Brexit, for once some facts.
- Thread starter flecc
- Start date
I strongly agree with the spirit of his announcement, the metric system though great for science and engineering is all too often an abomination in ordinary non technical life. The avoirdupois system for weight in an everyday human scale is far more practical.
Perhaps he's a product of Tony Blair's "education, education, education" everyone must go to university policy. System was the word he should have used in place of unit.
16 ounces make a pound and 14 of those pounds can make a stone, and eight of those stones can make a Cwt while 20 of those makes a ton of 2240 pounds or 35,840 ounces.
That's real growth, Britain going places, though possibly to hell in a handcart as the saying goes.
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Who cares, I said day to day human scale. We don't weigh water when preparing a recipe!
However, it's an easy one to answer, 1.25** lbs since a gallon weighs 10 lbs near enough.
**Precise weight 1.2528 lbs.
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You have assumed I was talking about a UK pint.
In this highly interconnected world, having two very significantly different pints in widespread use is confusing.
Stick to metric. If you wish, call 500 ml a pint (which fits nicely in a pint glass with room for a head or imperfect balance). Maybe call 500 grams a pound. At least in informal, colloquial circumstances.
Of course, you are in the UK, not the USA.
Metric is very silly in day to day terms, as you clearly shown by lapsing into hundreds with your two examples. The arbitrary nature of the metre means none of the measures are practical in day to day life. A litre is to big for beer, too small for petrol. A centimetre to small for judging or measuring a persons height etc. A kilogramme too large for recipes and the gramme too small for most dey to day purposes.
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My point, though, was that we are in a massively connected world. In a particular instance you might feel confident in making an assumption but if you pick an arbitrary document (in English) which refers to pints, you cannot safely do so.
Hundreds and larger numbers are in pretty darned regular daily use with many units!
110 yards, 220 yards, etc. were standard athletics distances.
200 pounds is a pretty regular US expression of someone's weight.
London to Edinburgh is around 400 miles.
Mountain heights in feet.
Flying heights of aeroplanes.
Grosses of matches.
Daffodil heads.
A litre for petrol measure is just fine. Gallons were a pain as you'd so often end up with halves and quarters. Whereas a typical car of today having a tank of around 50 litres means that to the nearest litre is perfectly acceptable most of the time. Much easier than working out things like 8 3/8 gallons at 6/10 a gallon.
A kilogram of flour is just right for my bread sessions. With three to five grams of a special yeast-like ingredient. Certainly wouldn't want to deal with fractions of ounces. Or 46/7000 of a pound (grains).
In the end, almost everything is arbitrary when it comes to units. And a reasonably consistent system more than makes up for sometimes larger numbers and complexity of other systems. Indeed, avoidance of fractions alone is a major help.
Again, you are absolutely right flecc.. SI system grew from engineers and mathematicians who demand order and repetitivity in units... ie a constance as amounts increase or decrease. That's not the case for everyday human activity. We prefer organic "units" we can understand and generally (but not always) correspond in usage to numbers we easily understand ie numbers between 1 and 9...
Think about it... In old days we bought 5 gallons of petrol, we were about 6 feet tall and drank 3 pints of beer and bought 6 eggs.
Organic units grown to fit usage rather than calculation.
We do understand numbers under 10 and see the 3ness of 3 much better than the value of let's say 16..developing systems which lend themselves to calculation often lose that organic nature.
My height... 185cm...I,ve just bought 45 litres of petrol..
Being 6ft tall and buying 10 gallons of fuel is intrinsicly more understandable but harder to do calculations with..
I don't know why we can't have both. Use the one you feel happy with.
Go down the pub and consider how sensible the units were for spirits. 1/4, 1/5 or 1/6 of a gill - a unit hardly used anywhere else than the pub or very old recipe books.
So 1 1/4, 1, or 0.8333 of a fluid ounce.
I lived in a pub all my teenage years and until 28 or so... We served pints... And halves... Or shots. The sizes of which normally correspond to having between 1 and 9 of them in a night... What the value actually is is irrelevant to drinker,but in an evening he or she will drink perhaps 4 or 5 of them...
Drinks trade is epitome of exactly what I was talking about. Ask a drinker or landlord... Not a mathematician.
The actual measurement is utterly irrelevant... Its to get to a unit size that we buy "a handful of them".. A number we understand. Beer is served in pints.. Whisky in a shot, wine by the glass... We have 4 or 5 of them... See the theme... Even if you went for SI units the trade would do exactly the same to produce that"organic " size we can understand...
