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)...
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 weightonly 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???
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Meantime I can pretty accurately measure 225g within 0.1 of a gram using cheap kitchen scales:
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(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 - MemberYet 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.
[i]Then again, baking's not that accurate anyway because egg sizes vary [/i]
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?
[i]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[/i]
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?
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 [i]about[/i] 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.
We have the odd thing here or there that is US sourced (ye olde worlde tape recorders on board satellites is one). So the americans don't necessarily use metric in space (ISS they do, but elsewhere, possibly not).
All the figures are in imperial... pressures in PSI, tension in lb-f, tape length in feet, travel speed in inches per second.
tbh, it's no big deal... everything has upper and lower limits and expected values, and there's really no point converting back to units that Europeans understand or can conceptualise.
Sure if I was designing it now, it would be in metric, although these days that's all obsolete tech now anyway.
The metric system's the work of the devil! My car does 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it.
I'll continue to measure bikes and rides using whichever system is more flattering though.
depending on which "cup" you're using
Yes but it's US recipes that use cups, so there is only one US cup yes? Certainly only one in common use. And no-one ever has this problem in the US when cooking.
I once worked with a woman who utterly refused to use the metric system which caused a few issues in a packaging company.
She also refused to drive or even get in a car and rode to work on a horse.
I liked her a lot.
The metric system requires an extra conversion due to the conversion from newtons to pascals,
I don't see the problem - pounds per square inch is the same as Pascals ie newtons per square meter.
pascal is so small you end up with massive strings of zeros
Er that's why we have multipliers, k, M, G etc. If you have too many zeros just use kPa, that's what everyone else does. I didn't just go on a 20,000m bike ride, for instance, and I don't weigh 87,000g. Well I do, but I don't talk about it.
The really nice thing about metric measurements is that they are all derived from other things, and there are only two arbitrary things in it - the metre and the kilogramme. Everything else is based on real world phenomenon and these two things so scentific formulae become much easier!
And no-one ever has this problem in the US when cooking.
They don't have a problem with their date format either, and that's bloody stupid as well.
And no-one ever has this problem in the US when cooking.
Similarly, no-one in the rest of the world has a problem cooking with metric measurements.
No-one's mentioned temperature yet. What the f is Gas mark 5 ?
And isn't Celsius just a tad more useful than Fahrenheit ?
Apropos:
I had major problems with my liquid helium plant, but it's nearly OK now.
when you are dealing with pressures up to 20,000 psi a pascal is so small you end up with massive strings of zeros
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?
e.g. [url= http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=20000psi%20in%20pascal ]20,000 psi = 137.9 MPa (megapascals) or 0.1379 GPa (gigapascals)[/url]
And isn't Celsius just a tad more useful than Fahrenheit ?
Not in everyday terms - makes no difference. However in scientific terms they are both useless, hence Kelvin 🙂
Similarly, no-one in the rest of the world has a problem cooking with metric measurements.
No I know, I'm not defending it - I use weights too. I was responding to the poster who said it was confusing because cups are not all the same size. This is not an issue due to a standardized cup used for cooking in the US.
haha! a former colleague, manager, had a previous life as an astro-physicist - lovely guy.
Anyway, his classic memory of mixed and indeed downright weird measurement units was the measurement of heat in outer space - apparently (according to Phil) it was in BTUs (British Thermal Units, about 1000 joules) per cubic megaParsec (which I suspect is quite a large volume...)
Think typical values would be definitely single figures...
