a greater songwriter than Daltrey, Jagger etc. (And if believing so makes me a pretentious cunt, so be it.)

Also, kmph reads as thousands of miles per hour to me.

Indeed, which is precisely why the preferred style is km/h.

note Citoyen and your maths teacher, its common abbreviation to 'k' in audaxes

Doesn't mean it's right though!

[Pancho]

For house style, I'd go for metric for all things apart from historical norm items (miles on roads, pints in pubs, furlongs at the races etc). To do otherwise smells of artifice.

Anyway, what happened to the bloke who fell off? Was it newsworthy ("man landed on flock of sparrows and survived!") or predictable ("he died, of course")

[hellymedic]

Like many of the fifty-somethings here, I am bilingual unit wise.
Signs like this one http://goo.gl/maps/j87YA on our street do appear a little dated.

I thought in km when doing Audax rides but miles elsewhere in the UK.

The quirky weight-watcher in me likes the stone as a unit of human weight.
Half a stone for a newborn, 1½ for a one year old, 2 stone for a two year old, half a stone for every year from 5-12, 10 stone for a trim medium, adult and more than 15 stone is BIG.
Oh so simples but hated by the professionals!

Kilograms are still 'alien' to some and newborn weights are usually given in pounds & ounces in the newspapers at least.

There are many people whose numeracy is poor and I think this dichotomy has caused dangerous errors because the 'feel' for the correct scale has been lost.

[Basil]

Don't they still talk about MPG in car adverts.    I have absolutely no idea how much a gallon of deisel will cost.
(Well, of course I could work it out, but.... meh!)

[Phil W]

Without going into the 800 foot cliff is probably just a steep bit if ground with some crags in it (papers rarely get the facts right when in this area).  Most mountaineers still work in feet for height in the UK. We still know the length of our ropes in feet, as a cliff that high translates into 5-6 ropes lengths which would translate into 7-8 pitches. Our guidebooks and route descriptions are in feet. We happily use metres when in the Alps and Himalaya / greater ranges. The Munros (anyone done all the peaks above 913.nnnn metres!), Hewits and Marilyn definitions are all based on feet. Feet is a logical measurement and term as it was based on the length if your feet (my feet are 29.5cm long). In working out pitches when on a rock face I can easy relate what I see in front to my height in feet. In metres it just wouldn't compute.

[Guy]

Guy and bobb, please feel free to stick with your overly-complex measurements derived from dead kings' anatomies and other such nonsense. The rest of us will use a sensible system.

Listen, Penis - I'll use whatver units I'm comfortable with. I'm bilingual. I'd use metric for anything mathmatical and a whole bunch of other things too. I'd generally use imperial for every day things like how much I weigh or how high a cliff is.

The point is, I decide. Not some jumped up cunt on the internet

+1

TBH I reserve my insults for those who've earned them. I really couldn't give a toss if someone measures their garden in ells, their commute in kilometres and the distance to the pub in versti. It doesn't affect me to the extent that I have to show the world how I'm so small-minded that I feel superior because of a totally insignificant personal choice. Life's too short for that shit.

PS. fboab - was that first post I quoted an attempt at humour? If so, please don't give up your day job just yet. 

[citoyen]

For house style, I'd go for metric for all things apart from historical norm items (miles on roads, pints in pubs, furlongs at the races etc). To do otherwise smells of artifice.

I broadly concur.

Anyway, what happened to the bloke who fell off? Was it newsworthy ("man landed on flock of sparrows and survived!") or predictable ("he died, of course")

You'll have to buy next week's issue to find out!

[Phil W]

Don't they still talk about MPG in car adverts.    I have absolutely no idea how much a gallon of deisel will cost.
(Well, of course I could work it out, but.... meh!)

My car computer still says MPG despite the fact we haven't sold it in Gallons for decades.

[Guy]

Don't they still talk about MPG in car adverts.    I have absolutely no idea how much a gallon of deisel will cost.
(Well, of course I could work it out, but.... meh!)

I don't think car adverts evn mention mpg. They're all about how much fun you can have holding lighted flares out of the window while driving through cities, driving really fast on icy roads cos the 4 wheel drive makes it totally safe to do so, driving round in circles getting your baby to sleep, looking out of the windows at beautiful scenery while cruising along empty roads et cetera et cetera et bloody cetera. In short FUN!

Information about the car and the practicality of driving one in the real world don't actually get a look-in any more.

[Pancho]

My car says miles per kilowatt hour! Although I can choose between that and km/kwhr and kwhr/100km (which is the default).

[hellymedic]

Though I am personally happy using either system, I feel for those who are short-changed by any changeover.
500ml is 2½oz short of a pint and the 'two pound' large loaf has shrunk to 800g, which is a significant loss.

I wish kids were given a consistent feel for the scale of things throughout their education.
They aren't because we're still stuck halfway into metrication 35 years (and counting) since Thatcher abolished the Metrication Board.

