"The maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum, as defined, is unaffected by the recent changes to the law."
As it jolly well should be!
As much of the world's capitals erupt in protests and millions look fearfully at news of job losses and economic contraction, Great Britain has taken the legal step of redefining the metre and kilogram in law. Instead of merely stating the definitions of the two main metric measurements, Parliament has now gone a step further …
(a) "gram" is universally the preferred spelling in English-language science
(b) "gram" has been the legal spelling in UK statutes ever since we first legalized metric measures in 1864, though actual use, even by government, has always fluctuated according to the whim of the writer.
The question is why are you so keen to re-subjugate us to the French:)
"The question is why are you so keen to re-subjugate us to the French".
I prefer kilo to kilogram or kilogramme but regarding being worried about French I believe it's a bit late as there are some ten thousand words from French in the English language. Britain was ruled in French (and Danish) for quite some time after all.
That's not true, I'm sure that we have some original words. Somewhere.
Pesky Romans. Norse. Danes. Normans. Celts. All of which invaded and wound up becoming becoming British.
Generally we have two words for most historical things that were common around the time of the Normans, the Norman-French and the English form. Although if you then add Celtic and Old English into the mix it gets even more convoluted at times. Outside Normandy where Norman-French is the local dialect, English has an enormous amount of commonalities with it.
We are not in the USA (yet). Please spell it correctly.
"Gramme" is the original French spelling from the late 18th Century. The internationally accepted spelling for the SI unit of a thousand grams is (and has always been) "kilogram". The Oxford English Dictionary allow both the "gram" and the "gramme" spellings, but prefers "gram", as does the Weights and Measures Act of 1985.
If this offends you, you may instead refer to 772 scruples.
Kilogram certainly isn't USAian, their spelling is "two pounds" (or near enough, for some purposes).
Was I the only one that thought "why is offence not taken when scruples is set to read+write+execute for the owner and the group but only write for all users? "
If most people can only write scruples but not read them or execute them no wonder we are in such a state! maybe we need 755 scruples. that way everyone can understand the scruples and act on them.
Was I the only one that thought "why is offence not taken when scruples is set to read+write+execute for the owner and the group but only write for all users? "
If most people can only write scruples but not read them or execute them no wonder we are in such a state! maybe we need 755 scruples. that way everyone can understand the scruples and act on them.
Actually the US was well on it way to metricism (is there such a thing?); distance and speed limit signs on freeways (and in some larger towns) were printed in both Imperial and metric in the late 70's. (I think it was by Federal fiat, but I don't recall for sure; this even occurred in Texas, so I'm pretty sure a federal power was involved....) Food and drink containers in grocery stores were also showing up with both measures on them.
Then Ronald McDonald Reagan was elected our first Acting President. As he didn't have the mental fortitude to handle the metric system (!), and was having his political handlers whisper in his ear that it would be a good political move to reject this furrin' measuring system, he dutifully dismantled the slow, methodical conversion of the US to the metric system. Were he not to have been the president, or to have had an IQ above room temperature (is that in Fahrenheit or Celsius?), the US would have been fully metric by the end of the millennium.
"The kilogram (also kilogramme) is the base unit of mass in the metric system, formally the International System of Units (SI), having the unit symbol kg. It is a widely used measure in science, engineering, and commerce worldwide, and is often simply called a kilo in everyday speech."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram
"The metre (Commonwealth spelling) or meter (American spelling) (from the French unit mètre, from the Greek noun μέτρον, "measure") is the base unit of length in the International System of Units (SI).".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre
The British English spelling is overwhemingly "kilogram", as used by the BSI for decades, and per Fowler's Modern English Usage and the style guides of the BBC, the Economist, the Telegraph, the Guardian, Reuters UK and the UK government. Google ngrams are unreliable in many ways but the shift about 100 years ago is clearly shown at https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=kilogram%2Ckilograms%2Ckilogramme%2Ckilogrammes&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ckilogram%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ckilograms%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ckilogramme%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ckilogrammes%3B%2Cc0
For the second, the only possible one is the AEC Routemaster (the RM - based on number produced), with precisely 15 coats of London Transport Red applied overall.
Note that if the length appears extended, this is probably a small child* swinging off the pole and should not be counted.
*Ah, happy memories....
(thank you, the anorak please....)
Handily, if you take the Flanders and Swann London Omnibus* and fill it with concrete the result is near enough to 100 ton(ne)s to visualise the Chelyabinsk meteor as being comprised of such Monarchs of the Road.
* 30ft long by 10 ft wide. Not mentioned in the lyrics is 15ft tall making it easy to create a cube using 6 of them. NB Dimensions of actual buses may not be the same.
I never wondered why there was a nice bouncy yellow plastic bin mounted at about 5' on a convenient lamp-post next to the local bus stop until I impatiently tried to jump off the still-moving and bounced off it. At which point I suddenly appreciated its cheerful yellow bounciness even if I did feel rather shame-faced in front of the seemingly unimpressed (though more likely "yeah, seem it all before") queue and driver.
Well done to me for both missing out perhaps the most important word (what I jumped off, i.e. the bus; admittedly it may be inferred, but nobody wants to do that much thinking to figure out what some fat halfwit is on about) and then wandering off to do something random during the perplexing 10 minute editing limit. It made sense in my head, anyway, and it may not have even managed that if not for the friendly yellow bin which was otherwise unused thanks to that "the entire world is your dustbin" ethos, but I digress.
