Bring back the miles signs on the road?

Wishbone Ash wrote: »

'Smiles'

In 1958 the United States and countries of the Commonwealth of Nations defined the length of the international yard to be 0.9144 metres. Consequently, the international foot is defined to be equal to 0.3048 metres (equivalent to 304.8 millimetres).

The United States survey foot is defined as exactly 1200⁄3937 metres, approximately 0.30480061 m. It is used in connection with surveying and mapping. It is exactly 1,000,000 / 999,998 times the international foot and thus 610 nm greater than the international foot.

Within the legislation, the U.S. Survey Foot was specified in 11 states and the International Foot was specified in 6 states. In all other states the meter is the only referenced unit of measure in the SPCS 83 legislation. The remaining 19 states do not yet have any legislation concerning SPCS 83

Sam Vimes wrote: »

a pint is 568ml. we should of course keep pints but everything else should change to metric

Gallons of various sizes have been used in Europe ever since Roman times. In the United States, the liquid gallon is legally defined as exactly 231 cubic inches; this is equal to the old English wine gallon, which originated in medieval times but was not standardized until 1707, during the reign of Queen Anne. Some scholars believe the wine gallon was originally designed to hold 8 troy pounds of wine. The U. S. gallon holds 4 liquid quarts or exactly 3.785 411 784 liters; a U.S. gallon of water weighs about 8.33 pounds. American colonists were also familiar with the Elizabethan beer and ale gallon, which held 282 cubic inches (4.621 liters).

- a historic British unit of dry volume still used implicitly in the U.S. In the U.S., the term "gallon" is not used in dry measure, but if it were it would be equal to 1/2 peck, or 4 dry quarts, or 268.8025 cubic inches, or approximately 4.404 884 liters. This unit is the English corn or grain gallon, standardized during the reign of Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century. The earliest official definition of a dry gallon in Britain is a 1303 proclamation of Edward I, where the gallon is defined as the volume of 8 pounds of wheat; the current U.S. "gallon" contains about 7.5 pounds of wheat. Grain gallons have tended to be larger than liquid gallons throughout the history of British units, apparently because they were based on heaped rather than "struck" (leveled) containers. A container in which grain has been heaped above the top will hold as much as 25% more grain, and the traditional corn gallon is in fact 16.4% larger than the wine gallon.
gallon (gal) [3]

Currently the British use a larger gallon than either of the American gallons. The Imperial Weights and Measures Act of 1824 established a new unit for all volumes, liquid or dry, replacing all the other gallons in previous use in Britain. The imperial gallon, designed to contain exactly 10 pounds of distilled water under precisely defined conditions, holds exactly 4.546 09 liters or approximately 277.4194 cubic inches. The imperial gallon equals 1.20095 U.S. liquid gallons (British wine gallons) or 1.03206 U.S. dry gallons (British corn gallons).
gallon (gal) [4]

Gallon a traditional unit of volume in Scotland equal to 4 Scots quarts. This is almost exactly 3 British Imperial gallons, 3.6 U.S. liquid gallons, or 13.63 liters.

King Edward II, in 1324, reverted back to the seed concept of the ancients and passed a statute that "three barleycorns, round and dry," make an inch.

In 1824, the English Parliament legalized a new standard yard which had been made in 1760. It was a brass bar containing a gold button near each end. A dot was engraved in each of these two buttons. These two dots were spaced exactly 1 yard apart. The same act that legalized this bar as the standard for England also made the provision that, in the event it was lost or destroyed, it should be replaced using the pendulum method to determine its length.

In spite of repeated requests in Congress, there was no legal length standard in the U.S. until 1832. More or less authentic copies of the British copies of the yard were used as length prototypes. In 1832, the Treasury Department decided to admit as a legal Yard the distance between the lines 27 and 63 of a certain bronze bar, 82 inches in length, bought in 1813 in England for the Federal Survey Department. When the British yard bar, which was destroyed in 1834, was replaced in 1855, a new bronze copy No. 11 was sent to the United States which became the legal American Yard Standard.

Congress passed a Bill in 1866 which permitted use of the metric system of measurement in the United States. The value for the metre was given as: 1 metre = 39.37 inches

1959 - Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States adopted common standards for the inch-pound system in metric terms. One inch was made equivalent to 2.54 centimetres. ... The Coast and Geodetic Survey, which had used a slightly different conversion factor previously, retained their established relationship of 1 inch equaling 2.540.005 centimetres because of the extensive revisions which would be necessary to their charts and measurement records. The resulting foot based on this retained conversion is known as the U.S. Survey foot.

pickarooney wrote:

I measure exclusively in pixels these days.