Brexit, for once some facts.

[oyster]

It's nothing to do with changing back, it's accepting the fact that for everyday usage for vast majority of society our antiquated units are better. They are antiquated for a reason. Or perhaps you, d like entire sailing world to stop using knots... Windfoce system (F5 etc) to be outlawed... Road signs throughout land to be chopped down...etc etc..
I don't think you, ve been reading the posts OG. As an engineer of a kind of course I use SI system and know its advantages. But that doesn't mean all of a sudden I want to discuss windstrenght in km/h (or m/s, French use both and ours). Mates would think I, d had a breakdown if I phoned and said "it's 45 km/h tomorrow.." ...They,d say WTF you on about.. Its a force 6...(or 30kts ish) And long may it last.
There is more to life than building bogs OG.

Besides many engineering measurements are stuck with imperial probably forever. And some manage to mix the 2 systems and with little confusion... Look at wheels on your car. The diameter is almost without exception imperial the world over.. Inches.
The width.. Metric. The profile %age..
205/60/15...
Width 205 mm... Profile 80% .(depth of tyre 80% of 205) And bead diameter 15 inches. Not sure but that pretty much the norm worldwide. (for radial tyres)
Similar story with some bearings, oil seals and such. Imperial units are not going away. And it's nothing at all to do with Brexit. You are politicising it for your little grumble and moan at leavers. (which Flecc isn't)
Accepting the limitations and benifits of various systems is common sense. Use the one you wish... Either way.
But don't legislate one way or another. People are capable of mixing and matching, perhaps you aren't? Personally thought you were intelligent enough to do so??

The inches in tyre measurement being defined as 25.4 millimetres exactly. Which means the tyre moulds can be perfectly well engineered using SI units alone. The use of inches is, obviously, for compatibility with existing vehicles and simplicity for people who are looking at cars and tyres.

 

[flecc]

I must confess, I never saw any advantage in imperial units.
I never ever needed to know what the exact volume of a pint, weight of a pound or ounce or to understand the difference between ounce and fluid ounce.
Even the name 'imperial' has an obsolescence undertone.
It's so much simpler to equate a pint to half litre, a pound to half kilo, an ounce to 28grs, a mile to 1.6km then the world becomes straight, not wonky like imperial units, feet and inches.

Just like Oyster, you just aren't getting it, it's not about mathematics, its about human scale and convenience. The imperial measures fit our lives as we live them, like the useful ounce in foodstuffs and cooking, not the silly gram which is far too small so needs 28 (28.3) as you said.

A practical actual example of why that metric measure is so poor. Ham sliced off the bone etc in a supermarket. I order 4 ozs and the assistant easily arrives at four ounces with X slices.

I order 100 grammes which is half an ounce below that 4 ounces, the assistant cuts to just over 80 grammes which is well short. So they cut another slice which puts it well over 100 grammes so they apologise and ask if that's ok. All because the unit is too small for common human needs. The nice fat ounce with 14 grammes tolerance either way is just right for the job.
.
.

 

[Zlatan]

I must confess, I never saw any advantage in imperial units.
I never ever needed to know what the exact volume of a pint, weight of a pound or ounce or to understand the difference between ounce and fluid ounce.
Even the name 'imperial' has an obsolescence undertone.
It's so much simpler to equate a pint to half litre, a pound to half kilo, an ounce to 28grs, a mile to 1.6km then the world becomes straight, not wonky like imperial units, feet and inches.

I like the irony in your post. It does simplify things...