Actually, I think you'll find that there were more RTs (Regent Threes) than Routemasters, if you include all the derivatives such as RTW and RTL. 2876 RMs were built, compared with 6,956 RT and derivatives, consisting of 4,825 RTs; 1,631 RTLs and 500 RTWs (Wikipedia). I grew up with RTs, and remember the first batch of RMs being delivered to Barking Garage when I was at school in 1959.
It bugs me when TV presenters describe something being the size of x number of football pitches. As a non-sports fan; it still leaves me clueless. Besides, do they mean American football pitches or British football pitches and are they all the same size anyway? When I last played football (at infant school) I think the pitch was something like 50 feet by 100 feet.
When marking out pitches for the local council in the 1960's (summer holiday job) the groundsperson *
would ensure there was enough space for the penalty areas . The rest was mostly down to how much space was left and maximum dimensions allowed by the F.A.
I remember one pitch had less than 3 feet from the penalty area to the touchline.
(* I also remember him using the 3-4-5 rule with his string and stakes to ensure a right angle in the corners )
It bugs me too, as a furriner who has lived in the UK a long time now.
"The size of a football pitch" shouldn't be used as a measure. Officially in the UK, football (soccer) pitches are anywhere between 90 and 120m long and 45 to 90m wide. So (scribble, carry the four...) that's somewhere between 4,050m2 and 10,800m2. Doubtless the pub quiz experts here can tell us who has the biggest/smallest pitches.
I've been arguing for many years with people who want to keep the Imperial system - particularly the area measures - rather than a sensible system. My usual ploy is to ask them "well how big is an acre?" and the standard answer seems to be "the size of a football pitch", which in fact vary from 1-2 acres, depending on whose ground you're playing at.
Of course the correct answer to my question is "240 square rods, or or one furlong by one chain".
If we're talking football pitches, are we talking about soccer or rugby? (I am excluding American football and Aussie Rules football for the purposes of this argument).
And if we're talking rugby, are we talking union (94 - 100 m long & 68-78 m wide: https://www.harrodsport.com/advice-and-guides/rugby-pitch-dimensions-markings) or league (112-122 m long & 68 m wide: https://www.harrodsport.com/advice-and-guides/rugby-league-pitch-dimensions-markings)?
Just asking.
The offside rule is easy. If your team have just scored a brilliant, well-deserved and much-needed goal - it will be incorrectly ruled offside. Or in more modern cases, given by the referee, in order to cruelly raise your hopes, then overruled in a farcical and long-drawn-out VAR process.
On the other hand, due the to the dubious parentage of the referee and capriciousness of the sporting gods, the opposing team cannot under any circumstances be ruled offside, particularly when they blatantly are.
Sport England publish a document with pitch sizes
https://sportengland-production-files.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/comparative-sizes-outdoor.pdf?_YRYzA3jqXXbMqySFXK0rqke5RP0RHRn
I would have thought the same sizes apply to the rest of the United Kingdom, but who knows these days?
Well, I'm glad we got that sorted.
Now we need the MPs to concentrate on a scientific issue that really matters:- Definining "Pie" as having pastry covering all sides. A circle of pastry on a bowl full of some meat in a sauce is *not* a pie. I *might* be persuaded to make a few exceptions, for dishes like fish pie (potato on top <> pastry) or lemon meringue pie (best with a biscuit base)...
Now we need the MPs to concentrate on a scientific issue that really matters:- Definining "Pie" as having pastry covering all sides.
I see you've ruled out all pizza as a "pie"...with the notable exception of Chicago-style deep dish!
The Law of Unintended Consequences bites again!!! (tee-hee)
Shepherd's pie gets in under the fish pie ruling, as above.
My brother's pub has actually got this stated on his menus. He describes those half-arsed frozen puff pastry abominations as "casseroles with a pastry hat" - whereas he sells proper pies that he or the chef have made. Pleasingly square ones. The venison ones are particularly good.
The other investigation we now need is into the herertic who downvoted the OP - and seemingly disagrees that pastry hats are an affront against all that is decent in the world.
Pretty sure 1995 was 25 years ago, not 30.. unless you're ready this in 2025 and it's all good.
Also, the early 2000s farce caused by those idiot market traders was hardly what held Britain back from adopting metric, considering the metric system was officially introduced in 1960s and I went to school in the late 80s where we were taught only in metric. I'd say more pure pig headed stubbornness in the face of change, which is a longstanding British tradition.
"I'd say more pure pig headed stubbornness in the face of change, which is a longstanding British tradition."
It's partially stubbornness, but it's also familiarity. I know what a decent fuel economy is for a car in miles per gallon, not in litres per 100km. So I buy my petrol in litres and compute fuel efficiency in miles per gallon.
Sorry but I partly agree with OP.
I was educated in the 70s.
The only thing I measure in imperial is miles/mpg.
That is simply down to the fact that signs are in miles/yards and odometers are also in miles. No other reason.
I couldn't tell you how many ounces are in a pound; pounds in a stone and stones in a whatever. Inches in a yard or yards in a mile.
16 ounces in a pound, 14 pounds in a stone, 160 stone in a long ton.
360 inches in a yard, showing its very remote derivation from the base 60 counting system used by the ancient Sumerians. Don't talk to me about miles. They made more sense before Elizabeth fiddled with the definition.
