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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 Are there any other countries that still use these outdated units apart from USA.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 |
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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milk , petrol and wine by the litre and 2 metres of electrical cable Are there any other countries that still use these outdated units apart from USA.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 ----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==---- http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 120,000+ Newsgroups ----= East and West-Coast Server Farms - Total Privacy via Encryption =---- |
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"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 Are there any other countries that still use these outdated units apart from USA.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 |
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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 ? |
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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. |
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"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 |
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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! |
#10
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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. |
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