The Beaufort scale was an attempt to quantify the winds effects and not simply it's speed..as anyone who knows much at all about sailing will tell you winds of equal velocity (actually speed) can contain varying amounts of power.. (air density, pressure and temperature all play a part)
I know my minimum air speed for windsurf planing in UK is generally around 13 mph... In hotter climes its probably 15 mph... Agreed still both the same Force number... Again tho we understand precisely what a F6 can do... and what a F2 means..Windsurfers and sailors talk about the F4 barrier...They don't say the 23km/h barrier. F4 is intuitive. Rivers/rapids are graded on similar scale.
Perhaps unsurprisingly tho all technical aspects of Windsurfing are SI units.. (masts, length and stiffness, booms same, boards, length width and volume, sails.. Area... Even reserve volume and float ratio (essentially specific density of bosrd/sailor) all SI.
There is reason and call for both.
Funny thing is I,d have a bet in conversation all of us use the imperial. I, ll bet OG, Oyster and Woosh still talk about mpg, that they are 5feet 10 and that they weigh 12 stone.. (or whatever)
Be honest, how many of you anti imperial posters have your scales set to kg..and talk about litres per 100km.(the EU unit for economy)???
Be honest OG, Woosh, Oyster.. Come on. No porkies.

 

[flecc]

Let's face it, even representing fractions can be problematic on computer systems. Of course, it is possible to do so, in terms of visible symbols, very satisfactorily. But the difficulty of typing any random fraction (e.g. of the sorts we need in Imperial/US Customary systems) is ridiculous.

Using Microsoft Word and simply typing fractions:

½ 1/3 ¼ 1/5 1/6 1/7 1/8 1/9 1/10 ¾ 3/8

Going to Word’s Symbol insertion, you can add:

⅛ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞

To get further, you need to use different fonts and/or ways of constructing arbitrary fractions. There is a tool for doing so in Word, but it is tedious. I suspect most fractions that are typed are copied and pasted from elsewhere!

View attachment 44052

And it is a Word-specific approach not available in browsers, other apps, etc. Can't even copy it from Word and paste here other than via a screenshot.

In practical terms, we need to avoid any need to represent fractions - at least, any other than the three or seven basic ones.

There you go again, the obsession with maths.

The great majority of people don't use or want to use maths in their day to day lives, they prefer to keep life simple with very small numbers and preferably single numbers.

You use whatever you like. Just leave other people alone and stop trying to dictate to your preference, it usually isn't theirs. The politicians are giving the choice back and immediately all the petty dictators get upset because some of us welcomed the return to the freedom of choice the people should always have.
.

 

[oyster]

There you go again, the obsession with maths.

The great majority of people don't use or want to use maths in their day to day lives, they prefer to keep life simple with very small numbers and preferably single numbers.

You use whatever you like. Just leave other people alone and stop trying to dictate to your preference, it usually isn't theirs. The politicians are giving the choice back and immediately all the petty dictators get upset because some of us welcomed the return to the freedom of choice the people should always have.
.

But it's only a few years ago we got rid of halfpennies! And not that many since we jettisoned farthings.

I guess in your world no-one buys a house or a car because they can't count that far?

 

[flecc]

The use of inches is, obviously, for compatibility with existing vehicles and simplicity for people who are looking at cars and tyres.

At last a sign that you are getting it. Exactly, it's simplicity for real people, instead of the complexity of over large numbers.
.

 

[oyster]

I order 100 grammes which is half an ounce below that 4 ounces, the assistant cuts to just over 80 grammes which is well short. So they cut another slice which puts it well over 100 grammes so they apologise and ask if that's ok. All because the unit is too small for common human needs. The nice fat ounce with 14 grammes tolerance either way is just right for the job.

Doesn't that reflect their ham cutting skills as much as anything else?

I remember skilled servers who would cut one slice, check the weight of that and cut as many more as needed. With high confidence they would all be very similar. If they get the first slice "wrong", there is no way (ha!) to recover the situation in full slices unless you adjustthe size of them.

 

[oyster]

At last a sign that you are getting it. Exactly, it's simplicity for real people, instead of the complexity of over large numbers.
.

But using inches does mean we see tyres at least as big as 66 inches and widths of 900.

And no-one seems put out by paracetamol tablets of 500 milligrams.

 

[flecc]

But it's only a few years ago we got rid of halfpennies! And not that many since we jettisoned farthings.

Once again demonstrating the superior flexibility of Imperial, readily adjusting to our needs.

I guess in your world no-one buys a house or a car because they can't count that far?

Now you are being silly. We buy in pounds, exactly the same pounds that we had back in 1970 with a different divisor. We can count as well as anyone, but we don't want to spend every minute of our lives calculating with inconvenient oversize numbers when we have perfectly convenient fewer numbers, fit for the job.
.

