Metric vs imperial, ISO8601, etc.

I think it’s curious how many people in the UK continue to measure their height and weight in imperial units. I’m in my mid-sixties, so you might expect me to be imperial… but I’m not. We made the move in weights and measures in general years ago, so now most people buy and cook in grammes, and engineering and clothes are usually in millimetres or centimetres. When I ask for a glass of wine, it’s sold in millitres (sorry, Mr. Pampling, I never developed a liking for beer, and I would never miss the pint).

So heights and weights seem to be pretty much the only place where people cling on to imperial measures.

Why?

All we ever do is use the numbers to compare ourselves with our peers (X amount taller/shorter/heavier/lighter) which is just as easy in any units.

In our house, we set the bathroom scales to kilogrammes decades ago, and so we only know our weights in kilos. I converted my height to metric 30-odd years ago and have used exlusively that when asked.

I should add that, at school, I studied physics, maths and chemistry at A level. I learned physics calculations in both imperial and metric units (CGS – this was just before the SI system came into the curriculum). The metric system was clearly so much easier and more logical, I stuck with it when I went into the world of work, and never looked back.

As for dates: there is a line in a nursery rhyme about four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, but normally we start from the biggest-valued numbers and work through to the smallest. Once I saw dates written year first and day last, I saw it as consistent with the rest of numbers, so if you look back through my log book entries in over two decades, that’s how you’ll see the dates written in the headings. Alarm on the icon bar shows “2016-11-28 17:09:48” (OK, it did for a second…). When I’m asked for my date of birth, I always give it as year-month-day.

I did have a discussion a few years ago with a bloke who ran a crappy little car spares shop and insisted everything was in imperial units, so I couldn’t buy a 600mm wiper refill, I had to buy 24". He complained about having to convert dimensions. It only occurred to me later that I should have asked him what he converted 24" into. What we all do is convert such measurements into “about this long” (holds hands out, approximately that far apart), which you can do just as well in whichever system you want, given that you’ve stared at rulers for long enough to embed the idea in your brain (this is 300mm, etc.). Doing conversions numerically is a killer for most people; just compare whatever it is with other things around you whose dimensions you know.

I think it’s curious how many people in the UK continue to measure their height and weight in imperial units. I’m in my mid-sixties, so you might expect me to be imperial… but I’m not.

I’m in my early-sixties, so you might expect me to be imperial… well the only things I can think of that I still use imperial for is my weight(and babies), my height and milk¹! I am an evangelist for ISO 8601.
All the weights for parcels and all dimensions measured with a ruler, tape measure, vernier or micrometer are metric.
I do often wish there were metric (base 10 or 100) time (minutes and seconds)

All we ever do is use the numbers to compare ourselves with our peers (X amount taller/shorter/heavier/lighter) which is just as easy in any units.

But what units do our pears use? I can’t recall any British person using metric for their height a few youngsters I think have talked of their weight in KGs but that has been very rare. Maybe I should get out more. I hear the pop charts are not populated by beat combo’s anymore:-)

¹ I’m not a beer drinker. What measure of beer do you ask for Dave?

I think it’s delightfully old-fashioned that Dave sticks to his “grammes” instead of grams, even despite his comparative youth and avowal he started with CGS, as did I. However, I write to point out that real people in France still use informal measures from other times – the demi-livre, roughly corresponding to the half-pound, is often to be heard in the markets or at the meat counter, and the pouce (thumb) corresponding to the inch – the upper thumb part. A 26" bike frame would be described as 26 pouces.

Baby’s birth weights will be in kilograms/grams, however!

BSP threads and measurements survive in the plumbing sections alongside metric ones.

Avoirdupois, will travel; as people only rarely say!

Doing conversions numerically is a killer for most people; just compare whatever it is with other things around you whose dimensions you know.

Therein lies at least one of the obstacles. I work with a sizable number of people in their 20’s and 30’s who speak of their height etc in feet and inches and look puzzled when you try metres.
I’m intrigued as they shouldn’t have been taught imperial except as a historic curiosity and I’d guess their parents should have been metric taught too.

Pints? Ah yes, beer. Pint just the right amount. The litre is too large, the half litre too small. Give the rippoff brewers half a chance and they’d equate 500ml to 1 pint and retain the same price thus making a 13% price rise in a trice.

