Imperial Nonsense
Discussion
CzechItOut said:
grumpy52 said:
As the vast majority of the driving public didn't have a metric education they default to imperial.
The vast majority of width restrictions are signed in imperial but I do wonder why most of them are 6' 6" which is the nominal for a 2m conversion .
Really?The vast majority of width restrictions are signed in imperial but I do wonder why most of them are 6' 6" which is the nominal for a 2m conversion .
I'm 43 and we never did anything in imperial at school, everything was metric.
UK life expectancy is 80. Assuming people drive until they die, this makes the average driving period is 64 years (80 minus 16). This makes the median age of a driver is (64/2)+16 = 48.
Therefore, claiming the "vast majority" were educated in imperial is clearly false. At best it is a slight majority. However, if people over 48 were educated in metric, then it isn't a majority at all.
And education doesn't stop at school. Everyone in the UK has been living and working in a metric world for many decades now.Triumph Man said:
In work I'm forever having to mentally convert between imperial/metric. Builders will usually express timber sizes in imperial, older clients will use imperial, to the point I make a point of teaching the trainees basic feet and inches!
I find talking to builders about measurements really hard. I can talk and think fluently in feet and inches but have to convert everything in my head when they're expressed in mm or cm. Same when I'm looking at the drawings.
I just know how long 2 and half inches is. 18 inches, 2 feet, 6 feet, 7 feet and so on.
8mm? 30mm? 17cm? No chance. I have to convert them all before I can visualise them.
The only hope I have any chance of vague precision is with metres (a yard + 3 inches I think) and the sq ft to sq m calculation (divide by 10).
I also stuggle a bit with weights although that's no so bad as I can use a 2.2 multiplier to get from kg to lb's. I still prefer things in lb's, though. I was shifting large bags of logs yesterday and was struggling a bit so decided to find out how much they weighed. Turned out they were somewhere between 24 and 25kg. None the wiser I Googled it and realised that meant 52-54lbs. Which in turn means "very heavy" as I know that liftting and shifting things over 50lbs is pretty hard.
My brain just got calibrated that way and it's hard to change it.
PS as for the education thing my class in school was the last to be taught money in pounds, shillings and pence - that must have been when I was 6 in 1970 as the following year, 1971, was the year money went metric.
Edited by AC43 on Monday 24th February 10:40
Triumph Man said:
In work I'm forever having to mentally convert between imperial/metric. Builders will usually express timber sizes in imperial, older clients will use imperial, to the point I make a point of teaching the trainees basic feet and inches!
Two things I recall from way back. First house bought in 1980, doing it up, had read the DIY manual which said all timber was now in metric sizes. So wandered into Arnold Laver's in Sheffield, announced I wanted some x by y sawn timber according to the table in the book, got a blank look, oh he means 2 by 3.Second thing at work, plumber in doing some pipe work, tells apprentice to go and get some 1 inch sprockle headed wossnames, only for apprentoid to ask what's an inch?
Likewise car related though not imperial / metric related so off topic, service manager in a BL garage who has just taken in an old Austin 1100 from an old customer who has asked for a service tells the apprentice to change the oil, filter, plugs and points. Points, what's them???
OK oldpharte mode off.
Wills2 said:
I don't see the issue, we use both metric and imperial measurements every day and have done for 50 years, it's hardly beyond the wit of man to understand both and convert it in your head if it makes it easier for you.
I'd disagree with that. We count in decimal, so if a system uses decimal it's easier for us to work with. Imperial not only uses different bases than what we count in, but they're all different. 16 ounces in a pound, 1760 yards in a mile, 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard.For example: What's half an imperial ton in pounds? How about ounces is that? How many pounds is 100 ounces? If I have 9 inch square paving slabs and lay them butted up against each other, how many yards do 100 of them make? 150 of them? How many miles is that? These are everyday calculations that are trivial in metric, but unquestionably more difficult in imperial.
For comparison, half a metric tonne is 500kg, which in grams is 500,000g. If the paving slabs were 22cm across, then 100 of them is 2200cm, or 22 metres. Easy.
Edited to add: In reply to the above, you could say that if you have multiples of 16, converting from ounces to pounds is easier than g to kg, which it is. However, bring in another unit to the calculation that's not based on 16 and you have a whole world of trouble! This could happen if you're combining units: for example area and weight for pressure, or it could just be going up between units as your project or calculations scale: inches, feet, yards, miles. 24 inches is two feet, which is easy, but if you had that a hundred times, how many yards is that? How many miles?
Edited by RobM77 on Monday 24th February 10:46
FiF said:
Triumph Man said:
In work I'm forever having to mentally convert between imperial/metric. Builders will usually express timber sizes in imperial, older clients will use imperial, to the point I make a point of teaching the trainees basic feet and inches!
