May I present to you, how to measure like a Brit
It’s great fun especially when you’re trying to work out how fuel efficient your car has been when your tank and fuel pump is in litres and the fuel efficiency is in miles per gallon.
Oh and you’ll have a jolly time following a recipe from more than 20 years ago trying to remember what the hell “Gas Mark 4” is in centigrade for fan or convection ovens.
Oh and my personal favourite for the industry I’m in: when designing a PCB your component sizes will use imperial codes, your wire diameters will be in AWG, your track widths and PCB dimensions will be in millimetres, but your copper thicknesses will be in ounces despite the final weight for the assembly will be in grams.
Bear in mind that the gallon we use is different from the US gallon, too:
- a UK gallon is eight (imperial) pints of 20 fluid ounces, so 4.54 litres
- a US gallon is 231 cubic inches, so 3.79 litres
The reason that I thought American car fuel economy was so terrible as a child is partly because UK mpg is +20% on US mpg for the same car on the same fuel. But also, because American car fuel economy is so terrible.
Don’t forget that the UK fluid ounces are different (slightly smaller) than the US fluid ounces as well
20 UK fl oz = 19.21 US fl oz
Holy crap, that’s why craft beer tall cans are different from 16oz tall boys here in the states. I’d always wondered why the were 19.2.
It’s weirder when you look at Canada vs USA. Mileage here is usually written L/100km, but back in the day the cars were exactly the same but the mileage in Canada was better because the the US gallon is only ~83% the size of a proper gallon.
Thank you for posting this. So sick and tired of people saying that GB switched to Metric.
This! That stupid map that just shows the US and Burma always annoys me. The US customary system includes Metric units. Canada and England still use Imperial/Customary. And “Metric” Is actually like 5 different systems with similar features like ANSI/ISO, KMS/CGS, and the three different pressure measurements.
Natural units >>> Metric I want an alternative to Metric that uses base 12 units instead.
It’s because we’re stuck with a bunch of twats who can’t let go of the past. They’ll stick with Imperial measurements, mostly because the word looks like “Imperialist” and that’s the side they want to be on. Jacob Rees-Mogg is a wrought-iron dildo.
The only part I disagree with is stone/pounds for people’s weight. Although we use stone, I’ve never heard someone use pounds… Maybe if you’re in Weight Watchers or something, but otherwise it’d be rounded to the nearest half a stone (e.g. 9 and a half stone)
Yeah, it’s common talking about babies birth weight but that’s about it.
I’m 14st 13lb. Nowhere near 15 stone.
According to this chart, goat milk is vegan 🤔
Goats are actually malevolent vegetables.
Since volume is equivalent to metres cubed and distance is equivalent to metres (both multiplied by some conversion coefficient), I think fuel efficiency should be measured in metres squared, because why not.
But square inches, because come on.
A similar chart could be made for the US, proving that it does use metric: soda and wine bottles, medicine doses, eye-glasses measurements (in fact most medical things).
I think that both systems are used in schools now.
But then I see cooking instructions for a “cup of chicken strips” and a recipe having 1/4 cup of butter, and I wonder why anyone thought that volume was a good idea there.
If it’s medical, over 12%abv, or 2L of soda we use metric. Or related to spaceflight after the incident
your track widths and PCB dimensions will be in millimetres
Not milli-inches? Is this a UK thing or have PCB design evolve since I last touched it?
Anyway, milli-inches is one of the funniest unities I’ve used.
But what if it is horse milk?
Cubic hands?
How about spherical feet?
Yes. Calculating how much a car journey is going to cost is such a chore. Trip in miles ÷ mpg × 4.5 × £/litre of fuel = cost.
I just assume I’ll do 45.45 MPG, then I’m pleasantly surprised when the fuel bill is lower than expected.
Short distances should be meters, feet, inches, millimetres.
None of that fractions of an inch bollocks.
And milk is often actually in litres and half litres, we just assume it’s in pints. Clever little bit of shrinkflation.
Short distances should be meters, feet, inches, millimetres.
American machinists go a different way altogether: thousandths of an inch. So no binary fractions, but still imperial-ish. :/
And milk is often actually in litres and half litres, we just assume it’s in pints.
That one makes sense.
You forgot that inside temperature is in Fahrenheit, outside is in Celcius.
No it isn’t, I rarely see fahrenheit in the UK
Old people who still remember old money
How old are you? Even my parents, both in their 70s, use Celcius for everything.
Invents the word Soccer, calls americans dumb for using it.
(TBF it’s dumb, especially since you call hand egg football, sry americans)
apparently its short for association football
The term football used to apply to any ball sport played on foot (as apposed to on horseback). The idea that it could only belong to soccer is actually quite arrogant.
Why not assfoot?
i think assball sounds funnier
Third World Ball Chace.
It’s always worth bringing this out again at times like these, while the US trots out the same old excuses for their lack of progress that every other country that used to have old measurements has made.
“It’s fine”.
The US system month/day/year is pretty bad, but honestly, so is day/month/year. Pretty much everything else is written from largest to smallest unit. Regular numbers: 123, here 1 is the 100s, 2 is the 10s and 3 is the 1s. In money, when a currency also have smaller units, you always say the largest first. “3 dollars, 50 cents.” A digital clock displays the numbers ordered from largest to smallest - 10:45:31. So why are people so proud of the european date format? Writing out a full timestamp would switch from increasing to decreasing units.
ISO-8601 is the only sensible choice.
Came to say exactly this. ISO8601 🔝🧠
I think it was just us Swedes who embraced ISO-8601
It’s been Canada’s official standard for decades. It’s just starting to hit the general population though.
I’m in agreement with everything except temperature. I’m not saying that Celsius is bad, but I do think that using the phase changes of water as the sole point of comparison is a bad argument.
For most people, the interaction with temperature is through the weather, and I don’t think Celsius is inherently better for that. I like that in Fahrenheit 0 is a cold winter’s day, and 100 is a hot summer’s day. I find that more relevant in day-to-day life than the phase changes of water. The big argument I see for preferring Celsius is that everybody else is doing it, so we may as well jump in.
However, in regards to the other systems of measurement, metric is best. The imperial system was nice when manufacturing measuring tools was difficult, so using easily divisible numbers allowed for easier creation of accurate measuring devices. But it has been quite some time since that was a reasonable argument (and that’s only really relevant for some of the units anyway).
Temperature is so much more than weather
Also it’s very relative. For me. 0 celsius is a cold winter day. Which is about 17f
100f is also a degree that never occurs here.
I like that in Fahrenheit 0 is a cold winter’s day, and 100 is a hot summer’s day.
Fahrenheit fans always say stuff like this, but it just doesn’t work. 100 isn’t too bad in that respect, but 0 is just insane. If you want it to be equivalent, 0 °F would be 0 °C. Because there’s no way that -18 °C is as cold as 38 °C is hot.
Besides that, knowing about things like snow or ice outside, whether your fridge is likely to cause some stuff to frost over, etc., or whether the thing you’re cooking has reached boiling point are all just as valid things for your day-to-day experience.
But besides all that, SI is a package deal. You use Fahrenheit and now you’ve got to redefine all the other units that are derived from the Kelvin, because now you’re suddenly using Rankine.
My point is that Fahrenheit is not like our other units of measure. 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 1760 yards or 5280 feet in a mile is ridiculous. There’s no benefit to these units with arbitrary scaling factors for conversion. That lack of consistent scaling factor is the primary difference with metric, and it is also precisely why metric is superior. The image’s assertion that these units are stupid is valid.
But for temperature, there are some aspects of Fahrenheit that work out nicely, and learning 32 and 212 for the freezing and boiling points of water is not that bad. It’s not as nice as 0 and 100, but this difference leads to certain other temperatures being in the range of 0 and 100. My enjoyment for which temperatures fall between 0 and 100 feels about as arbitrary as your enjoyment for water being liquid within this range. At the very least, the difference here is not as clear cut as it is for other units, so I don’t buy into the idea that Fahrenheit is a bad unit of measure.
To put it simply: I don’t see any redeeming quality for our other units of measure, but I do for Fahrenheit. I’m not saying that Celsius is bad or that Fahrenheit is better. I’m merely saying that the phase changes of water are not enough to convince me that Fahrenheit is stupid.
For the Time units - in terms of organizing by a list of numbers, I find year, month, day the best because it organizes itself.
- 20241210 today
- 20241211 tomorrow
- 20241217 a week from now
If these were folders in a computer, they’d be in numerical order automatically.
How about addresses on mail going from most general to most specific?
United States Missouri, Kansas City 55555, N Lincoln Ave 1546, Apt 456 Joe Sturgeon
I was typing that as a joke because it is the opposite of the system in the US, but aren’t there places that follow this method?
Aren’t there places in Europe that do Street then Address # then City (I have to do this for OSMAnd)? That’s just as cursed as Month Day Year
Everything the UK has done throughout history was just for the banter. We’re not a serious people.
True dat. You wouldn’t believe the crazy, flavourful food we eat behind closed doors. We save the bland beige-on-toast for when foreigners are around.
Build an entire empire just to troll your own offshoots.
The UK can pretend all they want, but they ain’t part of the metric club.
The US was a founding member of the Metre Convention, find a new slant
We were almost the first country to switch. Now we’re probably going to be last
Screw both. If you don’t measure temperature in Kelvin don’t talk to me.
No we are a mixed people thank you very much
You forgot "and we continue to use Imperial and archaic things like ‘stone’ " too.
Yeah but we don’t mention that when we’re making fun of Americans.
We bamboozled ourselves. The Brits woke up to the fact the metric system was better and changed. Sure they still have their idiots who like the old system there but they ignore them. Whereas here we let that small minority rule. That is why we are using a broken old system and why we are the only country that is. Because we let the stupid rule in order to beat some imagined enemy.
What flag is that?
It looks similar to an inverted Union flag but one of the red stripes is in the wrong place.
The US wanted to rid itself of as much English influence as possible, she even changed the spelling. Odd that she held on to Imperial.
We are supposed to use metric here in my country, but because of American influence, we use imperial.
I loved Torque Test Channel’s take on the whole metric thing… https://youtu.be/2QUum9NymZY?si=8w7PCNReVX1-3tMn
deleted by creator