It was a mistake to settle on base 10, just because we have ten fingers. Base 12 is much more flexible.
Which gives us the acre: a chain by a furlong, or what a man could reasonably be expected to plough in a day with a plough drawn by one horse, leaving one chain unploughed, but instead, mowed & rolled for a the village cricket team :o)
Side note: at my school, kicking someone in the swingers was known as making them a landowner - giving them two acres
Puny English measures.
In Scotland a pleuchgate was the area tilled by a team of eight oxen over a season: 104 Scots acres (which were larger than English acres) or 53 hectares. An oxgang was the contribution made by one of those oxen, i.e. 6.6 ha.
There also used to be a Scots mile of 2.29 km or 1.42 English miles.
Source: Dictionary of Scottish Building
The Anglo Saxons had a much better measure. Which was the hide of land. Brilliant because it was defined as the amount of land needed to feed one family of unspecified size for a year. And was therefore totally dependent on local climate and farming conditions and had no definiable size.
We should base a measurement system on that, just to confuse the hell out of people.
Genuine question: how does (picks arbitrary numbers out of the air) 220 × 8 make any "sense"?
A measurement system which seems to have as many different conversion factors as there are units, and which are mostly seemingly chosen at random, is just too confusing.
Whereas a system where the only conversion factors are powers of 1000 (with logically extrapolated 10s and 100s thrown in at the human scale to be friendlier) is just nice and easy.
8, and 12 are very useful numbers for basic mathmatics when it comes to dividing things up. If you have a regular size pizza are you likely to cut it into 10 or into 8?
While 12 is a harder number to cut something into, it's a very convenient number as it's divisible by 2, 3 and 4 compared to 10 which is divisible only by 2 which makes it considerably less convenient when it comes to dividing things up.
I can't think of an excuse for 220 though...
220 is large because there's supposed to be something intermediate in the way - a chain is 22 yards, so it should really be:
1 yard = 3 ft
1 chain = 22yd
1 furlong = 10 chains
1 mile = 8 furlongs
I believe a chain is sized as it is because it was a useful unit in farming way back when. The modern imperial system was defined when the vast majority of people worked on farms.
But none of that is Base 12. Base 16 (or 8x2 if you like) for ounces->pounds, then 14 for pounds->stone, then 8 for stone->cwt.
And I notice you're steering well clear of the area measures, which are a horrible hash of several different systems.
There's nothing like consistency. And that's nothing like consistency.
"Don't talk to me about miles. "
I though statute mile were "mille stadia" - 1000 double paces of a Roman soldier. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
A while ago, while on a visit to Noviomagus (young people call it Chichester) I did measure my paces and discovered they were indeed approx. 0.8 m long, i.e. in accordance with that definition.
And a nautical mile is one minute of latitude.
I did measure my paces and discovered they were indeed approx. 0.8 m long,
I think you may have measured your strides. A pace (from right foot at rest to right foot at rest again) is two strides, and closer to 5 feet (1.5m). A Roman mile was 1000 paces, not far off a modern statute mile of 5280 feet.
...is indeed a thousand paces (2000 steps) - it's right there in the name. On a long walk in Wiltshire several years ago along the still-straight footpath which follows the Fosse Way, I used GPS to measure the distance covered by 1000 paces at marching speed, and it was *very* close to 1.609 km/1 statute mile.
I was educated in the 70s.... I couldn't tell you how many .... pounds in a stone
I'm skeptical. Did you go out of your way not to learn that?
For any left-pondians it's 14, which is why a British hundredweight is 112lb / 8 st, which in turn is why our tons are different - they're both defined as 20 hundredweight.
I finished school in 1978. When I started college, one of the first lectures was to teach us the "imperial system" as knowing little about it was the norm.
I seem to remember laughter and incredulity that this supposed system expected us to take it seriously. The only bits I remember are barleycorn(0), inch, hand(1), foot yard, chain(2) and mile.
(0) Because it is funny
(1) My grandfather kept ponies and this is one 9th of a yard
(2) Length of a cricket pitch
The only one of those I remember being of any use was the fact that there were 63,360 inches in a mile. Why? Ordinance survey maps before they went to a less insane scale of 1 to 50,000!
No. If your school had any intention of turning out useful members of society, it made perfect sense not to fill your head with a load of mediaeval junk. If, on the other hand, you wanted to avoid the 20th century and later, then imperial measures are for you! Please hand in your phone, TV, computer, any clothing with man made fabrics to the time guardian as you leave on your horse and buggy.
That's Harry Potter wizard money. Galleons, Sickles, and Knuts. "There are 17 Sickles in a Galleon, and 29 Knuts in a Sickle, meaning there are 493 Knuts to a Galleon" (obviously!)
Only in the United Kingdom though! If you see prices like that elsewhere, it just means there is, at the risk of using offensive language, a loony. (Which is a Canadian coin worth one dollar, but only in Canada.)
"While we're discussing old stuff, what the hell is with prices on old books written something like 1'4/-?"
[You are, I hope, kidding that you don't know what this means? We got taught about it, in passing, in history lessons at school (hehe).]
It's (just) before my time, but it's slightly horrifying to realise/learn that £sd was the currency system of the UK (and, correspondingly, Ireland), and previously also other members of the British Commonwealth (who had the good sense to convert (and go metric) sooner), until "relatively" recently, "only"(?) 50 years ago next February.
