Also in America, people generally don’t talk about how far away a place is, instead it’s how long it takes to get there.

Using the decimal time system?

“If we leave now we should be there by about 6.90”

was that Imperial Babylon ?

Yeah why not. 🙂 You think the British Empire invented the foot or the yard?

The article that started this discussion is a piece of nonsense but the discussion itself a valid one. As a middle age person I’ve had a lifetime of translating between various standards and measures but since deciding to embrace metric measurement fully it’s all become much simpler.

Imperial measures should be confined to history, look forward not back.

You think the British Empire invented the foot or the yard?

no but at least they are Imperial measurements.

True story: when I was I think nine so mid 80s, we were having lessons on such things as decimal points, and I mused to the chap on my desk that we should have a decimal system of time. Kirsty, who was sat in front of me turned round and said in an exasperated tone, “We do! Digital watches!”

You’d need to tell us the atmospheric pressure before we can answer that one.

I’d like to bring an added level of geekiness to this, Celsius is no longer relative to water for this very reason. It was only a small change, but it’s now defined by the melting points of metals mostly, as they’re not dependent on pressure within the accuracy of the experiments (i.e. if you can be bothered controlling pressure accurately the melting point of the metal is accurate, whereas with water if you control the pressure to the same accuracy then the temperature isn’t as accurate).

And linguistically, Centigrade is interesting, because garadians are a unit of angle (hundredth of a right angle), so centigrade is common in a lot of languages as a tenthousandth of a right angle. So by accident we’ve ended up with called “degrees degrees”.

(But yes, you’re right, no-one navigates by milliradians, that would be daft)

Hangs head in shame at owning a FB prismatic compass in mils… 😳

I say bring back the slide rule and log tables !

maybe we could re-brand some aspects of imperial as hexadecimal ?

Imperial system didn’t work out so well for these guys…

Don’t bring them into it – they can’t even get basic parsecs right! 😀

the reason we weigh babies is that any more than 10% of weight loss in the first week is a bad sign, their weight goes slightly down then they start putting it back on

worth pointing out that the NHS use metric measurements of babies weights, it’s only the older midwives/health visitors who convert it – and the parents/grandparents who convert to lbs/oz to compare with other baby weights they can remember

I weigh myself (and on the very rare occasions I put the kids on a scale) in KG, I haven’t got a scooby about pounds or stone and I do body measurements in cm.

I would be quite happy with buying beer in 500ml glasses, this wouldn’t be a difficult thing to do, just the chancellor to enforce it via duty, pubs replace glass on a pretty regular basis.

Fair points on the cost/benefit for kilo’s on the roads

Fair points on the cost/benefit for kilo’s on the roads

Don’t forget that it might lower the cost of new European cars by several pence if they didn’t have to produce a special speedo fascia for the UK 😀

Might also help European drivers obey our speed limits…

The French did decimalise time for a while or at least weeks not sure about hours and minutes etc.

An Artillary Captain acquaintance tells me the military still use mils for added accuracy.

My physics teacher once got us to measure velocity in furlongs per fortnight.

(But yes, you’re right, no-one navigates by milliradians, that would be daft)
Hangs head in shame at owning a FB prismatic compass in mils…

the reason we weigh babies is that any more than 10% of weight loss in the first week is a bad sign, their weight goes slightly down then they start putting it back on

Thats great but why do people feel the need to shout about it?

anyway metric for the win, and zero points for accuracy in the original post (or 32 in old money)

Don’t forget that it might lower the cost of new European cars by several pence if they didn’t have to produce a special speedo fascia for the UK

Careful, you’ll have us driving on the wrong side of the road with that type of thought!

I would be quite happy with buying beer in 500ml glasses

There’s no point. Why not buy them in 568ml glasses? That’s a metric measure. There’s no need to stop calling them pints, because you don’t need to measure them out or interact in any way other than filling it to the top.

In france you can still (as I understand it) buy a pound aka livre of vegetables and similar. You get 500g, but you’re allowed to call it a livre.

