Miles & kilometres: why do so many people still reference miles?

porsche959 · 30-09-2014 10:02pm

ardmacha wrote: »

Many people in Ireland are west Brits. You only have to see the continual reference to stones even in publicly financed ads by Safe Food and the like.

:rolleyes:

Sheldons Brain · 30-09-2014 10:06pm

ardmacha wrote:

Many people in Ireland are west Brits. You only have to see the continual reference to stones even in publicly financed ads by Safe Food and the like.

I've also never understood why the GAA, which changes its field measurements to metric 2 years ago in a forward looking move, will have programmes for minor games without a trace of metric for player details , although these weren't even born at that time.

Iwannahurl wrote: »

Why?
Ireland has -- surprise surprise -- made a mess of adopting the metric system. Stupid quantities such as our 454 gramme packs of butter ensure that we hang on to our Imperial relics.

This is not entirely accidental, butter is sold in 454g containers in the South and 500g in the North while cheese was the other way around. This related to the butter subsidies in the 1980s.

My kids go to a school where the principal, and some of the teachers, are barely able to comprehend metric units, and I regularly hear 7-year-olds talking about their weight in "stone". Utterly daft.

No excuse for teachers not doing better, but you also have to wonder what information they are receiving from the Dept etc.

rab!dmonkey · 30-09-2014 11:53pm

kms/km's

Stop. Unit symbols are never pluralised

Carawaystick wrote: »

Then you have nautical miles, which are natural units, where each is one minute of arc of longitude of the sea where you are

The nautical mile has a fixed value. It's accepted for use with the SI too, so you can switch between nautical miles and kilometres as you please.

endacl · 30-09-2014 11:58pm

ardmacha wrote: »

Many people in Ireland are west Brits. You only have to see the continual reference to stones even in publicly financed ads by Safe Food and the like.

Post #2? West Brits?!?

Do you struggle at all under the weight of that enormous chip?

endacl · 01-10-2014 12:00am

cnoc wrote: »

Andybobandy wrote: »

(maybe this belongs in After Hours? Apologies if it does..)

I don't know why, but it bugs me a little when people still reference distances in Ireland in miles as opposed to kilometres.

Would that be Irish miles or English miles?

Nautical.

Iwannahurl · 01-10-2014 12:17am

Subpopulus wrote: »

Basically, the whole of the developed world uses metric. If we hadn't changed we'd be left behind. Anywhere that doesn't use the metric system is either some backward third world country or the US.

Officially there are only three countries that have not adopted the Metric system: Liberia, Myanmar/Burma and the USA.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Metric_system_adoption_map.svg

If there is a list of countries that have pretended to adopt the Metric system, or have adopted it in a half-arsed way, or are taking a stupidly long time to adopt it properly, then Ireland is in there somewhere.

Sam Kade · 01-10-2014 12:36am

Andybobandy wrote: »

(maybe this belongs in After Hours? Apologies if it does..)

I don't know why, but it bugs me a little when people still reference distances in Ireland in miles as opposed to kilometres.

I don't really (that much) mind your every day John or Joe quoting miles, but when I see officials/politicians/"important people" etc.. on the news/TV saying something is/was 5 miles down the road, or 20 miles from wherever.. it annoys me a little.

I started driving in 1998 when we were still using miles, but have had no issue whatsoever changing to km's now when referencing distance/speeds etc...
I'm no maths buff, but I can easily convert any distance/speed from miles to km's (almost without thinking about it now at this stage)

(I have driven about 200,000/300,000 km's in mainland Europe over the last 10 years or so, so maybe I've slightly adapted to using km's a little more than would be expected here in Ireland since we changed over).

Does this bother anyone else?

or am I just mental?

What really annoys me is how Irish get bugged nowadays instead of annoyed :mad:

CelticRambler · 01-10-2014 12:50am

What's all this about the "under thirties" ??? I'm a few years away from being one of the "over forties" but I've lived with metric since I was in secondary school. Did my head in though when we started having babies and all the wimminfolk were talking in lbs and flozs. FFS? The cat was 4.3kg and ate 80g of nuggets a day. Why did the sprogs have to get dosed with flozs of baby milk? Well, they didn't when I was making up the bottles :pac:

That was nearly twenty years ago and we were in England at the time, so maybe there was some excuse (and even then we bought our petrol in litres) but I've got a new Dublin-born niece since last month and sure enough she came out weighing lbs not kgs. Maybe it's because her mother's a teacher?

