MPH or KMH?

[Cudzoziemiec]

What's the exchange rate between pounds and hashes?

A pound of hash to a gram of £sd?

[perpetual dan]

A pound of hash has about as much connection to my real world experience as a barrel has as a measure of oil, or indeed a swimming pool to baked beans.

[zigzag]

Plus if you're cycling in kms and everyone else in miles, it means you'll be going faster than them too

of course! only shame that almost everyone else is in kms too, so no advantage really..

[citoyen]

I have no objection to beer being sold in pints but I would not use them to calculate fuel usage for my spaceship.

You have a spaceship? Cool!

[drossall]

AIUI the school curriculum is a thing unto itself, and the change to metric there was unrelated to decimal currency or the government's use of metric for standards (even imperial ones).

Yes, my recollection, as a pupil around that time, is that schools just taught metric for the practical reason that that's what they expected you to be using. And sometimes the pupils weighed (sorry) in. I remember my class declining to do a sum along the lines of "Vehicle A is travelling at 30mph and vehicle B is travelling 40% faster; how fast is B travelling?", on the basis that "We're metric now miss". Of course, we knew perfectly well that the units were irrelevant to that calculation, and were just having a bit of fun. I think she probably crossed out mph and wrote km/h instead.

[Pickled Onion]

Converting _BEER to metric would be easy, they wouldn't even need to change the glasses as most pints poured are 0.5 litres once you discount the head. Better still, sell it by weight, no more sarky comments about whether you could fit a whisky in there...

I'm exclusively metric*, it's so much easier. I measure liquid in grams when cooking, more accurate than a jug, and a 1:1 conversion in metric. Also useful in other spheres: take a 55 litre windsurf board, you weigh 75 kg, you know you will sink it. Problem if it's in cu ft and stones.


* ok, occasionally I drive, and the numbers on the speedo have to match those on the signs. Also relative measurements with a tape measure, like hanging pictures at the same height: the number doesn't matter, but the tape measure has big numbers for inches and I can't be arsed to find my glasses.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Also relative measurements with a tape measure, like hanging pictures at the same height: the number doesn't matter, but the tape measure has big numbers for inches and I can't be arsed to find my glasses.

Also clothes, particularly trousers, where the number stated in inches or centimetres bears no relation to the actual dimensions of either the garment or the person it will fit.

[Kim]

Also relative measurements with a tape measure, like hanging pictures at the same height: the number doesn't matter, but the tape measure has big numbers for inches and I can't be arsed to find my glasses.

I have a terrible feeling that I'm going to end up doing that sooner or later.

(Also, I should have imported some pure-metric measuring devices before brexit.  It's irksome having inches on the side of the ruler / tape measure that you actually want to use.)

[Feanor]

I work in the oil industry, and am well acquainted with units-hell.
I now work in a software house within the oil industry.
Some of our modules work in traditional Oil Industry units.

Some are different, and probably better...

They work in SI units internally.
All input data is converted as necessary on input.
Outputs are converted to user-choice on output.

But within the code, we may use published equations or charts.
We will always use the original equations or charts, and convert on-the-fly as required as inputs and outputs to the charts.
We don't convert the original equations or charts to our units system.

This may seem un-necessary multiple conversions, but it allows us to cleanly state we are implementing chart FU-12 from 'Petrophysical Nonsense', Bollocks And Bollocks et All, 1957.
And this is something we need to do with some regularity.

[Pickled Onion]

Also relative measurements with a tape measure, like hanging pictures at the same height: the number doesn't matter, but the tape measure has big numbers for inches and I can't be arsed to find my glasses.

I have a terrible feeling that I'm going to end up doing that sooner or later.

(Also, I should have imported some pure-metric measuring devices before brexit.  It's irksome having inches on the side of the ruler / tape measure that you actually want to use.)

Oh yeah, that winds me up no end. Inches on the top of the ruler, sensible units on the bottom, both starting from the same end. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?

[Andy W]

More points of view than I could have imagined. My 15 year old daughter is pleased to tell people she's 5'10" but weighs herself in kg. Walking through flooded fields/ bridleways she tells me the water must be at least 6" deep. Apparently all the kids at her school use both imperial and metric, not just listening to me using both. Hitchin Nomads still have their Briercliffe 10. That's miles folks.

[Cudzoziemiec]

^^Sounds like my son and his friends (16/17). They'll say they use metric, but if you listen, they use a mixture. Because "it's sense, everyone does that" or something similar.

[phantasmagoriana]

I use metric for everything *except* distance, for which I still use miles. I did try to convert to kilometres for a while, but gave up and went back to miles. I should probably try again, as metric is just so much neater.