 

[flecc]

Doesn't that reflect their ham cutting skills as much as anything else?

I remember skilled servers who would cut one slice, check the weight of that and cut as many more as needed. With high confidence they would all be very similar. If they get the first slice "wrong", there is no way (ha!) to recover the situation in full slices unless you adjustthe size of them.

Nothing to do with skill, everything to do with units that are far too small, many of them to a single slice.
.

 

[Zlatan]

But using inches does mean we see tyres at least as big as 66 inches and widths of 900.

And no-one seems put out by paracetamol tablets of 500 milligrams.

Come on Oyster. What are your scales set to.?
How do you measure economy of your car?

 

[flecc]

But using inches does mean we see tyres at least as big as 66 inches and widths of 900.

On our cars!!

How many times must I say "in everyday common use".
.

 

[Zlatan]

Many years ago we were having this very discussion and about dropping imperial from curriculum. Most (all the mathematicians) were strongly in favour of following Government advice of time and dropping them completely. A few of us wanted to just cover them, but not for calculations.
At end of meeting I stood up and said I was in a rush to go buy a new suit could anybody guess my height. 6 foot 2...6 foot 1...nearly everybody shouted an answer. Nobody said 1 metre 87..Nobody... I then asked"and my chest size? ". The penny dropped.
I then asked should we completely drop imperial? We didn't.

 

[jonathan.agnew]

On our cars!!

How many times must I say "in everyday common use".
.

Indeed, let's recalibrate the number of hits received by a web site. Let's make our new zero minus 30 (the arbitrary point where 30 imagined people may have said to each other how much they dislike it and would never go there). Now, let's divide each hit by 0.75423 (the length of time it takes a gnat to flatulate in spring). Let's give people time to get used to it, to speak fondly of how their grandparents used it in the good old days of imperialism.

 

[Danidl]

Come on Oyster. What are your scales set to.?
How do you measure economy of your car?

Not Oyster .. but I will bite.. Our weighing scales are all Kgs ..including the kitchen ones . The car is set to read Km.hr and the odometer Kms . The fuel computer does kms per litre. I know that I typically fill the car with 50 litres of diesel and get about 1000Km. My ebike is set at km.hr. It could be reset to miles per hour. Actually when I bought it it was set up in MpH , since I got it in Lisburn,near Belfast . We buy our butter in units of 454grams ..which was the old pound, and it is marked off on the package in units of 100 grams. We buy our meat in Kilos. Our kitchen measures are usually metric, but the jugs and measuring spoons also have imperial markings.

 

[Nev]

What do you buy Guinness in?

Bottles?

 

[Zlatan]

Bottles?

Pint or half?
I, m not saying anybody should use imperial, just let them if they want and understand why. They do have a place in UK..

 

[flecc]

So when you drive in a 30 zone what speed do you drive at. And in a 60? A 70?
But heyho. Good for you. There is always the exception. Rest of us use convenient speedo readings to match road signs. Think it might be illegal to not have spoed limits accessible on your speedo. (on bikes in km/h the limits must be marked)???
Unless of course you are in a foreign country. In which case WTF.

Danidl is in a foreign country which has all metric measure, Southern Ireland.

Hence his using all metric, kilometres matching his road signs.
.

 

[Zlatan]

Danidl is in a foreign country which has all metric measure, Southern Ireland.

Hence his using all metric, kilometres matching his road signs.
.

Yep, I realised mid post... Makes his comment rather irrelevant. Deleted mine.

 

[Danidl]

Danidl is in a foreign country which has all metric measure, Southern Ireland.

Hence his using all metric, kilometres matching his road signs.
.

But cannot you not see that both the UK and USA are the outlyers ? .. and are the miles not even different?. When Ireland was part of the Empire , we even had a different length for the Mile!., So the mile was not even standard. If I cross the Border I just remember to stick to 96 on the antiquated main road to Belfast. When I get on the Motorway at Newry South, ,paid for by Ireland and the EU I go to 120.