AndyBoBandy · 01-10-2014 7:48am

Sam Kade wrote: »

What really annoys me is how Irish get bugged nowadays instead of annoyed :mad:

Well, I was only a little annoyed, and didn't want to convey the fact I was fully annoyed, only a little annoyed, about 5/8 annoyed, hence bugged.

SpaceTime · 01-10-2014 8:12am

Iwannahurl wrote: »

About 40 furlongs from Glenties, Co. Donegal:

I'll consider offering two guineas for it!

Estate agents are sort of stuck in a bit of another era.

Some French ones still use pricing in Francs....

Skatedude · 01-10-2014 8:34am

Distance is milles.
Height is feet and inches.
cars have MPH and MPG and Horsepower.
we have been using this for generations and many, many years. Just because someone in the government decides we dont use them means nothing. people will use what they have always used.

I bet if they decided to change to furlongs, people would still use what they always used

SpaceTime · 01-10-2014 8:39am

CelticRambler wrote: »

What's all this about the "under thirties" ??? I'm a few years away from being one of the "over forties" but I've lived with metric since I was in secondary school. Did my head in though when we started having babies and all the wimminfolk were talking in lbs and flozs. FFS? The cat was 4.3kg and ate 80g of nuggets a day. Why did the sprogs have to get dosed with flozs of baby milk? Well, they didn't when I was making up the bottles :pac:

That was nearly twenty years ago and we were in England at the time, so maybe there was some excuse (and even then we bought our petrol in litres) but I've got a new Dublin-born niece since last month and sure enough she came out weighing lbs not kgs. Maybe it's because her mother's a teacher?

I don't think the imperial system has been taught here since the mid 1970s so you'd need to be born in the 60s or before to encounter it.

The nuns and Christian brothers even moved on to beating people up with metre sticks before or was abolished. Thankfully I missed that era entirely.

It's just one of those things.

I find it mind boggling that gym equipment here will usually be set to American units. I'd a cross trainer asking for my weight in lbs (I'd need a calculator to figure that out) and setting targets in miles when races here are all in km.

The next machine a rower was in metres.

Running machine - back to Americanism.

It's obvious though that people can change. Fahrenheit completely dropped out of use because weather forecasts stopped using it.

I wish Met Éireann would use km/h wind speeds consistently though. They regularly default to knots which are meaningless to 95% of the audience.

hmmm · 01-10-2014 8:54am

Re metric & imperial conversion, this is the saddest/funniest story
http://www.wired.com/2010/11/1110mars-climate-observer-report/

1999: A disaster investigation board reports that NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in the Martian atmosphere because engineers failed to convert units from English to metric.

SpaceTime · 01-10-2014 9:02am

hmmm wrote: »

Re metric & imperial conversion, this is the saddest/funniest story
http://www.wired.com/2010/11/1110mars-climate-observer-report/

Engineering using non metric is just stupid nonsense that makes calculating things unnecessarily complex.

BMJD · 01-10-2014 9:25am

I'll have 568ml of your finest porter, sir!

That doesn't sound right, does it?

Subpopulus · 01-10-2014 9:32am

SpaceTime wrote: »

I wish Met Éireann would use km/h wind speeds consistently though. They regularly default to knots which are meaningless to 95% of the audience.

I presume you're referring to their costal forecast, which only uses knots. That's for the benefit of those in the maritime community, and not for the average joes. Who apart from sailors and fishermen needs to known the wind speed off Fastnet rock?

L1011 · 01-10-2014 9:51am

gctest50 wrote: »

yip

Plenty of other stuff that didn't get in to space because of the yanks inability to use proper measurements, though.

Judgement Day · 01-10-2014 9:55am

ardmacha wrote: »

Many people in Ireland are west Brits. You only have to see the continual reference to stones even in publicly financed ads by Safe Food and the like.

Or could it be that some of us refuse to be treated like sheep and lap up everything our European 'masters' throw at us? :rolleyes:

SpaceTime · 01-10-2014 10:10am

Subpopulus wrote: »

I presume you're referring to their costal forecast, which only uses knots. That's for the benefit of those in the maritime community, and not for the average joes. Who apart from sailors and fishermen needs to known the wind speed off Fastnet rock?