If you're young enough, it's extremely surreal to dredge around online video archives from just before "decimalisation" and chortle at (some) people being confused by the "new money", when instead it's the bizarre "old money" that confuses our brains instead! I doubt that anyone old enough to have lived through it would want to go back, however, which makes it all the more strange that the conversion to metric stalled and has dragged out for sooo loonnngggg…
Well, as a young person and never lived in the U.K., I was always very confused about old British money. There are still coins I'm not exactly sure how much they were, which often leaves me disoriented if I'm reading old British literature. It's similar to how I felt when Jules Verne reported all the measurements in his book in leagues, sometimes clarified as French leagues and times such as two o'clock in the evening, which I still don't understand. Standardization is very nice.
Two o'clock in the evening? That's a new one on me.
On the other hand it's still common to see such idiocy as 12am or 12pm. These are impossible times and do not exist, the interpretation is down to context of use and if you follow the numberical flow from am to pm makes even less sense. Just like zero is neither positive or negative, 12 o'clock is either the meridian or the two equidistant points in time from the meridian, therefore neither can be considers before or after the meridian. While clarifying them as 12 midday and 12 midnight helps, this only works for the 12 midday case because 12 midnight is precisely between two days therefore it is not clear to which it applies, for example, is 12 midnight a Tuesday or a Wednesday? The solution for this nonsense has been around for quite a long time now - it's called the 24 hour clock.
The interpretation is standardized, and fairly easy to remember. All times starting with 12pm apart from 12:00:00.000000.... are after noon, and all times starting with 12am apart from 12:00:00.000000.... are before noon. (Except of course in Murrica, where the Government Printing Office adopted the opposite convention until they finally saw the light in 2008.)
Then, 12:00:00... am is made consistent with that, and has to be the start of the following day, because it's "before noon".
My father got caught by that when he was told to start a new job at midnight Sunday. When he showed up at midnight Sunday he was told that he should have started the night before. What made it worse was he was not the first to have had this issue. One would have thought that mangelment would have learned.
chortle at (some) people being confused by the "new money",
I just remember being incensed that a 5d bag of crisps was now 2½p, a 20% increase without any more crisps in the bag (I was about 10 years old...).
makes it all the more strange that the conversion to metric stalled and has dragged out for sooo loonnngggg
I think that's more down to familiarity. People who grew up with buying "half a stone" of potatoes had a mental image of that quantity which 3kg didn't give them. With decimalisation a Pound was still a Pound.
@ Phil O'Sophical
...a 20% increase without any more crisps in the bag...
This reminds me of a joke that did the rounds when we (South Africa) moved to the metric system in '63 (I read it many years later, but can still remember pounds, shillings and pence (plus tickeys - 2 1/2 pennies).
There was this farmer who bitterly complained about how badly he was affected by it, as his farm was now almost twice as far from town, his fuel consumption has gone through the roof, his crops were halved, everything was twice as expensive (R2 to the pound), whilst his farm shrank by 15%. (We used morgen as the unit of area - https://www.convertunits.com/from/morgen+[South+Africa]/to/hectare).
L (Libra =Pounds); Shillings S =12 pence, Denarius d = Pence Hence
LSD £1/12/10 one pound, 12 shillings and 10 pence
Brilliant for computer work as no rounding errors ( 1.0000... 001) in sums on computer.
For accountancy accuracy, we avoided ten. somethjing in spreadsheets remember 64,000 error?
I finished school in 2002. However because imperial units are (still) partly the standard units used in informal usage in the UK, I absorbed them from parents and grandparents.
I've noticed a disturbing trend in the last couple of years where my younger friends ( in their mid 20's ) have started referring to their weight in kilograms, which makes absolutely no sense.
Fortunately people are still measured in feet and inches.
Why does referring to your weight in kilos make no sense? There are plenty of countries around the world that get by just fine with kilos.
I'm the opposite. I have no idea what my weight is in the strange system of stones and pounds. Why would you go with something like "13st 10 pounds" rather than something like "87.3kg"? Even the American system of just using pounds makes more sense.
I only know my weight in kilos, but I'll admit that in some respects 'stones' make more sense.
Mostly because your weight can vary up to a couple of kilos between eating and defecting*, so kilos are too precise.
Still, if I'm going to be doing any maths at all, I'll use SI units and thus stidestep all the random "base twelve, no sixteen!" of Imperial units.
* I once measured a 2.1kg reduction in my weight after one visit to the toilet, of which I am unaccountably proud.
Same here. I am 1.81 metres tall and weigh approximately 78kg.
The only time I use imperial units are when driving and when playing golf. I keep meaning to change the latter but I have enough problems on the course as it is without suddenly switching from yards to metres. It's surprising how much of a difference it makes.
"Nobody has any idea what 1.81m looks like in a person."
Shuuure...
I guess you must have been daydreaming that week in primary school when the class was doing rough measurements with the metre stick (you know, it's like yard stick, but can be divided into 10ths, 100ths, 1000ths more easily (spoiler: there's a reason for that)) to get a feel for measurement.
You know how big a metre is (you really should do, otherwise there's no hope for you).
The metre stick is delineated into alternating decimetre sections (ie, 10 cm), so if you can count as far as 10 (you can, can't you?) you can work out how much 8/10ths of a metre is.