Bizarrely, I recall being taught pre- and post-decimal currency conversions at school. I didn't start school until the mid-1980s, so this was of limited use.

[Jaded]

^^Sounds like my son and his friends (16/17). They'll say they use metric, but if you listen, they use a mixture. Because "it's sense, everyone does that" or something similar.

The measurements are all arbitrary, so they all have relevance and weight. Except length, which has no weight. Just relevance.

A mixture is good. We want our young people to grow up being able to cope with different and difficult situations. Don't we...?

Or do you want them to go off to foreign lands, shouting (slowly) that xxxx measurement is best? You want them to grow up understanding that people are different and live in different ways; and that if the differences are merely about some arbitrary physical measurement, that there is a way to deal with that.

No longer do people rely on log tables and long division. That's what computers are for, and they can work out conversions to far more decimal places that any human can. It's what IT is for.

Who the hell made 10 the best number anyway? Blake Edwards?

[DaveReading]

That's what computers are for, and they can work out conversions to far more decimal places that any human can.

All of them (those extra decimal places) usually pretty useless.

[Hot Flatus]

^^Sounds like my son and his friends (16/17). They'll say they use metric, but if you listen, they use a mixture. Because "it's sense, everyone does that" or something similar.

The measurements are all arbitrary, so they all have relevance and weight. Except length, which has no weight. Just relevance.

A mixture is good. We want our young people to grow up being able to cope with different and difficult situations. Don't we...?

Or do you want them to go off to foreign lands, shouting (slowly) that xxxx measurement is best? You want them to grow up understanding that people are different and live in different ways; and that if the differences are merely about some arbitrary physical measurement, that there is a way to deal with that.

No longer do people rely on log tables and long division. That's what computers are for, and they can work out conversions to far more decimal places that any human can. It's what IT is for.

Who the hell made 10 the best number anyway? Blake Edwards?

Sometimes 10 isn't good enough. Ask Nigel Tufnel

[drossall]

Hitchin Nomads still have their Briercliffe 10. That's miles folks.

Speaking as a member of that club, we have a Briercliffe 10 because nearly all UK time trialling is done in miles. Even the current British Cycling series on Zwift. All the records are in miles as well. There's the odd 100km event, but it is an oddity. I reckon time trials will go metric about the time when we get metric seconds.

[Hot Flatus]

What is your view on imperial vs metric, from the point of view of an economist?

[Andy W]

If i were an economist, would my DECIMAL point of view carry any weight?

[Hot Flatus]

Yes, as they say in France, it would 'avoir du poids'

[Rod Marton]

Hitchin Nomads still have their Briercliffe 10. That's miles folks.

Speaking as a member of that club, we have a Briercliffe 10 because nearly all UK time trialling is done in miles. Even the current British Cycling series on Zwift. All the records are in miles as well. There's the odd 100km event, but it is an oddity. I reckon time trials will go metric about the time when we get metric seconds.

Seconds are metric. It's hours and minutes which aren't.

[perpetual dan]

I worked for a company whose clock cards (we had a punch-in and out on card system) ran in 1/100 of an hour.

[citoyen]

No longer do people rely on log tables and long division. That's what computers are for, and they can work out conversions to far more decimal places that any human can. It's what IT is for.

One of the riders on my audax asked if I could supply a route sheet with the distance in miles rather than km. My initial response was to roll my eyes... But actually it was easy to do - I just pasted the route sheet into Excel and ran a conversion formula on the distances column.

[Hot Flatus]

I a country with roadsigns in miles, and with kms not used for distances, it makes literally no sense to provide a routesheet in kms.

Yes, I know audax is validared in kms, but that is just the nominal distance. A 200k audax is almost never 200k anyway.

[Tomsk]

According to my former neighbour (Aussie airline pilot), he thinks in nautical miles - universal at sea and in the air - and we should all be standardised on that measure. And for the beyond (very big) bit of the universe, that'll be light years I guess?

Years ago, when metres first replaced feet in the building trade, a friend went to Travesty Perkins to order some wood. He was corrected at every turn with his imperial measurements, even though a 'standard' 1.22m x 4.22 sheet of ply is still a 4' x 8' one. He was finally quoted a price in pence per square foot!

Many standardised metric formats are just conversions from imperial or whatever, eg the standard half-length portait size known as Kit-Cat, (after Kit Catling, C18th Gentlemen's dining club founder) is 28 x 36 inches, but now quoted in cms. JIS threads per inch? Etc ...