As to wine, my main reason for not drinking it is that I prefer beer. This is fortunate since early on I decided there were rather few examples I particularly liked, it took a little while for a wine buff to demonstrate which ones I liked and that as he put it “that’s expensive tastebuds you have”

continue to measure their height and weight in imperial units.

I have actually had it said to me by an older person that they completely refuse (la la la fingers in ears) to have anything to do with “funny foreign French muck” when asked about measuring in metric. I pointed out that his preferred measuring of weight in pounds and ounces is known as both Imperial measurements, and also avoirdupois (avp). He said "yeah, aver-duh-poyz. I told him it’s French and it means “to have weight”. He said if I say stuff like that again, he’d pop me on the nose. Because, f-yeah, violence solves everything. <sigh>

[I believe it was originally spelled differently because it dates back to Latin; but the spelling we know today is French]

I understand that if you have spent xxxty years with a measurement system that you are familiar with, you might not exactly see the point of bothering with something else. At least that is a better reason than “funny foreign French muck” (but, then, in his world anything from M&S that wasn’t lamb or mince beef was “funny foreign French muck” – yakitori, tzakziki (or however you spell it), biryani – doesn’t matter, it’s all funny foreign French muck).
And yes. He voted brexit. Why? Because “Nige is my man” (how anybody other than The Donald can say that without cringing is beyond me).

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes…

and I would never miss the pint).

Mom has American cookbooks. Not only do they use bloody weird measurements (“cups”), they also have a different idea of stuff like pints; not to mention things like “quarts” which I think is supposed to be a quarter gallon so is… what… about two pints? And god knows how many cups.
Then we have “dry pints” and “fluid ounces”.

Stuff all of that nonsense.
If it’s sloshy, it’s millilitres, centilitres, or litres.
If it’s heapable, it’s grams and kilograms.
If it’s sloshy and heapable, it’s probably ice cream in it belongs in my stomach.
The. End.

Snap test – without looking it up, how much is a hogshead?

I learned physics calculations in both imperial and metric units

When I was at school, I was taught both. I pretty much ignored imperial measurements because it was irregular and illogical. Twelve of this, sixteen of that… The only ones I remember and would feel a need to use is “inch” and “foot”. An inch for when something is small but larger than a centimetre, and a foot for when something is about the size of a traditional school ruler. That said, I cannot visualise my height in feet and inches, above about two feet (~60cm or so), I switch back to metric.
It’s just a convenience, I don’t NEED to use imperial at all, but when speaking with British people, to say “Playmobil people are about three inches tall” is simpler and more natural sounding than “Playmobil people are seven and a half centimetres tall”.

Once I saw dates written year first and day last, I saw it as consistent with the rest of numbers,

I grew up with DD/MM/YYYY and first encountered backwards dates when hacking FoxPro database files in the DOS days. They were stored as YYMMDD so a dead-simple string sort routine could put them into the correct order. Once that twigged in my brain, I did some research and discovered that the far eastern Asians prefer to use YY.MM.DD and it just seemed like a much better way to write it. Then I found out that ISO8601 existed, and I haven’t ever looked back. We write times as hour (big), minute (middle), second (little), so why not do dates in the same way? Just start the whole shebang from largest value to smallest.

Alarm on the icon bar shows “2016-11-28 17:09:48”

MiniTime says at the upper right of the screen 20:13:53, 2016/11/28. It is that way around as the time is the part I will be most interested in (the date only changes once a day (duh!)) so I want to read that first.

When I’m asked for my date of birth, I always give it as year-month-day.

16th of December. Because I’m probably speaking to humans, so saying it otherwise would be unusual, and it tends to freak people out if you say stuff like “16th of the 12th” because they then have to think (and it takes long enough you know they’re counting off the months from January in their head!).

who ran a crappy little car spares shop

Ouch!

What we all do is convert such measurements into “about this long”

…which only works so long as “about” is good enough.

I have a manual saw. It’s the one that’s like an Art Deco letter C with a blade that clips between the two ends. Unfortunately, there are three types of saw that use similar blades but are actually slightly different sizes. I therefore need to know the size of my blade exactly.
I don’t, mind you. I just take the old blade into the shop and hold it up against the pack on the shelf. The one that’s the same size, I buy. Simple, and involves exactly zero maths. ;-)

I do often wish there were metric (base 10 or 100) time (minutes and seconds)

There are 86,400 seconds in a day. Without redefining what a second is (and breaking time everywhere), the clock simply does not lend itself to units-of-ten time measuring.
Remember, also, we are fortunate to have a type of crystal that can be made to reasonate at exactly 32.768kHz. Does that number seem familiar? It’s a power of two (1<<15) so it can be converted into a reliable second ticker by simply dividing the oscillations by two fifteen times. Fifteen D-type flip-flops in a chain. Easy, simple.