The final centimetre, you should recognise from the ruler on your desk.
But, in reality, the only person who needs to know their height to centimetre accuracy is that person themself. In other situations (eg, trying to describe someone to somebody else, you might say they were "about 180 - 190 cm tall").
I know how far 2m is. I know how far 1m is.
However there are small differences between tall people and short people that the metric system does not grasp.
I could have a good think about it and say that 1.8m is about 6'. But if you're making the listener think about what you're talking about then you're doing it wrong.
The difference between 5'8 and 6' is the difference between slightly short and slightly tall. Yet that isn't clear when you're using your fashionable units.
"referring to their weight in kilograms, which makes absolutely no sense"
What's wrong with it? It's a straightforward linear measurement that is precise enough not to require weirdness.
When I was young, I weighed stones and pebbles, I mean pounds. How many pounds in a stone? Flippin' 14. Weirdness.
Myself, I pretty much always measured in kilograms, and usually round it off to the nearest five as the increased accuracy isn't that important in the day to day use of body weight. You know what's "normal" for you.
"Fortunately people are still measured in feet and inches."
That has always been centimetres. Yup, leading to charts in school (back in the 80s) with my weight in dumb measurements and my height in metric. {sigh}
> "referring to their weight in kilograms, which makes absolutely no sense"
> What's wrong with it? It's a straightforward linear measurement that is precise enough not to require weirdness.
I'm surprised no one here has leapt at the chance of a bit of SI pedantry and pointed out that 'weight in kilograms' makes no sense because kilograms are a measure of mass.
The younger people are the ones making sense here, using the standard system of weight measurement used in almost every country on Earth apart from the UK and USA. As an ex-pat now living in a fully metric country I can tell you the rest of the world looks at the UKs continued use of archaic measurement systems such as "stones" and "pints" in bemusement and as confirmation that it's a country firmly stuck in the past.
Agreed on the beer, but I would venture that 500ml and 1 litre would be good sizes for wine bottles IMO. I think that 500ml is enough for a glass each for two people, or enough for one person over dinner. Twice that if you're going to get more serious. However I find 750ml falls unfortunately somewhere in the middle.
The problem of different languages is far more dividing than the problem of different but easily convertible measurement systems.
I can't speak Flemmish, but I could, if I wanted, convert feet to metres for a Belgian.
If the EU had a point it would have mandated English as a first language for every member state before it started thinking about weights and measures.
Why is it not km/l?
Honest question. It seems very weird.
My wild guess would be to make sure the numbers are wildly different so you can't confuse them, which also has the problem that the numbers are wildly different so you can't understand the "other one".
Unlike say metres and yards, which are similar enough that for many human-scale purposes it doesn't matter.
As I recall, a bush cord of wood is 4ft x 4ft x 4ft or 64 cubic feet, or 1.8 cubic meters. A face cord, where the wood is cut to 16 inches to fit in a wood burning stove or fireplace is 1.33ft x 4ft x4ft or 21.28 cu ft. is .60 cubic meters (approximately).
I'm the same although I also measure people in imperial measurements and if you asked me how tall I was in metres I just wouldn't be able to answer. Same goes for weight, although as I don't own any people scales that's a moot point. Amusingly enough I couldn't even say for sure how many pounds in a stone nor ounces in a pound therefore all human weights are in wholes and fractions for me.
It's also worth noting that the US is one of only three backwards countries in the world not to use SI (metric) measurements as a standard, although their scientists are doing so more and more as talking in the same measurement scales as the rest of the planet is pretty important. American engineers are occasionally catching on more now, but only in some fields of engineering.
I couldn't tell you how many ounces are in a pound; pounds in a stone and stones in a whatever. Inches in a yard or yards in a mile.
I was educated on the 70s too. Fortunately my education appears to have been a little more complete.
</smug>
Actually I'm much more concerned about kids educated in the 21st century rather than my contemporaries. The lad in WH Smiths who had to ask his mate if half a dozen was six, when I asked for some stamps, won't be getting my support for Chancellor of the Exchequer.
"I was educated on the 70s too. Fortunately my education appears to have been a little more complete."
Same here. We started with imperial, then switched to metric but used both. Partly because no matter how much anyone wished it so, there was no way our measurement system could be completely decimalised overnight as we later did with money (I was in junior school when that happened, 8 or 9 years old). I'm ok with metres and kilograms, but I still have issues with smaller metric weights. eg buying from the deli counter in 100/200/300 grams when I can easily visualise "a quarter of breaded ham", "a half of smoked bacon" etc.
And of course, even now, you still come across imperial based measurements, especially in older houses or machinery.
IGotOut,
I was educated in the 80s - and we did our science in metric. Which I'm perfectly comfortable with. I can't now remember if what little cookery we did was done in metric or imperial - but in that case the greatest influence on me was Mum. She cooked in imperial and that's still how I think when planning a meal - if following a recipe it'll be metric - but when buying meat or fruit and veg I still estinmate in imperial and convert if forced to buy that way. It's not like converting 3/41b into kg is hard.
If I'm doing DIY, then the influence on me was Dad. Again, of an older school who thought in imperial. So that's how I mostly estimate distances, and the foot and inch are more convenient for imprecise measurements that mm, cm or m anyway. If I'm working out how much paint I need, or measuring precisely, then I'll use metric.
