In the meantime to “take advantage of Brexit” it will be possible to sell wine by the pint… A push to go back to the imperial system was axed though. Maybe brexiters should move to the US if they like the imperial system so much.
My point is that if I give someone directions in meters they’re going to look at me like I have two heads, it’s literally like speaking two different languages.
They made fun of that on For All Mankind. An incident on Mars because Russia and America were doing calculations using different systems and someone forgot to convert.
While I don’t disagree with that, that’s just a convention. Metric is inherently superior, solves issues that other systems have and is used by, well basically the whole world.
There is a reason. When you grow up with people around you using imperial units to describe things, you think in terms of it. If you tell me 10 ft., I can picture that in my head, I have an idea of how much that is in real terms. If you tell me 10m, I have no mental idea of how much that is, even if I can convert it. It’s like a language you grow up speaking, versus one you learn later in life.
I do think metric the sole system used in schools, to be honest.
The good thing with metric though is it’s easier to visualise other measurements once you know one of them, cause you just know that each other measurement is just a multiple or division of the one you know. Like if you know roughly how long a centimetre is then you can take a good estimate of how long a meter is knowing that it’s 100cm
It was much more mixed when i was in primary school but by the time I left secondary school it was fully metric. It might’ve fully changed before I noticed though just cause I was little and parents and grandparents would still be using imperial. I do remember having to learn imperial in school though.
I mean, yeah, I’m not arguing that imperial is a better system. Metric is superior, absolutely. I’m just arguing against the statement that there’s no reason to use it.
That’s true, but it’s also a double edged sword: you can easily learn metric just by switching to it.
Try setting a weather widget on your phone to only show you Celsius and don’t convert it to Fahrenheit, over time you will get an intuitive understanding of what feels cold to you.
The biggest block to learning a new system is insulating yourself with conversions IMO, imagine trying to learn a new language by just having everyone speak into Google translate
That’s a good idea that I think I will try out. To be honest, I have a pretty hard time visualizing distance, even with imperial, so sadly I don’t think that help will help me in that area.
Yep, that’s my life, pretty much. OTOH, my kids don’t have to live under the curse of arbitrary units of measurement and only have a vague idea of what a foot is.
Are there really Britons doing this? I lived there from birth until just shy of my 30th and I’ve never witnessed it. I’ve seen plenty of people make fun of Americans for getting the British flag wrong, though, I’m suddenly reminded.
No, not at all. My best guess is that the OP is confused with mainland Europe, who actually do use metric a lot more… the UK uses a mix of imperial and metric.
I’m on team inch. I think the metric system has been pushed by Big Socket to sell more wrenches. If they made a meter equal a yard we could be bilingual and use the most appropriate system for the job.
Soccer was an abbreviation used by posh people. Associate football -> sociate -> soccer. Much like rugby is called ruggers by the same group of people today. It was an informal term.
Association football was popular amongst the working class in the UK, who didn’t use the same types of abbreviations. So it wasn’t referred to as soccer by the them. When radio/TV became common the presenters wouldn’t use abbreviations like soccer and so it was referred to as Association Football or Football.
In the US the posh abbreviation took over, likely because many British travellers to the US would be posh and not working class. At least the ones traveling for leisure and taking part in sports activities. Working class would mostly be immigrants and wouldn’t be brushing shoulders with those in sports media.
American call the rugby like sport, American Football because it is played on foot and not horse. It would also share a common ancestry of completely moving a ball from one place to another on foot, like football and rugby.
I fucking love the psychotic concept of using “stone” as a measurement, even though a real stone can weight anywhere from milligrams to … thousands of tonnes?
Everyone in the UK under 40 never used imperial in their education, but everything is still imperial.
Even stuff that’s not supposed to be. Milk is sold in pints but labelled in ml. Sometimes it’s litres because these are smaller. Timbre is all sold in a metric equivalent, but it isn’t consistent. You don’t know if the piece you’ve had delivered is 2.4m or 2.44m. Rulers have both metric and imperial, unless you pay extra for a single system - which makes them harder to use.
The worst thing is recipes, many recipes are imperial online because of the USA. American imperial measurements aren’t the same as UK ones.
It is all driven by ignorance. The royal family (TV show) summed this ignorance up best. They complained it took them longer to get to the destination because their sat nav was in kilometres and there’s more kilometres than miles so everything is further away.
It’s better. Because metric is still an option, but it’s not as good as it could be.
If the English speaking world fully committed to metric DIY, maker stuff and cooking online would be much better. But I’d much rather this than a fully imperial system. It much easier to work in metric and convert between than work in imperial. Imperial requires a lot more knowledge of the measurement system your working with than metric does. Because everything scales in metric the same and you can use exponentials or prefixes to express sizes. Though the US imperial system does simplify this system by using pounds for everything rather than stones.
It is surprising that the US still clings to imperial measurement despite being the first Anglosphere country to adopt metric/decimal currency. Along with the metric system being associated with liberty and enlightenment that was a big part of the philosophy behind the start of the US.
When it comes down to, in the UK and the US both imperial systems are quantified by metric standards. So it’s purely a mirage, because all reference lead back to metric measurements. Not brass yardsticks installed in the town centre. Imperial is now just a middle man maintained for nostalgia. The cost to switching is every decreasing as all series industry uses metric.
I avoid volumetric measurement whenever I can. I’ve found weight based measurement to be vastly superior, especially when you have a 0.1g digital scale. It’s much easier to weight 100g of water than check the line on 100ml.
We use US Standard, not Imperial. Americans took Imperial and changed the measurements but kept the names, because “fuck you, Britain” but “fuck you even more, everyone else!”
Americans took Imperial and changed the measurements but kept the names,
Not accurate. Imperial and US customary were designed side by side. They share a common history en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_units but US did not come from imperial
Well it depends. Open standards are created to hopefully catch on by multiple manufacturers and make the interoperability better to make it easier for both consumers and manufacturers.
Proprietary standards are just simply to lock you into their ecosystem.
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