Two things I recall from way back. First house bought in 1980, doing it up, had read the DIY manual which said all timber was now in metric sizes. So wandered into Arnold Laver's in Sheffield, announced I wanted some x by y sawn timber according to the table in the book, got a blank look, oh he means 2 by 3.Second thing at work, plumber in doing some pipe work, tells apprentice to go and get some 1 inch sprockle headed wossnames, only for apprentoid to ask what's an inch?
Likewise car related though not imperial / metric related so off topic, service manager in a BL garage who has just taken in an old Austin 1100 from an old customer who has asked for a service tells the apprentice to change the oil, filter, plugs and points. Points, what's them???
OK oldpharte mode off.
But as others have pointed out, we do have a strange mix. When I buy fence panels, posts or trellis everything is in units of 2 feet, 3 feet and 6 feet (expressed metres or mm of course). And it's not just because of old British tooling either. All the stuff I bought last year from Lawsons was sourced in Poland.
Riley Blue said:
RobM77 said:
And education doesn't stop at school. Everyone in the UK has been living and working in a metric world for many decades now.RobM77 said:
Wills2 said:
I don't see the issue, we use both metric and imperial measurements every day and have done for 50 years, it's hardly beyond the wit of man to understand both and convert it in your head if it makes it easier for you.
I'd disagree with that. We count in decimal, so if a system uses decimal it's easier for us to work with. Imperial not only uses different bases than what we count in, but they're all different. 16 ounces in a pound, 1760 yards in a mile, 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard.For example: What's half an imperial ton in pounds? How about ounces is that? How many pounds is 100 ounces? If I have 9 inch square paving slabs and lay them butted up against each other, how many yards do 100 of them make? 150 of them? How many miles is that? These are everyday calculations that are trivial in metric, but unquestionably more difficult in imperial.
For comparison, half a metric tonne is 500kg, which in grams is 500,000g. If the paving slabs were 22cm across, then 100 of them is 2200cm, or 22 metres. Easy.
Edited to add: In reply to the above, you could say that if you have multiples of 16, converting from ounces to pounds is easier than g to kg, which it is. However, bring in another unit to the calculation that's not based on 16 and you have a whole world of trouble! This could happen if you're combining units: for example area and weight for pressure, or it could just be going up between units as your project or calculations scale: inches, feet, yards, miles. 24 inches is two feet, which is easy, but if you had that a hundred times, how many yards is that? How many miles?
Edited by RobM77 on Monday 24th February 10:46
My problem is that my brain is calibrated in the old stuff.
Wills2 said:
I don't see the issue, we use both metric and imperial measurements every day and have done for 50 years, it's hardly beyond the wit of man to understand both and convert it in your head if it makes it easier for you.
Drivers may use miles every day, but most people in the UK will very rarely use feet and inches these days. I'm quite happy with feet and inches, but it's months since I last used them for anything. The only two times I can think of I use imperial units these days is miles (on the road) and pints (in the pub). I used to use imperial units for things like peoples' heights and weights but I've switched to default to metric these days. Edited by kambites on Monday 24th February 10:55
Dracoro said:
kambites said:
but most people in the UK will very rarely use feet and inches these days.
Yet ask someone how tall they are...Edited by kambites on Monday 24th February 11:08
AC43 said:
PS as for the education thing my class in school was the last to be taught money in pounds, shillings and pence - that must have been when I was 6 in 1970 as the following year, 1971, was the year money went metric.
That reminds me of interviews with local people in Somerset that appeared in the press around that time. Various traders were asked how the introduction of decimal currency would affect them, including an old lady who ran a shop in, I think, Cheddar. Her reply,Edited by AC43 on Monday 24th February 10:40
" Oh no, we shan't bother about it. It'll stay in the cities and won't get to us down here."
I wonder if it ever did.
Riley Blue said:
That reminds me of interviews with local people in Somerset that appeared in the press around that time. Various traders were asked how the introduction of decimal currency would affect them, including an old lady who ran a shop in, I think, Cheddar. Her reply,
" Oh no, we shan't bother about it. It'll stay in the cities and won't get to us down here."
I wonder if it ever did.
They should have waited until all the old people were dead." Oh no, we shan't bother about it. It'll stay in the cities and won't get to us down here."
I wonder if it ever did.
RobM77 said:
I'd disagree with that. We count in decimal, so if a system uses decimal it's easier for us to work with. Imperial not only uses different bases than what we count in, but they're all different. 16 ounces in a pound, 1760 yards in a mile, 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard.
