Metric system vs. Imperial system!

The Bollox

well, as you all know, the Irish road signs are now dealing in Metric speeds instead of the Imperial ones, but is anyone happy about this? I personally am not, I HATE the metric system with a passion, not sure why, I just much prefered dealing in Pints and Quarts, Inches and Feet, Pounds and Ounces. the Metric system for me is too... exact, its not warm and fuzzy like the imperial system. for instance, its a lot easier to say "she lives miles away" than it is to say "she lives kilometeres away" the reason is that the Imperial systems' measurments could be bent to a degree, but not the Metric systems

so my question is this: which do YOU prefer? Metric or Imperial?

mackerski

Marts wrote:

for instance, its a lot easier to say "she lives miles away" than it is to say "she lives kilometeres away" the reason is that the Imperial systems' measurments could be bent to a degree, but not the Metric systems

That's fine - I use miles for idiomatic stuff like this too. Just not for measuring things, because imperial units, let's face it, are no good at that. Nostalgia has its place, but you'd do well to reserve it for things that actually were good. How ridiculous would it be today for someone to continue to work out monetary amounts in shillings (or Guineas...)?

The changeover (which actually took place long enough ago that I'm 32 and never saw any imperial measures in school) needn't be a big deal. If you think imperial measures have value for cases where you can apply the suffix "ish", then by all means keep:

* Drinking pints (that a pint might one day be a half-litre needn't matter in a laid-back systems of measures, nor will I care if it stays the same size. After all, beer strength varies even more widely).

* Buying pounds of fruit & veg. Once again, a 500g pound should be close enough, and convenient.

* Inching your way

* Being in for a penny, in for a pound

* Using six-foot-four as an indicator of vague tallness. But FFS let's please get around to metres for real measurement.

* Stones and pounds? C'mon, how old are you? You must have learnt about kilogrammes in school, it's plenty easy to use them to measure your weight. In fact, you get some brain capacity back from using base 10.

* Car speed? I can see the awkwardness until the cars with miles go out of circulation. Use miles if you like, but remember that there's a bunch of lads out there who are increasingly unwilling to be vague or fuzzy about this particular measure.

* MPG? Hasn't been a usable measure for over 10 years, ever since they started selling petrol by the litre. Means nothing, except as a comparison with itself. l/100km is what you want. Try it, you'll like it.

* Wearing a ten-gallon hat, but preferably in the privacy of your own home. Don't forget that, despite what they might have you believe, not everything American is bigger, not galllons in any event.

All MHO, of course. Me lazy. Don't like pointless arithmetic.

Dermot

sliabh

Personally I have always thought the imperial system was a bizzare and overly complex one. There is no consistency to it e.g. Some units are based on multiple of 3, 8, 12 some 16. And even in countries where imperial is the standard and metric is badly received people don't seem to know how it works.

Just before Christmas I was in the UK and I asked three people I was out with how many yards there were in a mile. Only one could give me an answer (and being a metric minded person myself I caan't say for sure if it was right or not)

Metric is soooooo much simpler and consistent. Everything is based on powers of 10 and all the units are related to each other, even when you are comparing different things like volume and length e.g. 1 milliletre is 1 centimetre cubed. Does anyone know how many cubic inches are in a fluid ounce?

lynchie

As above, I prefer the metric system as at least it's consistent. A US gallon is 3.8 litres whereas the UK gallon is 4.5 litres. A gallon should be a gallon!! Btw, I hate when they offer you beer in the US in a 16oz or 23oz glass - it sounds so strange!!

Blisterman

No, but its around 30ml.

I agree metric is easier, but its tradition to have say, a 12 inch pizza. 30cm pizza doesn't sound the same.

I agree that metric words are too long
Millilitres, centimetres, kilometers, kilograms.
Ounces, pounds, miles, inches. Muc easier to say.

Maybe they should make a new system, which uses imperial as a starting off point, so it's easier to convert.

sliabh

Blisterman wrote:

Millilitres, centimetres, kilometers, kilograms.
Ounces, pounds, miles, inches. Muc easier to say.

