I see in BBC News No 10 wants t accept Imperial measurements again.The only reason I could see to join the EU was to go metric.
Going back to the OP and I read it at the same time originally. It really does beggar belief what is going on in the UK the past couple of years. Simply frightful that any kind of taxpayers money is going towards even thinking about this kind of backwards thinking. I hope it is just usual media hype! We may wax lyrical about times past but I hope this kind of
pure guff is stomped out before any kind of "bill" is considered. They'll be telling us TV has to go back to black and white programmes. We have to wear bowler hats and waistcoats, and we all have to be able to whistle Mitch Miller and BBC radio 4 (only one left) stops broadcasting each night at midnight with everyone standing up, hand on heart while the national anthem is played.
...Farenheit: Never seen a UK weather forecast in it in my lifetime -forget lifetime : Modern life. I must admit this is one of the few conversions I just can't do in my head. One case where I think decimal degrees wins
absolutely hands down. Kelvin is just an offset either way, 99% of folk don't need or never need to know kelvin thanks to the brilliant metric temperature scale
...Body weight: I guess we may still think of stones and pounds. But everything I see over last 20 years at least for a proper measurement like BMI, body classes, weights for competitions is all in kg. Every time I've been weighed for work for medicals or helicopter transfers -sorry it's all kg. When I back-calculate to stone and pounds etc. I'm afraid that's my bad, not others!
...miles and mpg: I guess the "gallon" (imperial) part is the dafter part in mpg as we buy in litres but I just cannot get my head around litr
es per 100km because you have to work out your journey length first before you know your fuel rather than buying your fuel and knowing how far you will get with it. Even dafter the US with their smaller gallons than imperial, nevermind their awful attitude to transport and cars
...kts and m/sec: Well one of the very few things I remember as a nav. arch. is a knot is 0.5144m/sec so if you
struggle to convert from kts to /sec then a simple 0.5 conversion is mostly close and add-on a few for much larger numbers. kts to mph is
roughly a conversion of 1.2. I've never had a case of needing to convert kts to km/h so no idea
...Tons! I work with Europeans and we work with Americans. What
is a "ton" as our Europeans use it far too casually: Is it metric, or a long or short ton. Everyone I work with in the UK refers very clearly clearly to Te (metric)
...Centimet
res: For me I find Europeans know centimet
ers intrinsically: 0.75 centimetres rather than 7.5mm. They can't convert easily to mm or metres
...I had to check with a colleague in Paris the other month, he was sent a spec. sheet referring to a thickness in mils. I checked with him that a
mil is not a mis-spelling of a mm unlike lots of people use -it's a carry over from imperial and pretty much the only place we see this stated is in US data sheets who are not interested in selling products outside the US
...standard
isation. My boss agreed everyone in our company uses a basis of a standard units on mandatory on-line calculators (no excel sheets allowed for calculations). This means I have to use met
res to describe a 30km long line, and I also have to enter the pipeline diameter of 200mm in metres, plus the corrosion coating of 1mm in metres, plus a corrosion allowance on a fraction of a mm in metres. I don't have enough fingers to count how many decimal place shifts each time and apparently I'm not the only one complaining lots of mistakes are made for simple slip-ups of non-intuitive units. When I joined that team I said to that guy he was probably the only person I've met who would stipulate to measure the distance between the office and the moon in mm, but measure the thickness of a human hair in metres.
There was a post before about how a space probe was lost because of "English" measurements: I found that very hard to read from an author in a country who can't even spell words in "English" for love nor money. My spelling and grammar is very bad since school but it's no more pedantic than any of the other discussions to say we should acknowledge English language and speak / write it rather than succumb to "American". We also must pride ourselves on being able to write or say a word more than 2 syllables in length without needing to shorten it.