Time for the British to adopt the metric system only

Dear Group,

do you think it is time for the British to join the rest of the planet
and drop their archaic measuring units.

Are there any other countries that still use these outdated units
apart from USA.

Mike

wrote in message
ups.com...
Dear Group,

do you think it is time for the British to join the rest of the planet
and drop their archaic measuring units.


Why do you think SI units are archaic ?

When I went to the supermarket last saturday I bought
my food and veg by the kg, milk , petrol and wine
by the litre and 2 metres of electrical cable

Are there any other countries that still use these outdated units
apart from USA.


Have you got a clue ?

Keith



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wrote:
Dear Group,

do you think it is time for the British to join the rest of the
planet
and drop their archaic measuring units.

Are there any other countries that still use these outdated units
apart from USA.

Mike

Why? Can we not be free to decide for ourselves?
Currently most Britons, at least those under 60, are familiar enough
with the metric system to be able to use it when necessary, while still
knowing and using the imperial one. Being "bilingual" in this way
brings the best of both worlds.

Edmund

"Keith W" writes:

wrote in message
ups.com...
Dear Group,

do you think it is time for the British to join the rest of the
planet and drop their archaic measuring units.

Why do you think SI units are archaic ?

When I went to the supermarket last saturday I bought my food and
veg by the kg, milk , petrol and wine by the litre and 2 metres of
electrical cable

Loose food (e.g., fruit and veg) has to be priced in SI units in the
UK, for sure, but the cartons of milk I see are typically sized in
multiples of 568 ml, and more prepacked produce than none is sized in
quanta of 454 g.

Beer in pubs is still sold by the pint, and road signs still quote
miles. I think there's at least one more exception, but I can't
remember what it is.

Are there any other countries that still use these outdated units
apart from USA.

Have you got a clue ?

He's a fairly effective troll, and you're the one feeding him.

Des

Des Small wrote:
"Keith W" writes:

wrote in message
ups.com...
Dear Group,

do you think it is time for the British to join the rest of the
planet and drop their archaic measuring units.

Why do you think SI units are archaic ?

When I went to the supermarket last saturday I bought my food and
veg by the kg, milk , petrol and wine by the litre and 2 metres of
electrical cable

Loose food (e.g., fruit and veg) has to be priced in SI units in the
UK, for sure, but the cartons of milk I see are typically sized in
multiples of 568 ml, and more prepacked produce than none is sized in
quanta of 454 g.

Beer in pubs is still sold by the pint, and road signs still quote
miles. I think there's at least one more exception, but I can't
remember what it is.

Are there any other countries that still use these outdated units
apart from USA.

Have you got a clue ?

He's a fairly effective troll, and you're the one feeding him.

Des

Thankyou.

But why do you think its a troll ?

On 21 Mar 2005 09:38:53 -0800, wrote:

Des Small wrote:
writes:

Des Small wrote:
"Keith W" writes:

wrote in message

[...]

Are there any other countries that still use these outdated
units
apart from USA.

Have you got a clue ?

He's a fairly effective troll, and you're the one feeding him.

Des

Thankyou.

But why do you think its a troll ?

That's what you do, on the evidence presented to date.

Then you have not read my other posts.

I think he probably has.


We look forward with bated breath to your tirade against the evils of
the 240 volt socket, for sure.

For me this is not so evident as adopting the Euro or fully converting
to Metric.
I do not understand enough about the pros/cons of voltage.
I do know that everyone should adopt a standard.But which ?

Why?
Ah, standards. Like the single, standard language spoken in Belgium, you
mean?

Have you forgotten the motto of the EU so soon?

--
Tim C.

On 21 Mar 2005 09:01:18 -0800, wrote:


Edmund Lewis wrote:
wrote:
Why? Can we not be free to decide for ourselves?
Currently most Britons, at least those under 60, are familiar enough
with the metric system to be able to use it when necessary, while
still
knowing and using the imperial one. Being "bilingual" in this way
brings the best of both worlds.

Edmund

You are free to decide for yourself, but,
it would be more efficient to use one system.

No it's not, people work best with low numbers of whole units - so
when working with an amount of roughly 1.5 Kilos - 3lb is easier for
humans to comprehend. the fact that 1.5 kilos easily divides until 5
lots of 300 grams is completely irrelevant, no-one ever does that.

The metric mathematical advantages are almost irrelevant to day to day
life, and one system isn't an advantage - you don't need to use the
same measure for buying your milk as filling your petrol tank - milk
and petrol are completely different things, 26 litres is a pretty
inconvenient amount to put in my car, I can't comprehend 26, it's a
and odd number, fortunately I don't need to, but if I did gallons
sound a lot easier.

