“2,775.5 meters, 2,775.5 meters, 2,775.5 meters onwards
Into the Valley of death, rode the 50 dozen…………”

just seems to work better, mpg, food potions, height and weight

only due to our familiarity with it, surely?

I think a passing understanding of imperial measurements is probably worth an hour out of a school child’s career but should they be taught that 1/16″ = 0.0625″ = 1.5875mm? Not in my opinion.

I’d still describe my height and weight in feet and stones, but there’s no real need for that other than habit and it’ll die out of its own accord as my generation, well, die out.

I also went to school in the 70s, and now tend to more often than not refer to my height and weight in m and kg. Though I can use either set of units – I’m quite good at converting.

One other thing I do still tend to use imperial for is buying timber – it might be marked up as 2.4m by 100mm by 50mm, but surely that’s still 8ft of 2×4 to most people?

the problem with “mix and match” units

I’m now over 60, so I was taught first in Imperial then in Metric.
Why revert to an awkward confusing system, when most of us have no idea about its ramifications.
Gallons (Imperial or US ?) & fl.oz, different from troy oz.
Furlongs & roods, anyone?
Gills / pints / bushels / god knows what.

That system was a mess, and not half as international as we’d like to think.
The other country shown on the map is Burma, and they use different units again.

Does anyone remember buying dope in Tola ? The weight of an silver Imperial Indian rupee. Happy daze.

Saw this on Newsnight, and this…

Actually there is no news here

Though it did remind me a little of this (around 3 mins in)…

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7R7dDJmwPY[/video]

people in their 30’s that have never ever used gallons, referring to petrol in gallons and even doing mental arithmetic to get the pump price converted to gallons seems odd, but I know people who do. those of us 40’s might just about remember orange squash sold in gallon bottles (back when it stained yer mouth and lips orange).

one “imperial” measurement that does make sense is cups etc. for measuring volumetric food quantities. even having been brought up on grams and kilograms, i wouldn’t have a friggin’ clue how much 225g of sugar is or 225g of flour when making a cake, but if the recipe says cups, spoons, etc. then the device you use to take it out of the packet is the device that measures the right amount.

See any bike weight thread on here if you think no one uses imperial anymore!

just seems to work better, mpg, food potions, height and weight

only due to our familiarity with it, surely?

Maybe.

However, I think mpg makes more sense than l/100 km. If you want to estimate how much it will cost to drive a certain distance in “metric” you have to perform additional maths.

Also, food potions just seem to “fit better”.

A lot of imperial measurements have an “organic” origin and is still pretty handy for pacing out stuff and you can measure rope quite accurately using your outstretched arms.

However, to suggest teaching it as the primary system in school is bat-shit mental.

wouldn’t have a friggin’ clue how much 225g of sugar is or 225g of flour when making a cake, but if the recipe says cups, spoons, etc. then the device you use to take it out of the packet is the device that measures the right amount.

See that makes no sense to me at all.
Surely it depends how big your cup is???

Meantime I can pretty accurately measure 225g within 0.1 of a gram using cheap kitchen scales:

(and also ounces ironically enough)

I think mpg makes more sense than l/100 km. If you want to estimate how much it will cost to drive a certain distance in “metric” you have to perform additional maths.

But since petrol is priced and sold in litres then you have to do similar mental arithmetic to work out cost to drive a certain distance in “imperial”.

That’s the trouble with still using imperial road signs. 😀

you can use a cup that size if you want. perfect for scaling. no need to get calculator out and convert all the amounts 😉

However, I think mpg makes more sense than l/100 km

distance per volume that is different to the volume priced on the pump? or volume per distance?
which one has the extra calculation?

Meantime I can pretty accurately measure 225g within 0.1 of a gram using cheap kitchen scales:

Yet using the ‘cup’ system, you have no need for any kitchen scales.
I really do believe that the American cup system is the cleverest and simplest idea. My Mother in Law (American) is the most fantastic baker of cakes, pies etc and she has never owned any kitchen scales. All teaspoons and cups as measurement.

Having moved to the USA at my age was hell. Re-learning the 12 times table and having to buy new non-metric tools is a right pain.

TooTall – Member

Yet using the ‘cup’ system, you have no need for any kitchen scales.

but you do need a complimentary set of spoons and cups.