Those of us that use metric on a daily basis (I am an engineer) have clear enough abreviations for all these.
Millilitres - "mils"
Centimetres and kilograms - usually use the letters, so "c m" and "k g"
Kilometres, not an engineering unit I use too often, but "klicks" is used.

thejollyrodger

I HATE IMPERIAL. I think it belongs to the last century and its about time everything went metric here,:)

Capt'n Midnight

Blisterman wrote:

No, but its around 30ml.

I think you are getting mixed up with shorts

I agree metric is easier, but its tradition to have say, a 12 inch pizza. 30cm pizza doesn't sound the same.

In Italy they aren't so stingy with the pizza's that a 12" is supposed to sound big (it would probably get thrown back cos it's too small) and they are a fraction of the price here - that's a rip-off-ireland gimick to make you think that a normal Italian sized pizza is a super extra deluxe etc.

Maybe they should make a new system, which uses imperial as a starting off point, so it's easier to convert.

The yanks tried that with a metric foot after independence - btw: when the Romans left england there werre 5,000 feet in the mile

Victor

sliabh wrote:

Millilitres - "mils"

You have to be careful here. It tends to be "mill" on site and also for a soldier 1 "Mils" is an angle equal to coTan (1/1000)

BrianD3

Like lots of people I use a bizarre mixture of metric and imperial units. In my job I think and work exclusively in metric. Outside of work, I use mainly imperial with some metrics thrown in and am able to easily convert between the units that I habitually use. Why all this complication - well it's because certain units just "feel right". No logical explanation.

Also it depends on what's being measured. I will never describe someone as being 1.87 metres tall however I might say that a river was 3 metres deep. I use imperial when talking about a person's mass - normally I use stones + pounds but if I'm talking to an American I'll just use pounds. However when I'm talking about the mass of an object I'll usually use a metric unit and have no concept of certain imperial units such as hundredweights or ounces. I'm happy to buy petrol by the litre, however I'd never use anything other than miles per gallon to describe the economy of my car. And so on.

BrianD3

seamus

Victor wrote:

You have to be careful here. It tends to be "mill" on site and also for a soldier 1 "Mils" is an angle equal to coTan (1/1000)

Well, that's where context comes in.

"There are 30 mils of water in that" is hadly going to be misconstrued as an expression of angles.

utopian

Imperial may be awkward for calculation, but AFAIK the universities went metric in the late 60s or early 70s anyway.

The advantage of imperial for daily tasks is that the measures are "human sized" - a gramme is too small to be of much use to anyone not an engineer or a substance abuser.

OfflerCrocGod

Get it over it, welcome to the future.

Capt'n Midnight

densities are always going to be in metric g/ml=kg/l=tonne/m3 etc.
try converting ounces per cubic inch or pounds per cubic foot into larger or smaller sizes

even the us military used klicks in 'nam

utopian

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

try converting ounces per cubic inch or pounds per cubic foot into larger or smaller sizes

As I am unpracticed in complicated mental arithmetic with measures of density I would probably use a computer. At least until they go decimal.

seamus

Part of the ease of the metric system, as Cap'n Madnight alludes to, is that most measurements interoperate in some way. 1 litre of a liquid = 1000cm^3 in volume. And related to water, 1l of water = 1kg (all at 3.98 degrees C).

Water being chosen as the benchmark obviously because of its abundance, importance, and some unique qualities.

utopian

seamus wrote:

Part of the ease of the metric system, as Cap'n Madnight alludes to, is that most measurements interoperate in some way. 1 litre of a liquid = 1000cm^3 in volume.

I am aware of that. I was just pointing out that this is irrelevant for everyday calculations.

seamus wrote:

And related to water, 1l of water = 1kg (all at 3.98 degrees C).

Shouldn't that be Kelvins?

mackerski

utopian wrote:

The advantage of imperial for daily tasks is that the measures are "human sized" - a gramme is too small to be of much use to anyone not an engineer or a substance abuser.

And lo, God created the kilogramme. Which is the basic unit of mass, in any event.