For work it's metric all the way. I measure water in litres, because 1,000L is a convenient 1m³ of water that conveniently also gives you a nice 1000kg. Pressure should be in bar, because the numbers are smaller, and litres per second is easier than gallons per minute.
I saw a survey in the Eurozone a couple of years ago that said that more than half of people still translate how much stuff costs into their original currencies to work out how much it should be, despite the Euro having been with us for two decades! I know I did it when I lived in Belgium, but then I had the disadvantage that I was only just getting used to the Belgian franc when they unsportingly turned them all into Euros while I was in Blightly visiting my family over Christmas/New Year.
It's not so much stubborness, as people being slow to change the ways they think. Especially when you're doing that kind of sense-checking estimation in your head that tells you if a proper calculation is actually in the right ball-park. Neither is it a uniquely British thing. It's simply people being people.
I once took a car for a test-drive without realising that my local dealer had sourced it from the UK.
I thought it was surprisingly sluggish to get up to 120 until the sun caught the part of the dial that said "MPH". Oops. (Cars in Ireland are sold with km/h-only speedometers)
Luckily for me, nobody from the Traffic Corps was around that day..
Road signs in Ireland went fully metric in 2005, but newly-erected distance road signs had been switched to km some time before, so that there were would be fewer signs needing converted by the time of the final switchover, canny! (And to think that Britain likes to think that it's the Irish who are the daft ones?)
The last time I was in the US a Scottish colleague was discussing MPG of vehicles with a local and the American was proud of his vehicle being approximately the same MPG as the British equivalent. Until we realised that one was saying 17 MPG and the other 70 MPG... The American's jaw dropped.
It's also that some metric ( and decimal) measures are a tad clumsy.
A litre is too bloody small a volume for measuring petrol. No one ever puts a litre of petrol in a car.
The jump from cm to m is too big when measuring height. 5' 8" is easier to say ( and visualise, I think) than 172cm or 1m 772cm.
A kilometre is a bit too small when measuring journeys, arguably. But is reasonable for the purpose. People seem to use Km quite happily.
And use degrees C with no problem at all for the most part.
But a litre is too big for a swift pint, and who'd want to ask for half a litre? The phrase is just too clumsy and rather prissy sounding. ( Also a good linguistic rule of thumb is that people use the fewest and easiest syllables they can. Pint works better here than litre). And should you just want a half with your lunch, "Could I have 0.3 of a litre of your best ale please, landlord..." No.Just no.
Part of the problem was when they decimalised our money ( not a moment too soon imo) they determinedly set out to remove the familiar intermediate units instead of allowing them to fade slowly - or not as the case might be. These did no harm and were useful. A shilling is a shilling whether it's 5p or 12d. Saying "5 shillings" instead of 25p or "10 bob" instead of "50p" hurts no one and if it stopped being useful or clear would have gone the way of all things. But it provided useful intermediate units. "What, 5 bob for a bar of chocolate!" Sounds better than " What, 25p...etc.". I doubt these units would have been used for precise amounts, which would have encouraged a natural demise. But simply going out of their way to discourage the humble friendly shilling and its derivatives was counterproductive.
And I'd argue made people less amenable to losing pints\feet/lbs and so on.
Please don't get me started on the wretched horror that is the Windows printing sub-system. Other than inexplicably missing half of the important information therefore either relying on guesses or custom drivers, the units in use are not consistent requiring a library of conversions between one API call and the next. Not helped as the American's who came up with it are under the deluded impression that the entire world uses American paper sizes and measurements and therefore the accuracy is based on these units of measure, nothing more accurate. You can still this now if you set a margin to a nice round value in metric, Windows will re-round it to the nearest imperial measurement and convert it back.
> No they're not, a point is 1/72 of an inch
Actually a point is .013836 inch, so 72 points are .996264 inches. Which didn't really matter when typesetting was done by hand, but when Adobe introduced PostScript, points were rounded up to exactly 72 per inch.
[icon: nearly a point, in Scrabble terms]
A Sizes are actually perfectly logical, and rather elegant
A0 is precisely 1m2, but in a ratio* of 1: root 2, then each subsequent size halves the long dimension of the previous one, maintaining the ratio.
I can't speak to the B or C sizes, and of course left-pondian ones are just plain wierd
*I had it in my head it was the golden ratio, but a quick wiki showed me the error of my ways
I went to school in the late 80s where we were taught only in metric.
I went to school in the early 70s and was only taught metric. That might have been because the school - Blackfirs in Congleton - was newly built and only opened the year before (my brother was in the first ever intake). But still, I don't understand why anyone under the age of 50 struggles with the metric system and especially not why so many of that age or younger prefer the imperial system.
It's always struck me as something of a systemic failure.
A friend recently measured her window for new curtains, and gave the measurements to her daughter who worked in a department store and could use her staff discount to get them made up for what turned out to be a very reasonable price.
When the lass brought the curtains home, they were too small by a factor of 2.54.
The European Parliament.........
That is a lot of rubbish, the MEPs are elected in their own countries, the group they decide to join in the EP has has no real power over a MEP except that there is power in teamwork. MEPs tend to have their own field of greater interest and the rest they expect their team to master. The voting system is modern and rapid, a few minutes per voting and nothing like the medieval system with people wandering around like in a circus like in the British Parliament.
The EP is not a two party system with one party ruling the roost.