I can’t recall any British person using metric for their height

Children? I’ve always used metric. Pretty much the only imperial measurement that made a dent in my world was the mile as distance. But now I’m used to km.

I hear the pop charts are not populated by beat combo’s anymore:-)

You’ll get to hear Timberlake and Bieber and a bunch of women trying to sound like pregnant cats.

Okay, granted, Eagle (the station from Guildford that I used to listen to) just played something by Prince and he sounded like a pregnant cat, so… yeah…

Actually, you know what is the horrible thing about modern music? It isn’t the synths (say hello to Erasure and The Pet Shop Boys in the ‘80s). It isn’t the mindless repetition. It isn’t the fact that love and loss have been explored from every angle so a lot of songs are “ho hum”. It isn’t even rap. And, no, it isn’t even that dreadful “loudness” style of mixing that makes pretty much every CD from the mid ‘90s onwards suck.
What is horrible beyond all of these travesties is… autotune. Truly the invention of the devil, this awful device takes all of the natural wobble out of a vocal performance and makes every single frigging note bang on pitch. Never has it been abused so utterly as every single flamin’ song on “Glee”. I gave up watching because it was like having skewers rammed into my ears.
I don’t mind violins – Canon is my favourite piece of music. I don’t mind drop D banging away to an orchestra. And liking Nightwish, I certainly don’t mind epic rocking taken up to twelve. My playlist is about as eclectic and scattered as my brain, so it’s really nothing to me to have the random playlist segue from Nightwish into Hayley Westenra and then to Kalafina. Live pereformances are best, then you know who can sing and who just mimes to a pre-recorded track.
But something that drives me up the wall is autotune. It makes everything sound so utterly fake. If I wanted to listen to that, I’d become a Miku Hatsune fan.

I’m not a beer drinker either. If I was, I’d just buy a six-pack in the supermarket because my days of going in pubs (usually to accompany friends) meant that not only was I charged more than the booze for flat Happy Shopper lemonade, I’d also have everybody blowing smoke in my face. Back in the early ‘90s, being a non-drinker in a pub meant you generally got mocked and derided and treated like some sort of weirdo. All because I didn’t see the point in blowing forty quid on drinks that will be vomited up and peed into clothes before the break of dawn. Yup. That was my role on a Friday night. To accompany college friends on a pub crawl, to notice when they’d wet themselves to tell them they probably shouldn’t go into any more pubs. To hold hair or jackets while puking ensued. To convince them that this was where they lived. And to apologise to random strangers when other people’s doors would be banged upon by some sozzled twit looking to find their bed. Oh yes. Friday nights were full ’o fun. But at least I had a peaceful Saturday to take the train into Taunton, they were all too hung over to bother me. :-)

Frankly, put the kettle on. A good solid mug of Tetley is what I want and what I need.
Speaking of which, time to go and do exactly that.

BSP threads and measurements survive in the plumbing sections alongside metric ones.

They use 3/4" pipes at work. I asked why. Turns out that it is cheaper to get inch-sized piping shipped over from either America or the UK than to buy metric sizes in France. That’s kind of insane.

I work with a sizable number of people in their 20’s and 30’s who speak of their height etc in feet and inches and look puzzled when you try metres.

HUH? I was, I think, the first of the GCSE/National Curriculum students (exams in 1990) and metric was a required thing. I can’t believe that somebody half my age wouldn’t understand it – has education dumped metric or has it just failed them?

“that’s expensive tastebuds you have”

Well, come on. It applies to everything doesn’t it? Tea, coffee, wine, beer… There’s stuff that is just good and there’s stuff they sell in Aldi.
The two… aren’t even remotely similar.

[the lights haven’t got brighter, so the kettle hasn’t clicked off, did I remember to turn it on?]

[edit: oh balls]

From elsewhere.

Rick said:

Knowing my size in feet/inches is about as useful as knowing that I am seventy three Mars bars tall…

Lengthwise or stacked. Important if you’re a prize winner.