Surely it depends how big your cup is???

It’s a standard cup size, obviously. You buy sets of them for baking purposes.

Only issue is the accuracy of measurements – generally only down to the 1/4 of a cup for bulk stuff. Then again, baking’s not that accurate anyway because egg sizes vary 🙂

In practical terms though it’s worse because you need to clean the cup out if you want to use it again for some other material.

Cups and teaspoon don’t give you a consistent rise. Baking powder to flour has to be as accurate as you can make it

I only ever use metric. The other stuff gives me a headache and makes no sense

Then again, baking’s not that accurate anyway because egg sizes vary

There’s a trick for that: for sponges, weigh* the uncracked eggs then use equal weights** of flour, butter, sugar. Obviously, this is useless if you have measuring cups but no scales 🙂

* use scales to determine the mass
** masses

We’ve been conditioned to know rough upper and lower bounds for tall/short, heavy/light, etc. in imperial measures:

* Someone over 6′ is tall, and more than about 6’4″ is very tall
* A 6oz baby is light and 10oz baby is a whopper
* A ten stone bloke is skinny and an 18 stone is heavy

But this is all due to repetition and is no reason to go back just because the purple rinse brigade doesn’t properly understand decimals.

Then again, baking’s not that accurate anyway because egg sizes vary

Wet ingredients aren’t as important as dry raising. Difference between large and medium egg is teeny and means a slightly longer bake is all. And if your whisking and folding it makes even less difference

I’m also of a certain age. Metalwork was inches and thou. Science was SI. As a civil engineer I referred to 150mm pipes as 6 inch and 12mm reinforcing rod as half inch.

I climb, walk, ride and drive in Imperial and I cook using a combination of both.

Don’t dream of taking away my pint.

But yes, Imperial is a bit daft these days.

Born in the early 60’s and I was never taught the imperial measures. What I know I picked up along the way. When my generation becomes old(er) then the imperial system will die out. I expect in my lifetime to see road signs become metric. They won’t be replaced all at the same time, there will be a phased change over.

(In fact due to my age I was taught slide rules and log tables!)

150mm pipes as 6 inch and 12mm reinforcing rod as half inch.

It’s a bit like travel on bikes. I still convert the mm to inches when reading spec.

100mm – 4″ travel and so on.

I have had to deal with old style steel plate measurements, where the plate is described by it’s weight per sq foot. Seems a strange way of doing things, but it actually makes some sense for certain calcs. 40 pound plate is about 24mm thick.

Fork travel is the most trivial part of bike imperialism – what size is your steerer, what diameter are your handlebars, what’s the threading on your BB, what chain pitch do you use?

I climb, walk, ride and drive in Imperial

I’ve dropped imperial for all but driving – well I suppose I still have the computer on the roadie set to miles, but I’ve been riding that for a while with no wheel magnet and just the Garmin set in km (given I’m ageing I’m finding it less stressful with 30km/h as my target average rather than 20mph 😉 ). Getting back into rock climbing so I suppose I might have to deal with stuff measured in ft in guidebooks, but all the kit is now metric (no sign of anybody selling 150ft/45m ropes any more). So much easier to deal with altitude in m when that’s what’s marked on maps and distance in km when that’s the size of a grid square.

use scales to determine the mass

Do you calibrate them for the local gravitational field?

one “imperial” measurement that does make sense is cups

aren’t US cups different from UK cups?

We’ve been conditioned to know rough upper and lower bounds for tall/short, heavy/light, etc. in imperial measures:

* A 6oz baby is light and 10oz baby is a whopper

Although the difference between lb’s and oz’s still seems to escape some of us.

You wouldn’t have made the mistake with kilos and grammes 😉

one “imperial” measurement that does make sense is cups etc. for measuring volumetric food

It’s imprecise. Sifted flour takes up more space than flour that’s settled and compressed, for example. Who’s to say that my $ingredient is the same density as the recipe writer’s $ingredient? The same amount will always weigh the same though.

It’s a standard cup size, obviously. You buy sets of them for baking purposes.

Except it isn’t, because we have “metric” cups which are 250ml, the US cups are 240ml (unless you’re using an old recipe in which case it’s half a US pint, which is a bit smaller).