Fundamentally, what you're not accustomed to using will seem complicated. I, for instance, can't see why 9st 5lb (just calculated that, had to check how many lb in a stone...) is any more user-friendly than 60kg. Furthermore, since my schooling taught me kilos before I had built up any real sense of stones, there didn't seem a lot of point going with the difficult units. To this day I don't see any romance in measures (which is why I don't understand the attachment to the old ones), and I certainly didn't see any in the really daft ones once I found out how they worked. They are for getting a job done. The slide rules and log tables were very nifty too, but I won't be using them in preference to my trusty pocket calc any time soon.

Maybe some of you are old-timers, or took a really early interest in weights and measures and learnt your parents units at home before the new ones at school. Your loss, I'd have to say.

Dermot

Borzoi

Having been brought up at home with imperial, and school in metric, I'm fairly bilingual, which is handy as in work I frequently get enquiries using either or, and sometimes both systems

ie a room 2.2mtr by 2.0mtr by 84inches high

Things that I comes across frequently include:
feet - inches - meters
sqft - sq mtr
cuft - cumtr
pounds - stones - kilos - tons - tonnes
pascal - bar - psi - torr
ft lb - Nm
Centigrade - Farenheit
kilowatts - BTU/hr - Ton of Ref

and when I don't know the conversion:
http://www.onlineconversion.com/
has pretty much everything.

SI is a great System, but it has no heart, and little to relate the units to the world we live in.

sliabh

Borzoi wrote:

SI is a great System, but it has no heart, and little to relate the units to the world we live in.

That is purely a perception thing. If you grew up on the continent, or for that matter most of the rest of the world, you would only know metric and the units would relate just fine to the world.

mackerski

Borzoi wrote:

SI is a great System, but it has no heart, and little to relate the units to the world we live in.

If we're to suppose that imperial measures have a heart, it would have to be several different hearts, from a variety of different animals, some grotesque. And I can't see that imperial measures are any more naturally occurring than SI ones - it depends on which units you're most accustomed to relating to the world.

Put another way, if you find it natural to visualise 5'4", it's probably because you've met a bunch of people who are 5'4" and internalised the knowledge. This isn't any harder when you do it using different units, as anyone who grew up with only metric measures will confirm.

Dermot

parsi

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

The yanks tried that with a metric foot after independence - btw: when the Romans left england there werre 5,000 feet in the mile

SO is that why they started an Empire to find the other 280 ?

spacetweek

Marts wrote:

the Metric system for me is too... exact, its not warm and fuzzy like the imperial system.

Funny you say this. For me it's the exact opposite. When I think of the metric system, especially stuff everyone uses like litres and grams (perhaps less so for something like kilometres), it reminds me of my childhood, which for me is a positive mental association. Imperial, on the other hand, calls to mind men in tweed jackets sitting around talking about the price of buttermilk - things which have no relevance to me. Therefore, imperial stuff for me is a negative connotation, and metric is positive.

This means that I always favour metric units, but this doesn't mean that I never use imperial. It's a bit complicated. In certain situations it is more convenient for me to use those, but I am not thinking of them as real units that you would actually measure anything with - for me, this would be unthinkable.

I can think of several things which are still totally imperial in Ireland: pints of beer, clothes sizes in inches, circular objects diameter in inches (pizzas, fans, loudspeakers, plates, cymbals etc.), weight in stones and ft/in for height (but ONLY for people - NOT anything else). Some of these I'd like to see changed, others I'm easy (pints for beer - mmmm, lovely beer.)

In the case of things like weight, I happen to think that kilos are MUCH better than stones - a stone is far too big, so everyone gives their weight to the nearest stone or half-stone, which is 3-6 kg. I find it greatly annoying to have to give my weight in stones to other people - I'm being prevented from using kilos, because most other people aren't.

In the case of "it's miles away", I don't think you are supposed to ever stop saying things like this. I lived in Australia for a year where the metric system is used around 99% of the time and expressions like that were common.

As for Ireland, I have no experience of an Ireland without a metric system in it, and I could never imagine such a thing. I'm glad it's not like that.

lomb

mackerski wrote:

* MPG? Hasn't been a usable measure for over 10 years, ever since they started selling petrol by the litre. Means nothing, except as a comparison with itself. l/100km is what you want. Try it, you'll like it.