I don't care much if they don't understand it. Just as long as they have taken guidance from those qualified to understand it. MPs cannot be expected to be experts in all fields.
It's once they start to reckon they know it all and "have had enough with experts" that the trouble starts.
What is the new full definition of the Candela? It is an interesting SI unit because it is not defined wholly in physical terms. It is a psychophysical unit in that it takes into account the function relating the sensitivity of the human visual system to lights of different wavelengths (V(lambda)). There should only be one wavelength where the candela can be defined wholly physically, for every other wavelength that value (in watts per steradian - that's where you can get the caesium atom transitions and fractions of the speed of light in) there must be multiplication by V(lambda). Someone just has to measure that (V(lambda)) with real people by asking them to make judgements about the relative brightness of lights of different colours (wavelengths). How is that bit (measurement of V(lambda)) now defined?
Since 2019, the candela's been "defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the luminous efficacy of monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 × 1012 Hz, Kcd, to be 683 when expressed in the unit lm W–1,
which is equal to cd sr W–1, or cd sr kg–1 m–2 s3, where the kilogram, metre and second are
defined in terms of h, c and ΔνCs" which provides a standard even if it leaves the challenge of determining luminous efficacy at other wavelengths.
Someone needs to explain that to car headlight manufactures. And maybe the people in charge of the laws relating to vehicle construction. IIRC, use of lights on a vehicle in such a way as to dazzle or distract other road uses is illegal. Yet it seems some cars are built in such a way, and with such bright lights, that the driver can't avoid breaking that law, eg the "camera flash" effect from some cars going over a bump or brow of a hill.
The notation of /s and s<sup>-1</sup> are used in the same paragraph to indicate per second (be consistent!), and it appears that the character "v" (for vendetta) has replaced the greek character "nu" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nu_(letter)), the SI unit for frequency. Who proof-read this? (not someone with a GCSE/O-level in Physics, clearly!)
"Her Britannic Majesty's government did the proof-reading"
Well, there's your mistake. By the time it goes from boffin to government official, it's been passed across a dozen desks, watered down, tweaked, prodded just for the sake of it, and I'd check those numbers just in case somebody rounded it off "because it looks complicated".
direct copy-n-pastes from the Statutory Instrument."
And that always works well when typeface, document formats and character sets are taken into account, let alone the the program used might implement cut'n'paste and translate between various variables :-)
".for which the symbol "kg" is used, is the SI unit of mass, defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the Planck constant h to be 6.626 070 15 x 10-34 when expressed in the unit J s, which is equal to kg m2 s-1"
I haven't the foggiest what this means, but it looks like the definition of a kilogram is reliant on another measure which is expressed partly in kilograms...
E = mc2 or more accurately "energy is mass". So if you have a definition of energy (which you have if you have a definition of Planck's constant and the second) you have a definition of mass. It may seem circular but it is, in fact, consistent (with itself and reality).
I understand that it's ofteh more useful to state it as E=Δmc2 - as in the change in the mass as total conversion of matter to energy doesn't tend to happen. Throw in (from a distance advisably) some anti-matter and the resulting calculations get rather more interesting...
Very small masses are measured in energy units anyway.
No, it's not. The law defines a constant value H. H is defined as having a unit which includes the kilogram. The other units present are clearly defined, meaning that you can calculate the kilogram in terms of them and the constant value. The kilogram is the one variable there, and therefore can be calculated.
Admittedly, as this is written, the kilogram is basically just an arbitrary number based on a constant they pasted in. If they wanted to go very extreme, they could include methods for arriving at Planck's constant in the law too in order to prove why that value was used. It's not worth that effort though.
This new definition won't have any practical effect, however, back in 1959 there was a change which caused the UK inch to increase in length by 1 part in 2 million.
Remember also, that the US (some states, not all) uses two different definitions of the foot, which differ by about 1/8 inch per mile, which can make a significant difference.
Why does British law need to contain the definition of what a kilogram or a metre is at all, when they're clearly and precisely defined already? What next, copy-and-paste the geometric definition of a circle into the traffic signs regulations, in case anyone's in any doubt?
Surely they could just say "kg is the SI unit of mass" and leave it at that. No need to amend the law every time measurement methods improve by one part in 10 million. Anyone using weights and measures for trade is several steps removed from the reference definition anyway.
There are so many things that should be precisely defined in British law and aren't, yet for this they decide the law needs to include a definition down to the last hyperfine structure transition.
"Customarily defined" is probably the key phrase there... I bet it's a hang-over from when customary units did need to be defined in law, because they weren't well standardised. Every country had a different ounce. But SI units aren't customary units, they are standardised, so the law shouldn't need to specify what sort of kilogram it means.
The kilogram is the fundamental unit of mass of SI, the modern metric system, and the gram is defined as 0.001 kilograms. Way back in 1799, while the units were still being devised, it was understood that it was far more practical to create a standard kilogram against which copies could be tested, the Kilogramme des Archives, than fiddle around with a standard gram.
The question we need to be asking the French post-revolutionary government is, having fixed the metre as the unit of length, why did they decide that a gram should be the weight of a millionth of a cubic metre of water? Why not a thousandth, or one? If they'd gone for a thousandth, things would be more consistent now.