Standards are good, mmmkay?

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/senior_year

Road signs will never go to Kilometers while there is still a Daily Mail

Road signs will never go to Kilometers while there is still a Daily Mail

I should hope not. Kilometres might be just about acceptable.

48.3 kilometers (sic)

Now this is one of those things I really hate (I assume done for irony in that cartoon), overprecise conversion of rough amounts.

Except it isn’t, because we have “metric” cups which are 250ml, the US cups are 240ml

Except that you just quoted two standards – the original argument was that there was no standard. And since it’s the US that uses cups, then the US cup is the standard 🙂

Nothing wrong with teaching kids about imperial, what with miles and pints etc, without searching for a direct quote I’d hope that is what he actually said.

My kids are bilingual metric/imperial, so they can deal with their old dad.

I’ll be teaching my kid imperial, as well as proper map reading, grammar and religion. I want his mind to be as open as possible, able to understand the past as well as the future. He will not be allowed to use text speak in written or spoken communication and will be encouraged to approach and speak to people directly. Try to avoid him falling into the ever spreading global network of people who cannot communicate worth a shít.

farige would actually turn ukip purple if road signs went to KM, and the daily mail & telegraph would support the ‘plucky’ gangs of roving pensioners defacing motorway signs

Except that you just quoted two standards – the original argument was that there was no standard. And since it’s the US that uses cups, then the US cup is the standard

Is that the US legal cup or the US customary cup?

(And also, what then is the actual point of us having metric ‘cups’ that aren’t used as a measurement by anyone in the world ever?)

farige would actually turn ukip purple if road signs went to KM

I would get pretty pissed off with it to and I have nothing to do with UKIP.

It would be an incredibly expensive thing to do. Those road signs cost a fortune.

What about the cups on bra sizes? Metric or imperial or US?

I still remember buying a packet of Polo’s on the way to school on the on 15 February 1971 (I was 13)for two and a half new pence. 😳

Pounds, shillings and pence sounds so complicated now but in use it wasn’t too bad at all (240 pennies in your pocket weighed a ton though).

However, for engineering Imperial is useless. Just this morning I got some specs for some machinery from our US warehouse, hopeless, weight in lbs, footprint in inches. Very clumsy. Had to convert it all before passing to a Dutch colleague.

I’m not sure I agree with this, I think there’s simply a familiarity issue and also it depends on the size of the parts you are dealing with. The oil industry is still almost all imperial, with drawings and calculations done in inches, lbs and psi. I’m 40 and was educated in the metric system and was initially appalled by this but actually, I’ve come to like it for what we do in this industry. It’s that way because much of the original standard equipment was designed and manufactured in the US, and when you need to interface with existing equipment it makes sense to measure in the same units, so we still have 5″, 10000psi flanges and so on.
As to it being clumsy, I’m not so sure, for calculations requiring conversion of tensile loads and cross sectional areas into stresses and pressures it works beautifully, your lengths are in inches, your areas are in square inches your loads and in lbs and voila your resulting stress or pressure falls out in psi. The metric system requires an extra conversion due to the conversion from newtons to pascals, nevermind if you need to deal with kgs. Also, when you are dealing with pressures up to 20,000 psi a pascal is so small you end up with massive strings of zeros and the potential to make a factor of 10, 100 or 1000 mistake that isn’t immediately obvious. However, part of this convenience comes from the fact that the equipment we make is large and heavy, so most of the lengths tend to be somewhere from 1 to 100 inches and you end up with convenient numbers to remember and deal with. If you were designing parts for a mobile phone for instance, the dimensions expressed in inches would be ridiculous as they’d all be 0.0something.

you just quoted two standards

So, I just looked this up. Seems there’s a metric cup (250ml, and not actually a Metric measurement) and a UK cup (half a pint).

So a cup could be 236ml, 240ml, 250ml, or 284ml depending on which “cup” you’re using. Oh, and there’s a metric “coffee cup” (150ml) and two Japanese “cups” (180ml and 200ml).

Which is all fine if all you’re doing is cooking by ratio; one part x to two parts y sort of thing. But as soon as you add non-cup measurements into the equation, all bets are off.