For example: What's half an imperial ton in pounds? How about ounces is that? How many pounds is 100 ounces? If I have 9 inch square paving slabs and lay them butted up against each other, how many yards do 100 of them make? 150 of them? How many miles is that? These are everyday calculations that are trivial in metric, but unquestionably more difficult in imperial.
For comparison, half a metric tonne is 500kg, which in grams is 500,000g. If the paving slabs were 22cm across, then 100 of them is 2200cm, or 22 metres. Easy.
Edited to add: In reply to the above, you could say that if you have multiples of 16, converting from ounces to pounds is easier than g to kg, which it is. However, bring in another unit to the calculation that's not based on 16 and you have a whole world of trouble! This could happen if you're combining units: for example area and weight for pressure, or it could just be going up between units as your project or calculations scale: inches, feet, yards, miles. 24 inches is two feet, which is easy, but if you had that a hundred times, how many yards is that? How many miles?
Valid points - but...For example: What's half an imperial ton in pounds? How about ounces is that? How many pounds is 100 ounces? If I have 9 inch square paving slabs and lay them butted up against each other, how many yards do 100 of them make? 150 of them? How many miles is that? These are everyday calculations that are trivial in metric, but unquestionably more difficult in imperial.
For comparison, half a metric tonne is 500kg, which in grams is 500,000g. If the paving slabs were 22cm across, then 100 of them is 2200cm, or 22 metres. Easy.
Edited to add: In reply to the above, you could say that if you have multiples of 16, converting from ounces to pounds is easier than g to kg, which it is. However, bring in another unit to the calculation that's not based on 16 and you have a whole world of trouble! This could happen if you're combining units: for example area and weight for pressure, or it could just be going up between units as your project or calculations scale: inches, feet, yards, miles. 24 inches is two feet, which is easy, but if you had that a hundred times, how many yards is that? How many miles?
Edited by RobM77 on Monday 24th February 10:46
in the real world do people really do those conversions - does anyone care how many grammes their car weighs, or how many mm there are in a km?
I suspect that in reality, people use the measures in isolation - so, a lb of butter, or a pint of milk - double the recipe and you put in two pints / 2 x 1lb of butter... the measure remains specific to the item - the things we measure in inches we rarely measure in miles - so the conversion rarely matters
so people are generally happy to mix decimalisation of money with imperial measurements in most other places - pints of beer / miles to travel / mpg / height in feet and inches / weight in stones and pounds / etc. - and it is not specifically generational - ask a child of 12 who is growing and they will know that they are below 5' or above 5' or 5'4" etc. they want to be tall, then they are aiming for 6' - never heard a child aiming to be above 2m or above 1.8m etc.
we are in the middle of selling / buying / renting out some houses - everyone talks in feet and inches - that is how they visualise a room - ahh 10x8 - big enough for a double / 15 ft sq - big room / etc.
as for land - we can measure in acres of hectares - but every land owner I know measures in acres (sounds far more impressive!)
and of course, we should mention computers and binary / gb / kb / etc. - where people just round it up anyway...
the reality is the general public doesn't care enough - they don't need precise accuracy - (who measures a room to the nearest millimetre?) and they rarely need to convert across imperial measures - so there is no issue in keeping what is familiar and no need to bring in extra accuracy...
the only big public conversion was fuel prices from gallons to litres and that only happened so that they could disguise the rising costs...
RobM77 said:
CzechItOut said:
grumpy52 said:
As the vast majority of the driving public didn't have a metric education they default to imperial.
The vast majority of width restrictions are signed in imperial but I do wonder why most of them are 6' 6" which is the nominal for a 2m conversion .
Really?The vast majority of width restrictions are signed in imperial but I do wonder why most of them are 6' 6" which is the nominal for a 2m conversion .
I'm 43 and we never did anything in imperial at school, everything was metric.
UK life expectancy is 80. Assuming people drive until they die, this makes the average driving period is 64 years (80 minus 16). This makes the median age of a driver is (64/2)+16 = 48.
Therefore, claiming the "vast majority" were educated in imperial is clearly false. At best it is a slight majority. However, if people over 48 were educated in metric, then it isn't a majority at all.
And education doesn't stop at school. Everyone in the UK has been living and working in a metric world for many decades now.Indeed - the "vast majority" actually had a metric education - 2018 government stats show only 22% of the population is over 60, metrification started in the late 60's/early 70s. The number will continue to fall. I had a metric primary education in the early '70s, then moved to an imperial high school, which rapidly changed over when it realised the problem.
donkmeister said:
* I'm sure someone will say "but Canada, Australia and New Zealand are all-metric"... Legally yes, but in day-to-day conversation Imperial is still common even amongst the younger generations. My cousins back in Canada are all in their 20s and use metric less than I do in the UK.
Might be true for Canada but not in my experience in Australia.Gassing Station | General Gassing | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff