S.I. or British M.U.?

[John Cartmell]

Even worse when I realised a few years ago that I was in my seventh decade! ;-((

[John Cartmell]

Our Head of Science was Doc Tyler (you'll understand how we suffered had you read his textbook) and he predicted that international standards would be set using cgs - so MKS was mostly ignored. I still don't understand how you can base a standard on a hundredth of a thing (centimetres) or a thousand of them (Kilogram).

I'm waiting for us to adopt a more friendly unit. Something close to 25mm (or

300mm) will do. ;-)

[Roger]

The message from John Cartmell contains these words:

I am nudging 62 and my schooling included cgs and mks metric in addition to Imperial units although I have to say that introduction to that welknown Imperial unit 'The Slug' had to wait till I got to College.

SI metric wasn't even invented until 1960 and it would have taken some considerable time to trickle down into schools. Schools don't however seem to have noticed that in ISO metric centimetres are not a preferred unit.

For those who learnt traditional metric ISO metric is just another pain in the arse with its inversion of the universal fiddle factor and widespread use of contentfree names for units.

[Frank Erskine]

Nice one!

:-)

[Owain]

Yes, we could then divide it by 10 and it would be a convenient size for the electronic component pin-outs.

Owain

[John Rumm]

500 ml containers.

All the main ones round here do milk in pint multiples. The only one I can think of that does metric is Makro.

[John Rumm]

Lost cause huh? Never mind! ;-)

[John Rumm]

Yup inches makes buying shirts much simpler. Walk into shop, collect all shirts on display with '18" long length' on them, take to checkout!

Only problem is, that often amounts to zero shirts!

[John Rumm]

I tend to find that for many lengths that you want to measure while building, inches seem to give more manageable numbers.

I often find I make fewer measurement / cutting mistakes in inches as well, even though I was only officially taught metric. Probably less chance to introduce errors by dropping in and out of CMs

[Mary Fisher]

I've just sent an order which included ten ells of thread.

Mary