Metrication

[ianrauk]

Give them and inch and they'll take a metre..

 

[Kestevan]

I was taught exclusively in metric, but.... I live and work in the real world.

Anything below an inch is measured in milimeters.
Anything between 1" and about 6' is feet and inches.
We then switch to meters for the next 1500 and then back to miles.

Beer and milk are measured in pints.

Petrol in Litres.

It's a perfect system - it manages to confuse all the foreigners equally well, both metrical Europeans and Imperial Americans.

 

[Yellow Fang]

There are no god-given bases or units in the universe. I use both systems. I don't know why people get so hung up about base ten but there you go. I use miles for long distances and cm, mm and feet and inches for short distances. I use pints for liquids.

Yes, there should be a more fundamental system of measured based on powers of 2, or possibly e. It should be derived from the fundamental, universal constants, such as the speed of light, the charge of an electron and that sort of thing.

SI units are definitely more suitable for science and engineering, but imperial is fine for every day use, so why can't we use both?

 

[Gareth]

I am 5 feet, 10 inches and one centimetre tall, and weigh 12 stones, 2 kilograms and 1 ounce.

Last night, down the pub. I had; an 8oz steak, with 300g of Chips, 1/2lb of salad. With this I had 10 ml of ketchup, 1/8th of a fluid oz of vinegar, about 1 pennyweight of salt, and almost a scruple of pepper. I drank 2 pints of Cider, 350ml of red wine, and half a litre of orange juice.

I once had to make a steel hydraulic up pipe for a customer from 12 mm Outside diameter pipe, with a 5/8 inch BSP fitting at one end, and a 1/4 inch BSP fitting at the other end, one bend had to be 90 degrees over a 4 inch centre line radius, the pipe had to have a 3 inch parallel off-set with two 75mm radii, and the total pipe length was 4 metres 6 inches.

 

[Bokonon]

If you use (and are used to) imperial then it is fine in a small range where you say keep in lb or keep in oz or whatever.

I'm actually happy to use either system, I don't think either is necessarily correct, but different measurement systems are better suited to different tasks. For example using SI units that are derived from a common set of base units, and can be scaled by powers of 10^3 is very good for scientific and engineering applications. In casual usage, feet and inches are practical for measuring people's height with stones and pounds being used for their weight. If I felt the need to plough a field using horses, then chains, furlongs and acres would prove very handy.

I do refuse to accept the cm as a practical unit of measurement though. Litres are a bit stupid as well.

 

[Saddle bum]

Working on old machinery and such that were designed and manufactured in imperial units, I still work in "Christian Units".

When buying material, and using tools I have to use metric. It does not take much to develop "ambidextrous" thinking.

No-one actually asked me if I wanted the country to be metric and Parliament has never voted on it.

 

[Davidc]

Your starter for 10:

In what units was Trafalgar Square laid out?

 

[threebikesmcginty]

Your starter for 10:

In what units was Trafalgar Square laid out?

Can we have that as a starter for 12?

 

[Speicher]

Your starter for 10:

In what units was Trafalgar Square laid out?

Squadrons?

 

[Over The Hill]

I do refuse to accept the cm as a practical unit of measurement though. Litres are a bit stupid as well.

Mostly mm are used until you get fairly big and then metres. Very little is actually in cm.

Litres are great! I find that the easy bit.

If you think of a 1 litre bottle of anything it is really easy to picture and so you can guess a quantity from it very easily.
Also 1 litre of liquid weighs approx 1 kilo (1000g) so it is really easy to work out the weight of things from that too.

 

[Over The Hill]

Your starter for 10:

In what units was Trafalgar Square laid out?

four lions wide and four lions long?

Or the area you need to turn a gun carrage around in perhaps?

 

[Davidc]

Can we have that as a starter for 12?

No, but it could be 110.

 

[cheadle hulme]

I'm in manufacturing and I've found that there are more opportunities for mistakes with metrication, for example figures like 6m and 90mm can be miscommunicated as 6.9m, you don't get that kind of mix up with feet and inches. Not that many, apart from some of the old boys, use imperial any more. Up until a few years ago we still used to get the odd architect's drawing in with feet and inches, still got the old imperial scale-rule for just such an emergency, they were the ones still using CP112 when we'd all changed to BS5268-3 too, I ask you, tsk...

My dad worked for British Aerospace in the early days of the Airbus project. Good old BAe used imperial whilst those damned continetals insisted in metric. Everything had to be converted. A rather large and expensive aluminium billet was once reduced to scrap by the miscalculation of a certain night foreman!

At the deli, if I ask for 200g of Yorkshire Ham, other (younger) customers seem to think it a little strange for some reason.

 

[Rhythm Thief]

I'm pretty much ambidextrous - nothing teaches you to convert metres to feet faster than approaching a 4.2m high bridge with a 14'10" trailer - but I was always intrigued by the Hornby 00 scale, which, if I recall correctly, is 4mm to the foot. What's going on there then?

 

[vernon]

Your starter for 10:

In what units was Trafalgar Square laid out?

Galleons?