Jim.

"Ross Lyn" wrote in message
...

"Keith W" wrote in message
...

Beer in pubs is still sold by the pint, and road signs still quote
miles. I think there's at least one more exception, but I can't
remember what it is.


Exactly - there are at most 3 instances and you cant recall
the third - sheesh

How's about bridge heights. Where I live there are several examples of
height warning signs in feet and inches on one side of the approach and
metric from the other direction.


Old signage


I don't know if this is still in force but for a while you could only buy
carpet and other floor coverings in square yards although it would be
estimated and charged in metric sizes. This was because the manufacturers
where given a dispensation because of the cost impact of having to scrap
all the looms and install metric sized ones at one go. It may have worked
itself through the system by now.


Long ago

I believe eggs are still sold by the dozen and half dozen rather than the
metric packs found in Continental European shops.


This is clutching at straws, I definitely recall buying eggs by
the half dozen in Switzerland last year so its hardly just
a British thing

Then of course, there is the confusion caused by the different methods of
measurement used in the computer industry. DVD disk sizes, for example,
are given in both decimal to a base of 1000 and hexadecimal to a base of
1024.

By definition hexadecimal numbers use a base of 16 and 1024 is not a hex
number.

Kilobytes are actually a binary designation equal to 2 to the 10th power
Therefore, a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes or in Hex notation 400 bytes


Microsoft Windows 2000 should really be Microsoft Windows 2048.


7d0 in Hex and 11111010000 in binary actually

Keith

Our Christmas was a washout. My daughter Clare took ill on Christmas Eve,
and with few options on the holiday, we took her to the local emergency
room. It turned out to be a run-of-the-mill throat infection, easily treated
with antibiotics, though it meant canceling our plans for the next couple of
days. But I noticed something interesting.

Initially, all her vitals were taken and recorded in metric, the people
(nurses, doctors, etc) immediately switched to the English system when
talking. Every room had a photocopied table taped to the wall for
temperature, height, and weight conversions. When she was measured on an
electronic scale, the nurse immediately pressed the button to change the
readout from kilograms to pounds to report the data to the doctor. And not
just old fogies. Nurses younger than me who should have been brought up in
the metric system were doing it.

I remember the switch-over taking place when I was in grade 4. In fact, I
had the temerity at the time to question why metric was better during the
"Metric Fair" - a day when we formed teams and take turns going to a series
of stations to do experiments to gain some practical experience with the new
system. For my trouble I got yanked and sent to study hall for the rest of
the fair. I didn't understand the reason for the intense reaction for many
years. In fact, it always bothered me - a source of private embarrassment.
But a few years ago it dawned on me why I got into trouble. My innocent
question ran the risk of exposing a fundamental truth to all the students.

The metric system is stupid.

OK, that's a bit harsh. Measurement systems are the same, right? Six of one,
half a dozen of the other, right? On one level it is true. However,
measurement systems can be ranked against each other in terms of their
practicality. And in this, metric trails English badly. Maybe this was the
dirty secret my innocent question risked exposing, and why I was punished.
Well, they can't shut me up now!

You see, the English system was developed organically over the centuries by
different people (farmers, fisherman, sailors, architects, tailors,
engineers, butchers, gemcutters, etc, etc) adding schemes of measurements
for different quantities designed to make their lives easier. For instance,
the common measurement for distance is the foot and yard. Why? Because our
heights are conveniently measured that way.

You see, in the English system, I'm 6'0". The number "6" is a remarkable
number, because it doesn't exceed the hrair limit. This refers to the limit
of the capacity for the human brain to juggle numbers. In essence, we can
visualize between about 5 to 8 items without too much trouble, but beyond
that, a group of x discrete items becomes "many", and we have to resort to
counting to understand how many, and whether it is greater or lesser than
another group of many items. But within the hrair limit, we can just see it.
So if I pick a unit of measurement that describes the height of most humans
as a quantity within the hrair limit, I have made it easy for most people to
estimate heights. Notice that the foot is subdivided into 12 inches. That's
clever for two reasons. First, considering the hrair limit, a person can add
up to 6 inches from an lower limit (say if a person is between 5'0" and
5'6"), or estimate by subtracting up to 6 inches from an upper limit (if a
person is between 5'6" and 6'0"). As people get taller or short, the person
trying to estimate their height just moves to a different pair of limits so
that he is always working within the hrair limit (when trying to guess how
many inches to add or subtract from the base height). A second reason for 12
being a clever choice is that it subdivides evenly in many ways: halves,
thirds, quarters, etc. A base choice of 10 subdivisions (as in metric) means
you have to resort to decimals to describe a quarter or a third of a larger
base unit (such as the meter).