My guess is it was a practical decision based on the use of balance scales. A set of weights for a balance scale would increase by powers of 2 or 3, which is easy enough to work with as long as the smallest weight you commonly need to weigh is a whole number. If you need to weigh stuff less than 1, the decimals get unwieldy: 0.5, 0.25, 0.125, 0.0625, 0.03125... (or, heaven forbid, 0.333, 0.111, 0.037, 0.0123...). Or you go back to labelling your weights as 1/2, 1/4, 1/8... which somewhat defeats the purpose of having a decimal system.
It seems the reason why SI ended up picking kilogram, metre and second as the fundamental units is down to the units for electricity. 1 volt-amp = 1 watt = 1 kg.m2.s-3, and all the base units end up handily sized for practical use. In the 19th century, gram, centimetre and second were used as fundamental units (the CGS system) but apparently the derived electrical units were inconvenient to work with.
When I was at school in the 60s, we were taught to use both the Imperial and the cgs (centimetre, gram and second) system. cgs: Inconsistent length versus inconsistent mass in SI. Our Science teachers advised us that SI (and global warming) was coming. My engineer father used to use slugs and poundals in his caculations. I have no idea what system they belonged to. SI was an easy to transition after cgs.
I see the kg is defined with reference to caesium atoms and Planck's constant. Why? Having defined the metre, surely it would be easier to then define the kg as being the mass of a certain volume of pure water in a vacuum at it's temperature of maximum density. Using the conditions of a vacuum and temperature of max density means that it can then be derived without needing to define either units of pressure or units of temperature.
That was tried. Water turns out to be quite awkward stuff. In a vacuum, it evaporates, and as a liquid it's compressible. It's a powerful solvent, so it's hard to keep it as pure as necessary for a standard. You need to define the ratio of oxygen isotopes too - remember, 18O water's heavier and so it doesn't evaporate so fast as 16O. And so on.... In short, if it was easier we'd have stuck with it!
When the gov't mandated SI only, many companies decided to "catch up" with inflation by selling in smaller packages at the same price. As only SI was on the package, of course this sowed mistrust of SI rather than anger at the companies. Then the opposition became the next gov't and allowed both SI and Imperial. So some sectors are fully converted while others sell in odd-ball amounts (such as 183g or 473ml) and, yes, our neighbour to the south does have a bad influence on all this.
Despite the ambiguities identified by others here, I guess it's a good idea to ensure that the basis for establishing fundamental units is itself standardised. The overriding serious flies in the ointment in this case are [a] the metre is an arbitrary standard based on a faulty measurement in 1793 and not corrected when found to be wrong in 1858, [b] we still don't know the exact speed of light in vacuum, and [c] they seem to feel eight decimal places are sufficient for everything.
A few years ago I was on a tour of NPL and jolly fascinating it was too. The tour guide gave a talk about the standard kilogram, how it's calibrated against the other other ones in France etc. (including the time the boss left his backpack, containing the UK kilogram, on the Eurostar and had to dash back to find it). The highlight for me was the fancy high-tech plasma machine they use to clean the kilogram to remove all the atmospheric pollutants that sink into the surface, especially compared to the French solution - one particular old chap gives them a run down with a chamois, and only he is allowed to do it so they are all the same!
I've been waiting for someone to demand social distancing in non metric measurement, but I'm not aware that anyone has. Maybe that sort of thing has finally died out. The WHO stipulating one metre - while we're using two; I think the WHO generally expects large death tolls on these occasions and just likes to take the edge off it, we wanted actually to stop the plague, and we haven't - the WHO probably does set a bar that makes it crazy talk to go below it, e.g. three feet.
I think anyway that if you tell people to stay e.g. two metres apart, they try to do it but they don't get it right. So if you want one metre apart, then you ask for two.
I'd be very suspicious if, after wielding incredibly powerful measuring devices, anything as illogical as these figures, would result in only 9, 10 0r 11 significant numbers. It's rather like, and very analogous to, taking the value of Pi as 3.1415926535 89 when we all know it goes on three or four decimal places more. Keep looking lads. There's bound to bew more out there.
A. 1 Liter of Water weighs approx. 1 kilogram. (997 grams).
B. A cube with 1000 liters has exactly 1 meter of length on each side of its 3 dimensions, and it weights nearly a ton. Saying that 1 metric cube of water weights a ton incurs an error of 0,3%.
C. 1000kg is exactly a metric ton.
D. A cube, with 10 centimeters on each side, if filled with water, will have exactly 1 liter and weight almost 1 kilogram.
It means that if you need to measure anything in length, volume, or weight, and if you have a source of water and anything that can hold water with a scale, then you can use water as its own metric system.
Im so glad they didn't define things as their relation to Planck Time and Planck Length.
Every galactic civilization knows about hydrogen, so let's use it. The mass of H1, scaled-up by some nice exact decimal* multiplier, becomes the mass standard. The hydrogen line (21 cm wavelength) becomes the unit of length. (The Pioneer plaque used this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque) Etc. etc.
* Yes, I know not all civilizations, even here on Earth, use base-10 numbers, but we have to start somewhere!
In my working life our firm from about 1832 (founded 1820) (until I retired in 2005) always all used on engineering drawings both imperial and metric systems.
All internal diameters were in mm. All external diameters were in inches to nearest thou (1/1000 inch). Thus verbal reference to diameter listener was always clear if internal or external diameter. Likewise if units were off sketch. So 5.001mm in 1 inch meant a bore of 5.001 mm in a bar of 1.000 inch.