But plasterboard comes in metric sizes :)
I find that when using a steel tape measure with 1 mm markings I find it a lot easier than trying to use the imperial side with 1/8 inch markings. In my 1908 built house nothing is square or plumb so when spanning any distance quite a few measurements have to be made :)
Inches are good in that the subdivisions are binary, so you get to choose the resolution you need in the smallest increments possible.
If only we had 16 fingers, or maybe four digits on each hand and foot. Talking of which, why is a foot twelve inches and not five toes? And why are feet measured in barleycorns?
Because toes vary in sized and everyone has identically sized feet, stupid.
They are measured in furlongs, stupid.
Not always. Tenths, hundredths and thousandths of an inch were widely used too.
Because the barleycorn was the fundamental standard of length from which all other length measurements were derived.
And why are there 20 fluid ounces in a UK pint but only 16 in A US pint? The US pint makes far more sense as a pint of water there weighs 1 lb. Just to add to the fun, the US has two different sizes of foot, but this is due to change next year: "In 2020, the U.S. NIST announced that the U.S. survey foot would "be phased out" on 1 January 2023 and be superseded by the International foot (also known as the foot) equal to 0.3048 metres exactly, for all further applications.[43] and by implication, the survey inch with it."
No. For hundreds of years the furlong was defined in terms of barleycorns. John
No, everywhere uses many different standards. We use routinely centigrade, not Fahrenheit or Kelvin, we use miles, not kilometres, we order pints, not millilitres, our jewelry is in carats, not milligrams, knots, not mph or kph. gallons, as well as litres...pounds per squar inch, inces of mercutry, not pascals.
We have 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day, 360 degrees in a full circle, or 2 π radians.
Our energy comes in BTU as well as kWh, and our cars engines are quoted in BHP not kilowatts.
Stellar distances are in parsecs and light years.
Oil comes in barrels, not cubic meters or metric tonnes. If you are working in a field which has double or treble sets of units, you are expected as part of your training to be alert to the possibility of being quoted either, and if it really is important, regulating are introduced.
Airline pilots will have their heading in degrees, their height in feet and their speed in knots and their fuel in kilograms. Ive no idea what they calibrate barometric pressure in.
If you cant cope with it, don't do any DIY. where you will find that boards are actually still made in inch sizes of 8 foot by 4 foot, but quoted in mm just to please the EuroCunts. and 1/8" diameter drills are the standard, just called 3.2mm.
And there is standard wire gauge - not mm diameter. And numbered screwsizes as well.
In short we have already been using mixed standards for years, and its no good trying to make everyone else as thick as you are, because they are not.
To add to the confusion, the US fluid ounce, is not quite the same as the Imperial fluid ounce...
The Imperial fluid ounce is 28.4130625 millilitres and the US fluid ounce is 29.5735295625 millilitres.
USA is perfectly happy to have a 1/2" wrench, or a 13mm wrench or a number 5 torx driver. Its all the same to them. Just manufacturers' madness.
All sorts of other issues can cause mission critical failure. The aircraft that took on 24000 kg instead of 24000lb of fuel and barely managed to take off is legendary., But so are birds flying into engines, icing on wings, thrust reverses deploying at top speed and altitude, engines falling off, and the rest.
Fuel is still notionally measured in pounds OR kilograms as far as I can ascertain.
I reckon so.
The point is that where is a real hassle, people do tend to harmonise simply for convenience. There was never any need for a pan national bureaucracy to make it illegal not to, and that's all .
For sure quote what can be quoted in metric but if people want to buy a quarter pounder, let em.
I mean a hundred and twenty fiver burger does not exactly roll off the tongue, does it?
Could call it a Euroburger I suppose.
Well my attitude is that whilst it should not be illegal to use imperial units, it should be illegal not to also use mks as well
No one is forcing anyone to.
The point is to avoid spending a fortune prosecuting some poor butcher when a little old lady wants half a pound of mince
Its a bloody curse when I design model planes as half the components are in mm and the other half inches.