Dermot

pure bollox, the mpg system is very easy as we all know that there are 4.5 litres in a gallon. so therefore i know with petrol at 90 cent a liter then 4.5 litres is 4.10ish per gallon. hence i am fully aware that a cars mpg figure gives me how many miles i can do for 4100 euro ie if a car does 40 mpg i can do 40000 miles for 4100 or 10000 for 1025, mpg are very very useful.

mackerski

lomb wrote:

pure bollox, the mpg system is very easy as we all know that there are 4.5 litres in a gallon. so therefore i know with petrol at 90 cent a liter then 4.5 litres is 4.10ish per gallon. hence i am fully aware that a cars mpg figure gives me how many miles i can do for 4100 euro ie if a car does 40 mpg i can do 40000 miles for 4100 or 10000 for 1025, mpg are very very useful.

Yup, that sounds pretty easy to me. *Nurse!!*...

Dermot

spacetweek

lomb wrote:

pure bollox, the mpg system is very easy as we all know that there are 4.5 litres in a gallon. so therefore i know with petrol at 90 cent a liter then 4.5 litres is 4.10ish per gallon. hence i am fully aware that a cars mpg figure gives me how many miles i can do for 4100 euro ie if a car does 40 mpg i can do 40000 miles for 4100 or 10000 for 1025, mpg are very very useful.

What??!

Right. Your car manual will say something like this:

Fuel economy (l/100 km): 13.2 Urban / 9.1 Rural

let's say you're driving to and from Dublin and Galway, a 400 km round trip.
Divide your journey by 100 and multiply by the rural figure above.
So, in this case 4 * 9.1 = 36 litres of petrol.
At 90 cent each, this works out to €32. Simple!

The most important thing to grasp is that with mpg you start with the petrol, and then work out the distance you can travel. But this is backwards! When you're thinking of a journey you start with the distance, then work out the petrol, then the cost. Litres per hundred is much more logical - it's in line with how people think.

With mpg you would have to start by filling up your car with, say 25 litres. Then convert to gallons. Then from here you get the distance you can drive. But I want to start by knowing the distance, not finish with it! Sheesh. MPG is nonsense.

If I ever catch someone with a 2005 car with kilometres on the odometer trying to work out fuel economy by converting kilometres to miles and litres to gallons in their head, I'm gonna hit them over the head with the pump nozzle.

The Bollox

mackerski wrote:

* Drinking pints (that a pint might one day be a half-litre needn't matter in a laid-back systems of measures, nor will I care if it stays the same size. After all, beer strength varies even more widely).

* Buying pounds of fruit & veg. Once again, a 500g pound should be close enough, and convenient.

* Inching your way

* Being in for a penny, in for a pound

* Using six-foot-four as an indicator of vague tallness. But FFS let's please get around to metres for real measurement.

* Stones and pounds? C'mon, how old are you? You must have learnt about kilogrammes in school, it's plenty easy to use them to measure your weight. In fact, you get some brain capacity back from using base 10.

* Car speed? I can see the awkwardness until the cars with miles go out of circulation. Use miles if you like, but remember that there's a bunch of lads out there who are increasingly unwilling to be vague or fuzzy about this particular measure.

* MPG? Hasn't been a usable measure for over 10 years, ever since they started selling petrol by the litre. Means nothing, except as a comparison with itself. l/100km is what you want. Try it, you'll like it.

* Wearing a ten-gallon hat, but preferably in the privacy of your own home. Don't forget that, despite what they might have you believe, not everything American is bigger, not galllons in any event.

All MHO, of course. Me lazy. Don't like pointless arithmetic.

Dermot

DUDE! good point, you sound like my dad! you have the same name too *ponders* naaaah couldn't be

YO! yo make good points, lol! but I stick by what I said, I was raised on the Imperial system, at home and at school (I live in a small town in North Co. Dublin, what do you expect) so it stuck, now I do use the Metric system too, to a degree, because the Imperial system is really hard to use in terms of gauging large distances and being exact! but thats the fun part, not being 100% on everything!

~Mark~