Re speedos, I once hired a car in the US that had a speedo without units on it, and you pressed a button to switch from kph to mph. Button was near the centre of the dash so endless fun could be had messing with it when the driver wasn’t looking.

Always thought the baby weight thing had become a tradition due to a good weight being seen in the past as an indicator of a babies health (or likelihood to survive!)

I would be quite happy with buying beer in 500ml glasses,

The tabloids would explode. “Get your hands off our pints, Pierre!” they’d cry. Or something.

Aside from the fact that it’s a smaller measure, can you imagine the British public taking to a system where you could order beer in either halves or quarters? We’d have to introduce the litre stein like the Germans as a third option, and that would get messy.

Always thought the baby weight thing had become a tradition due to a good weight being seen in the past as an indicator of a babies health (or likelihood to survive!)

I always thought it’s so other women could wince sympathetically.

I would be quite happy with buying beer in 500ml glasses

Or make it 600ml and then there would (hopefully) be less complaining about being “ripped off” by a move to metric.

But molgrips is right, just mark the pint glass as 568ml and carry on.

Eh? Surely that’s like saying metric is useless at measuring big distances because a metre is too small.

Isn’t megapascal or gigapascal the appropriate magnitude?
Yes, it is, I didn’t say it’s a big problem, but its a minor pain in the bum if you are wanting to do a quick check with a calculator and a pen because your sizes will be in mm, so your cross sectional areas for stress are in mm^2, your loads will be in kN because a N is too small, your pressures for fluids will usually be in bar, or if not in MPa, your yield stress of the material is in MPa. But you want to punch the numbers into the calculator in m, m^2, N & Pa to minimise the chances of losing track of the decimal point on the answer, so you have a whole lot of extra multiplying up and down by factors of ten on the inputs and the output. Obviously that’s not a difficult thing to do and the fact that a MPa is 1N/mm^2 helps but it’s just another place that you can make a mistake and get a plausible looking answer that’s out by a factor of 10, 100 or 1000. As soon as you are using Mathcad, FEA or similar it’s a non-issue, but for that most basic “roughly how big should this part be” check on a pad with a pen, for the kit I design, it’s faster in inches, lbs and psi because you don’t need to make even those simple conversions. Also a pound force and a pound mass are the same, 1:1, unlike N and kg, which saves a step. Nothing big but it’s a little quicker and easier to avoid stupid unit conversion issues introducing an error.
I’m not suggesting that the imperial system is better, in many ways it makes less sense but suggestions that it’s useless or difficult for engineering and science are just nonsense.

Scapegoat – Member
An Artillary Captain acquaintance tells me the military still use mils for added accuracy

Not accuracy as such. Any method of angular measurement is as accurate as any other. Mils allow for quick mental arithmetic speeding up artillery aiming.

suggestions that it’s useless or difficult for engineering and science are just nonsense.

That depends on what you are actually concerned with. I am talking about very basic engineering and project management. Some examples:

Bar is excellent when dealing with ambient water pressure, 1 bar = 10m.

Also, when calculating quantities of free gas stored at pressure. It becomes a pain with psi and feet.

Fluid quantities – It is easy to visualise 1.0m3 of water which equates to 1 tonne. Try doing that in lbs and gallons.

I except that lot of it comes down to familiarity but for 90% of what I do at work the metric measurements work better.

I except that lot of it comes down to familiarity but for 90% of what I do at work the metric measurements work better.

I think this is at the root of it, which is what I initially suggested. Familiarity is a big part of what is easiest and the other part is that the different systems do suit particular things and it sounds like, for what you do, metric is easier as it would be if I was designing smaller equipment subject to smaller pressures and loads. For the size of kit the oil industry makes, imperial works very neatly and easily. The only thing we do in mm is fabrication drawings because standard steel sections and plate thicknesses are in mm these days, so that’s what the fabricators use. The ISO standards quote both systems for standard flange and gasket profiles and pipe for pipelines is till sold and sized in inches.

But molgrips is right, just mark the pint glass as 568ml and carry on.

As we have been doing with milk bottles for decades.