Nope they do it online in non coastal / maritime / salty contexts too.

They should always list both as people haven't a notion what customary maritime units are.

Iwannahurl · 01-10-2014 11:11am

Judgement Day wrote: »

Or could it be that some of us refuse to be treated like sheep and lap up everything our European 'masters' throw at us? :rolleyes:

Ignoring a modern and rational system of measures and continuing to use an outmoded and absurd system, just because lots of other people are doing the same, is what I would call sheep-like behaviour.

Mongarra · 01-10-2014 11:15am

BMJD wrote: »

I'll have 568ml of your finest porter, sir!

That doesn't sound right, does it?

It doesn't sound right. There are probably many who don't know what porter is!

Judgement Day · 01-10-2014 2:09pm

Iwannahurl wrote: »

Ignoring a modern and rational system of measures and continuing to use an outmoded and absurd system, just because lots of other people are doing the same, is what I would call sheep-like behaviour.

I don't like the out of control European 'project', have always voted against anything to do with it and I'm unlikely to change now - hardly sheep like behaviour since the vast majority of people in Ireland think the EEC/EU is wonderful.

L1011 · 01-10-2014 2:55pm

Judgement Day wrote: »

I don't like the out of control European 'project', have always voted against anything to do with it and I'm unlikely to change now - hardly sheep like behaviour since the vast majority of people in Ireland think the EEC/EU is wonderful.

Metric predates and made sense to use before there *was* an EEC. There's making a point and there's missing the point...

SpaceTime · 01-10-2014 4:12pm

We were actually contemplating metricisation in the 1920s.
One is an easy to understand, logical, open system and the other is based on British custom.

We'd be better off just embracing modernity. The UK clings to it because it's cultural, like the enormous, foot stabbing plug that we also somehow adopted!

The Americans see the US customary (cough: imperial British) system as 'less commie'

CelticRambler · 01-10-2014 5:06pm

Judgement Day wrote: »

I don't like the out of control European 'project', have always voted against anything to do with it and I'm unlikely to change now - hardly sheep like behaviour since the vast majority of people in Ireland think the EEC/EU is wonderful.

There was no "European 'project' " when the French proposed it in 1799. For once in their history, they were way ahead of the rest, and I'm sure the anglophone Imperialist powers of the 19th and 20th centuries stuck to their weird and cumbersome system only because it was the French who came up with the idea that everything could be measured in multiples of ten.

Having said that, I'm glad the French abandonned the metric week. :cool:

icdg · 03-10-2014 8:12am

SpaceTime wrote: »

The Americans see the US customary (cough: imperial British) system as 'less commie'

It's not exactly the same, as anyone who has ever ordered a pint in a U.S. bar will attest!

AugustusMinimus · 03-10-2014 8:51am

SpaceTime wrote: »

The Americans see the US customary (cough: imperial British) system as 'less commie'

As icdg has said, it has nothing to do with using Imperial Units.

Before metric units were invented in France, all of Europe used old style units. Various units could refer to different amounts in different countries.

US units can vary from Imperial units. A US gallon is smaller than an Imperial Gallon. There are quite a few differences between the units.

AugustusMinimus · 03-10-2014 8:55am

MYOB wrote: »

Plenty of other stuff that didn't get in to space because of the yanks inability to use proper measurements, though.

Interesting fact. Rockwell International and NASA used US units to both build and service the Space Shuttle. More interesting than that, Boeing are building the new Space Launch System using US Units as converting their Shuttle derived design systems would together with NASA cost more than $3 billion.

more than S.A.D. · 03-10-2014 9:04am

CelticRambler wrote: »

...
Having said that, I'm glad the French abandonned the metric week. :cool:

I'd love a metric week, as long as we got 3 day weekends.

We should change to metric time wholesale I think. 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour, 10 hours a day, 10 days in a week... 3 weeks a month, yeah it kinda falls apart there... 12 months a year with a 5 or 6 day end of year holiday.

L1011 · 03-10-2014 9:30am

icdg wrote: »

It's not exactly the same, as anyone who has ever ordered a pint in a U.S. bar will attest!

Canada's worse - pint in a bar can be anything from about 400 to 600ml depending on where you are, what beer it is, etc.

Miles & kilometres: why do so many people still reference miles?

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