Wether you call it 40 cc (guess) or 1/6 of a Gill is utterly irrelevant. It's a measure behind the bar (or in optic,or marked on glass) for us to buy between 1 and 9 of in a night. (or perhaps more if its a long night)
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No it isn't. Our traditional imperial units evolved entirely out of human needs.
The arbitrary metric system was created entirely for mathematical convenience with total disregard for human needs. And it shows all the time, as you illustrate with your compatibility suggestions showing how out of scale metric is. It's why we still use miles and mpg, ignoring all the attempts to persuade us to use litres and kilometres
I love the metric system in its place, just as I love our imperial one in its place. That why I use both freely according to suitability as Zlatan suggests.
What I object to is being dictated to, such as when the government were idiotic enough to threaten huge fines and imprisonment for shopkeepers and market traders who dared serve a pound of apples or five lbs of potatoes, even confiscating their scales.
If the metric system was so superior, why were they so worried? They were worried because they know the metric system is so inferior for such purposes and knew the public were opposed to it.
So I'm pleased we are now to return to the legal freedom to have either in shops, on stalls and in pubs. Just watch the pounds and ounces take over again over time.
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Exactly..Great post.
Buying 63 litres of fuel, being 185 cm tall is simply not human developed organic units.
Its units forced upon us by engineers to help calculations. Yes, obviously easier to calculate with but generally in 99% of cases we do not calculate anything with them. We pass them on as information and with less intuitive understanding if what they really mean.
Its not through stubbornness that UK almost 50 years after introduction of SI units for length in scools/colleges that people will still say tall people are over 6ft tall. Ask a 10 year old... They will still say "my dad is about 6ft"...Its for a reason. Its a unit that has grown and stayed because it fits its usage perfectly. Even if feet and inches is utterly ridiculous for calculations. It's exactly the same with gallons for cars. And pints for beer and milk. They have stayed for a reason.
Sizes of feet.. EU I, m a 45...In UK... a 10..
Which is most intuitive... 10 is big... 6 is small. Easy. Numbers between 1 and 10 again. A unit that has developed and stayed for a reason, but what the 10 means, I have no idea... But it doesn't matter. My feet are a 10...(perhaps 10inches long but don't think so)
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But you, ve hit the nail on the head... Its a pint. One.. (well about but not really)
Try ordering 500ml (or is it cc) when you, ve had 5 pints.
"A pint please love".
Or
"Could I have 500 mili litres of beer please"
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It won't catch on. I promise.
Trouble is, once someone accepted an ounce, a pound, a pint as a sensible, useful unit for one purpose, it then got used for everything, regardless how sensible or otherwise.
Gone are the days where we really did have sensible units for particular purposes - such as the 15 lb wool stone - allowing one pound of crap in each stone leaving a standard stone of moderately clean wool.
It's always sensible since as Zlatan and I are highlighting, the numbers are kept small by the traditional system. Unlike the idiocy of measuring in hundreds of units which has no perceptive meaning.
Only because its no longer required, the strength of the imperial system illustrated by it evolving to suit, rather than being enforced when not suitable as the metric system is.
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The word would be demi as in demi litre .
I have contributed to this discussion a few times before, so wouldn't be this ... But lets get real .. how many of you are interested in "five ton equivalent " as a measure of a heat exchanger. The Joule is precise. But the KW hr is useful and useful wins over precise. . There is no practical differences between a Yard and a Metre, or a Tonne and a Ton.or a demi kilo of pork or a pound or a demi litre and the pint.
Because I am a certain age I have familiarity with the older measures and still mentally do a miles per gallon rather than kms per litre.
Due to the lack of HGV drivers the government are stopping the requirement for drivers who passed their car test after 1997 to take the B+E test to tow a trailer heavier than 750kg. This they hope will free up space for more HGV tests,they are also dropping the reversing and hitching part of the HGV. This will be carried out by 3rd parties. I don't know why they don't reinstate the 7½ ton entitlement for car drivers who passed their test after 97. B+E tests end on the 20th of September but there is no date for when the entitlement will be added to everyone's licences.
No problem with demi. But we already seem content to say "a half" for beer. And if the base unit shifts, we can use "half" for an amount near a pint, and "quarter" for an amount near a half pint.