Meanwhile, buses and trucks strike low bridges with depressing regularity.

[Dibdib]

My car says miles per kilowatt hour! Although I can choose between that and km/kwhr and kwhr/100km (which is the default).

I'm surprised it doesn't give some pseudo-mpg-equivalent so you can be smug to the rest of us with liquid-dino powered cars

I wish kids were given a consistent feel for the scale of things throughout their education.
They aren't because we're still stuck halfway into metrication 35 years (and counting) since Thatcher abolished the Metrication Board.

To be honest I think it's more because something as actually useful as being able to understand and estimate distances in any unit is (ever-so-slightly) hard to put into an exam paper, and because it isn't in the exam paper it doesn't get taught at all these days.

[red marley]

The Munros (anyone done all the peaks above 913.nnnn metres!), Hewits and Marilyn definitions are all based on feet.

Just to complicate things further, Hewitts ("Hills in England, Wales and Ireland above Two Thousand feet") are actually defined by a combination of feet (2000 of them for peak altitude) and metres (30 of them for relative height). When I worked on detecting them I used 610m and 30m respectively.

[Jaded]

UKIP are welcome to use Imperial.

Those that like to exercise their brains, juggle translations, mix science and culture, and use units like poets use words are welcome to use both.

Simple people are welcome to use metric. Bless.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Converting the unit but not the measurement is the other thing that annoys me. Milk bottles are a prime offender. For instance:
1.136 litre
2 pints

Hmmm. I agree but fear that adopting your principle would give pub landlords and excuse to charge you the same price for less beer.

I'm quite happy to drink a pint of beer in a pub, or even in a bottle from a supermarket. I'd only whinge if they insisted on selling me 568ml (or 9.42 floz or however many it would be for 500ml).

[Kim]

I'm a child of the 80s from a scientific family.  Which meant I grew up with everything in metric, except for the countless things that Brits delight in measuring in their own archaic units for ease of obfuscation.  Distances in Kilometres, speeds in mph.  Height of doorways in mm, height of people in feet.  Feet in barleycorns, whatever the fuck they are.  Plastic money for maths lessons in "New Pence"^[1], cost of things in shops in "Pence".  That sort of thing.

At some point I decided it was better to have a feel for what a unit was than to be good at converting between them, so gave up trying to make sense of old people and Americans, except in contexts worth resorting to arithmetic (much like reading alanlgue clocks, really, which I never found reason to become fluent at).  Inches and feet get divided by three.  If someone has a baby (everyone's having a baby) I need to convert to metric and look it up on the percentile chart before it means anything to me.  I've no idea what a gallon is, other than that it's likely to be the wrong kind of gallon, but I can estimate the volume of a bag in litres.  'Mil's are a point of much contention, because they're a unit I can't avoid and my brain will treat them as a synonym for millimetres in some contexts, which is a recipe for Mars Climate Orbiter type disasters.

Fuel consumption, like the gain of bone-conduction hearing aids, should of course be measured in m².  Unless it's an electric vehicle, when it should be measured in Newtons.  I have a good intuitive sense of what a square metre and a newton are, I've no idea what a mpg looks like.



_{[1] At no point did the teachers or the workbook authors consider that as the generation who'd never known anything but metric money we might benefit from some explanatory context for that ubiquitous wording.}

[Cudzoziemiec]

"kph" is meaningless.

kmph is more pedantic than I'll get- mostly because 4LA are not as tongue-trippingly-lovely as TLA.

Also, kmph reads as thousands of miles per hour to me.

I generally prefer metric systems to imperial ones, both on principle and for the convenience of the maths. As for intuitive feel, it seems to work better if the unit being used has some detectable feel at the scale in which it is applied. For example, I prefer Celsius over Fahrenheit because I can just about detect the difference in air temp of 1 degree (7 degrees this morning feels just a little bit colder than 8 degrees yesterday, but I don't think I can tell the difference in 1 degree of Fahrenheit).

Audaxing certainly introduced me to km as a distance (and note Citoyen and your maths teacher, its common abbreviation to 'k' in audaxes) and it makes real sense in being able to 'feel' a km when you're riding. A mile seems too coarse in comparison. Likewise, losing or gaining a kg in weight is just about noticeable whereas lbs are hidden by the noise and stones don't change enough.

I remember a (British) athletics commentator wondering why it is that on the road you run 10k but on a track it's 10,000m.

(I suppose being able to measure distances more precisely on a track is a good reason, but instead we could wonder why English uses a decimal point and most other languages use a comma.)

[Kim]

(I suppose being able to measure distances more precisely on a track is a good reason, but instead we could wonder why English uses a decimal point and most other languages use a comma.)

What do comma-as-decimal-point users do to clump digits into clusters for ease of reading?

Not that it's something I do myself - I tend to prefer a non-breaking space as a thousands (or bytes) separator - but it's the accepted English way.