3D modelling has helped, since I can draw everything up in its 'native' scaling and import them in and mix and match,because the model actual dimensions come across, not what units they are expressed in.But in the end engineering was always mixed standards. BSF BSW BSP UNF UNC metric coarse metric fine...SWG, BTU Gallons BHP, tons and tonnes...oz per square foot...you can't do engineering without being able to concert rapidly in your head
But either way it is measured by weight rather than by volume. I suppose the weight (and weight distribution) on a plane is more important than the volume of fuel and therefore how full the tanks are.
Conversely, Americans like to measure ingredients when cooking by volume "1 cup", "3/4 cup" rather than by weight. I presume there is a standard size of cup. If you measure everything using the same cup, then the proportions will still be correct no matter what size of cup you use, but then you've got things like eggs which tend to be a *fairly* standard size, so you need your cup to be fairly standard as well.
Cups for dry ingredients (sugar, flour) or for liquids (milk) are fine, but I've always wondered how you measure out 3/4 cup of butter, when it doesn't fill the measuring cup to a nice neat line, as a powder or liquid would. That's the one thing where measuring by weight is more or less essential.
My policy is "always measure and calculate in metric, even if I estimate and talk informally in imperial".
Hopefully as time goes on, fewer and fewer people will still use and have a "feeling" for imperial, and fewer and fewer objects will still be found that use imperial sizes.
The one that always gets me is sizes of copper pipe. Metric specifies the external diameter of pipes and the internal diameter of fittings that go on the pipes (and the two should be almost the same). But imperial specifies the internal diameter of the bore of the pipe, and implies a standard thickness of the wall. Unless you are planning to fit something *inside* the pipe, knowing its inside diameter is a bit irrelevant.
I've never been able to "convert rapidly" in my head - mental arithmetic is one area that I have a complete mental block about: I always need a pen and paper (or a calculator) because I can't keep track of all the carry and borrow digits in my mind's eye as I'm adding or subtracting numbers. My wife tells me that if I find it difficult, I must be doing something wrong. She learned to add and multiply when working in a Saturday job in a bakery when people would ask for "3 jam tarts at 17 p each and 5, no 6, no, better make it 7 doughnuts at 11 p each" - and she only used the till to enter the final total, not the unit prices and numbers of units. I wish I could do that... I am utterly lost without a pen and paper to see the numbers written down so I can work on them, and can remind myself of the subtotal so far.
And we still measure feet (well, shoe sizes) in barleycorns.
We missed a trick when the inch was defined as 25.4mm - 25.6 would have been so much better division wise.
Yes, the US uses a standard 'cup'.
Cups for flour can vary from 3 ounces to nearly 6 ounces, depending on how the flour is put into the cup. The weight of a cup of sugar can vary, depending on the size of the crystals.
Butter is most often measured by the 'stick' or 'cube', which weigh 4 ounces, or by the tablespoon. There are all sorts of awkward ways to measure other fats - displacement in water is one.
I really don't understand why so many American are so fiercely opposed to simply using scales.
Yes. I tend to think of measuring any solid or liquid by weight/mass rather than by volume, to avoid imprecision with solids settling, and to avoid the liquid sticking to the measuring jug/cup which then has to be washed out and dried before it can be used to measure something else: measuring by weight, you can put the mixing bowl on the scales, and zero them before adding directly from source container to mixing bowl without needing an intermediate measuring container.
I suppose if the butter is sold in blocks of known cross-sectional area, you can measure the length of the fat in linear units which correspond to a given weight or volume.
I think it *started* because early settlers who were travelling in covered wagons only needed to carry a set of cups which are low-tech, and not a set of scales which are higher-tech and have the potential for the spring going out of calibration with very right handling on the road. But why that convention persisted after the days of the early travelling settlers is another matter...
"Right" should be "rough" - brain fade!
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