How tall am I in metric? I'm 1.83 meters. Absolutely useless. I have to
imagine a meter (almost exactly a yard, as it turns out) and then add 83
subunits about the size of a thumbnail. For crying out loud! There is
absolutely no way a normal human brain can do that. And so the metric system
is useless for communicating efficiently information such as my height.

Let's consider temperature for a moment. Fahrenheit has its quirks, to be
sure, and you could argue that it could use some rationalization, like
setting the freezing point of water at 0 instead of 32. But that's
quibbling. Did you know that one of the reference points for setting the
system up (actually, for its predecessor, the Rohmer system) was the body
temperature of a healthy person? Now maybe that is not the best possible
reference point -- it is hardly fixed in stone unlike a physical property
like the triple-point of water -- but it is indicative of the thinking that
went behind the system. It was designed with humans in mind. And the degree
system is great! A total of 180 degrees between the two common points of
reference -- the freezing and boiling points of water. Again, like the 12
subdivisions of the foot, the 180 subdivisions of the temperature scale in
this range means many, many even ways of subdividing the scale without
creating fractions. A great convenience for us and a way to make the system
efficient in communicating information.

Celsius, on the other hand, is strapped to the factor-of-ten mania of
metric. So we only have 100 degrees between freezing and melting. A Celsius
degree is almost twice as large as a Fahrenheit degree, meaning we almost
always have to use fractions to get any decent amount of accuracy,
especially in scientific experiments.

The metric system was designed by French scientists (of course) in the 17th
century. It was designed to eliminate the arbitrary measurements used in
other systems. I would argue that the metric system is the arbitrary one --
it uses the same 10-step interval for every form of measurement regardless
of the convenience or practicality. The English system was anything but
arbitrary, since every measurement had a reason rooted in history to make
some job easier and more accurate.

Does that mean I think we should turf SI? Not at all. First of all, I agree
that we need a common system of measurements that we all understand. SI
clearly achieves that, and does it extremely well. Now scientists and
engineers can communicate with colleagues anywhere using a measurement
system that has exactly the same meaning everywhere. As an engineer, I use
the metric system a lot, and there are many things about it that work very
well. Even businesses could adopt the metric system as desired when dealing
with international shipping.

My beef was with the imposition of the metric system on all of us. When the
government first imposed it, there were provisions in the law to prosecute
offenders. Butchers, for example, who wanted to sell meat by the pound were
fined. Finally, in 1983, a court case in which two gas station owners were
being fined for advertising gasoline by the gallon instead of by the liter
ended up embarrassing the government of the day into backing off on
enforcement. An election later, a new (conservative) government ended up
re-writing the rules, disbanding the enforcement bureau, and generally
letting the market decide.

Nowadays, the market is allowed to decide how to measure and sell their
goods, which is a good thing. The fact that, in such an environment, we see
a mix of metric and English, as convenience dictates. For example, apples
are sold by the 100g weight, which is more convenient for determining what
I'm paying per gram, so I can compare against a bag containing 500g of
apples. But people are smart enough to figure that out for themselves. In
fact, the current federal law concerning weights and measures recognizes
both metric and English measurements, and concerns itself with the fairness
of the measurement (and accuracy of the scales) and not on what the units
are themselves.

Eminently reasonable.

But I suppose the Canadian government itself is too proud to admit that the
metric system has its problems, and it insists to this day to deliver all
data to its citizens in metric, which is amusing. There was a storm warning
from Environment Canada a couple of weeks ago -- projected accumulations of
20cm of snow. A co-worker and I were chatting about it, both of us
engineers, and we moaned about going home to shovel 8 inches of the white
stuff. We pay some guy to report the weather news in centimeters, just so
that we can go back to talking in inches at the watercooler. And the
punchline -- I'd be willing to bet a box of donuts that the guy at
Environment Canada thinks in terms of 8 inches as well.

And one more piece of good news -- that box of donuts from Tim Horton's
still has 12 donuts inside, not a metric box of 10. Thank God for that!

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:21:03 -0500, From Toronto wrote:

You see, the English system was developed organically over the centuries by
different people (farmers, fisherman, sailors, architects, tailors,
engineers, butchers, gemcutters, etc, etc) adding schemes of measurements
for different quantities designed to make their lives easier. For instance,
the common measurement for distance is the foot and yard. Why? Because our
heights are conveniently measured that way.

The "English" system isn't exclusively British, of course, being based to a
certain extent on Roman weights and measures. Do you ever wonder what was
used in Europe before those countries went metric?

--
Tim C.