Entertainment For Lively Minds
When is a pint not a pint?
Posted by Martin Simmonds on 22 December 2011 - 12:49pm.
What possible chance could there ever be to resolve our differences over the Euro when we steadfastly refuse to budge on the imperial measurement system?
Will you ever go into a pub and ask for a beer rather than a pint? When filling your car with fuel, despite being surrounded by litres, do you ever think in terms other than how many miles per gallon you are going to get out of it?
This rather entertaining article from the beeb web site examines the British reluctance to join our European cousins.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16245391
So what are our chances? Will we ever shift?
(One thing I learned from this link is that our imperial measurement system is slightly different to the American one.)
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I wouldn't mind
so much if the champions of the imperial system actually understood it.
It's easy to fool them though; just ask them how many feet are in a mile or what a pint of water weighs.
(The only person who answered correctly was my dad, but he cheated on the second by converting to metric and back again.)
We're on our way
I'm pretty much entirely metric in my thinking (except for distances which are in miles). I'm 44, so I guess that young people may be entirely converted. I don't think anyone of any age would want to do back to pre-decimal currency, and surely everone thinks of temperatures in centigrade?
I do have one friend who insists on imperial measurements out of contrariness (Why yes, he does read The Telegrpah. How did you guess?) I gave him a copy of Warwick Cairn's book 'About the Size of It' for Christmas a coupLe of years ago, and it went down very well.
We will shift
I think we're nearly there already. The instances that you quote are really only personal preferences. An old dressmaker or carpenter may still measure things in feet and inches (and 16ths of and inch!!) because it makes no difference to anyone but themselves and if you can picture a measurement you're less likely to make a basic error. I fill my car in litres and have no idea how many gallons my tank holds - I don't know how many miles per gallon I get either but then I don't care as it only becomes relevant when I come to buying a new one and making comparisons. I'd be happy to move to have litres in pubs, what's the problem (except all the new glassware required).
The one huge area that would be expensive and problematic to convert is out road signs. They're all in miles or mph... and UK cars often have their speedos designed to make the mph reading much easier than the kph reading. Can anybody picture what a mile actually is? A mile marker on a road sign is only of any use when converted immediately in your head to a time to destination ... unless you're travelling under self propulsion.
Having said that, I'm lucky enough to be virtually bilingual when it comes to measurement systems (because of when I grew up) so it makes no difference to me either way ... as long as nobody makes me do any calculations in base 12 or gives me measurements in 32nds of an inch!
Ireland
changed its road signs to metric within the last 10 years and no disaster happened
Oh wait, that economic thing.....bring back MPH!
Took a while
As I understand it, it took a while to implement - it wasn't changed over overnight and I think there's a slightly more relaxed attitude to a lot of the rules of the road in Ireland than there is in the UK so a few inadvertant transgressions were not so much of a problem - there's alos much more room on the roads in Ireland so more room to make a mistake. I think it would be a very expensive exercise and achieve absolutely nothing.
We already have to have most cars specially made for the UK market so the speedo seems to be a tiny problem to overcome.
When we drove from the US into Canada and back again, we had to push a button on the dash to convert the (digital) speedo over and then drive according to the numbers on the signs. I don't think we really see speed limits as imperial or metric, just numbers that you need to keep the needle on the dashboard below.
Agree with above
I am in my early 40s (which is the new early 30s, right?), and I was not taught any imperial measurement at any point in school, on the grounds we were all going to go metric within the next few decades. So here I am in a land of pounds, pints and miles, with a Maths O level, but no training in practical measurements. Which is a bit odd. The final metric conversion should hurry up, I think,.
Pounds?!
Surely pounds have been pretty much expunged from UK life. I can't think of the last time I saw it referred to.... except in my wallet!
Body weight?
I can tell you how much I weigh in stones and pounds, but not kilograms. I don't know if this is unusual.
Interesting
I would never have thought of that, the last time I was weighed it was done in kilos (I have no idea how many!). I suspect that you're not alone though by any means. I would contend though that this usage falls into the category I was suggesting above where it just a personal use and it makes no difference to anyone else how you prefer to weigh yourself.
I'm 47
We learnt mainly metric at school but my engineering apprenticeship was imperial. Now at work, room dimensions are metric but set sizes and projection screens remain stubbornly imperial. Because cable lengths are usually imprecise and variable according to the exact route (cable in 10m, 20m lengths etc, I look at the distance to be covered and think 30ft) I think in both metric and imperial although if I want to visualise a screen or set panel specified in metric I mentally roughly convert to imperial. I don't think I will ever get to thinking totally in metric.
I'm 33...
...and I think in a weird mishmash of centimetres, inches, feet, metres and miles.
Weight is ounces if I'm making a cake, kilos and grammes if I'm at the butcher's, stone and pounds if I'm on the scales.
Petrol is litres, unless I'm talking about engine efficiency, which is MPG, as Martin suggests. Pints of milk. Pints of beer. Litres of cooking oil.
And I tell time in Planck Units*.
(*not really.)
True
The reality is you have to be familiar with both.
But I was in the US and bought what was a 16 oz bottle of Diet Coke. I have no idea what 16 oz is in millilitres or pints.
Yeah, fluid oz?
That unit means sod all to me. Also: US recipes that call for "cups". Apparently really simple and useful, but I have no frame of reference.
That's easy!
16ozs is exactly one pint simple!...... as long as you're in the US. Pretty much everywhere else it's 0.8 of a pint.
What threw me
was that I didn't know if it was 16 oz by volume (i.e. fluid ounces) or 16 oz by weight.
(Plus I'd forgotten how many ounces were in a pint.)
When it's a jar!
Sorry.
Metric in everything but height
Telling me the bank robber was 187 cm tall means sod all, I'm afraid
yep -wot he said
.
The railway
Ever ahead of the game, we still work with miles and chains on the railway, so metric seems a little way off yet. Further off, at least, than that bloke in the top hat waving a red flag in front of my cab.
Digital vs imperial
Is there an imperial equivalent of a Megabyte? Or a Megapixel? As an Ipad owner who still prefers to read a paper and use Ektachrome, I would like to know. In metric Australia, pubs sell beer by the half litre rather than by the pint, though inevitably every state seems to have a different name for the glasses used (schooner/midi/pot etc).
No
A byte is 8 bits a kilobyte is 1024 bytes a megabyte is 1048576 bytes - hardly a metric measurement! Storage space is therefore more imperial than metric although it's normally described as binary.