Mom has American cookbooks. Not only do they use bloody weird measurements (“cups”),

Cookery is about ratios so the actual units are pretty much irrelevant.

they also have a different idea of stuff like pints;

Ah, historic stuff – Queen Anne gallon. It’s one of the volumes used as a gallon in the UK until we standardised on the Imperial gallon.

not to mention things like “quarts” which I think is supposed to be a quarter gallon so is… what… about two pints?

Yup. Do want to check out the Gill too?
Or heading the other way Pin, Firkin, Kilderkin, Barrel, Hogshead, Butt, Tun ?

[edit: oh balls]

No he’s out. Lost another election/vote.

Quart

I use metric for my height and weight but my wife uses imperial (and our daughter is measured in imperial units by doctors/nurses). We are both in our 30s…

I also use big-endian dates and have done since I was a teenager. My wife thinks this is weird. I have had people at work comment that it is weird but it seems more natural to me.

When I was a teenager I worked out a completely metric system of time for days/months/years but it required a leap month to be added every decade. I thought it would be a good way to get a month off for a long national holiday every 10 years. When I showed the system to a friend at school she commented to the effect of “but I wouldn’t want my birthday to fall on the same day of the week every year…that would be boring”. Having never celebrated birthdays up to that point I had missed this issue…

In a previous job I used to write all the technical manuals for an international company and switched everything to SI units. After much complaining by the staff (no idea what the customers thought – I was never allowed to have any contact with them) I also had to put American and UK Imperial units alongside the SI units. I think they have dropped all the SI units after I left.

Imperial units have always struck me as a bit weird but I did have a CGS based textbook that I used when I was doing my nuclear degree – it blew the modern textbooks out of the water when it came to actually describing what was going on and although I couldn’t understand the units very well (never having been taught them, nor bothering to learn because they were not used anywhere else). Sadly I have lost that textbook but I feel it as a constant reminder of just how rubbish a lot of modern stuff is and how a good explanation is worth 100 good equations. But then my professor on that course always said my mathematics was weird.

International standards are a funny issue… I don’t know the exact sources but remember reading somewhere that a large number of Microsoft employees were appointed to the ISO standards committee shortly before one of their formats was awarded “International Standard for Data Exchange”.

I wonder what the International Standard Unit of Corruption would be…?

I wonder what the International Standard Unit of Corruption would be…?

Microsofts? Apples? Trumps?

It would have to be an American unit.

What measure of beer do you ask for Dave?

Like I said, Chris, I don’t like beer, so the question is moot for me.

If I did drink beer, I’d be happy to order it as a half litre or a quarter litre, like they do in mainland Europe.

I have had people at work comment that it is weird but it seems more natural to me.

Yes and yes.

“but I wouldn’t want my birthday to fall on the same day of the week every year…that would be boring”

Well, fine. In that case rework the entire scheme so that whatever day her birthday is on never happens. That’ll learn her. :-)

I think they have dropped all the SI units after I left.

The likes of the Daily Mail claimed that Europe giving up hounding the British to use metric was “a victory for common sense” (and other such nonsense). Actually, Europe just gave up trying to convince the country of the obvious benefits of using a standard logical (base 10, for a start) measurement system that’s the same as that used by everybody else in Europe.

but I feel it as a constant reminder of just how rubbish a lot of modern stuff is

Nothing to do with measurement systems, it’s just that modern stuff is complete cack. I used to look for, and buy, RSGB manuals written in the days of valves when everything was epic bakelite and huge-ass switches that you could practically hear the “thunk” just looking at the picture.
Why?
Because I had, someplace, a recent RSGB manual. I might have given it to a charity shop. Because it was crap. Something like fifty years of advances, the transistor and the microchip for god’s sake, meant that the RSGB manual ought to resemble the PRMs by now. Instead, a book the size of a phone book with more pages than the bible was pared down to a crappy softback book that more resembled a secondary school science book, had worryingly few circuit diagrams, and everything was just stripped down to basics. It was like Radio For Dummies.

Put it like this: if the 1950’s era RSGB manual is a Marks and Spencer book, the modern one is the Aldi knock-off brand.

and how a good explanation is worth 100 good equations.

Indeed. One can stare at all the equations in the world, but they don’t count if the explanation of how is missing, or inadequate.

I wonder what the International Standard Unit of Corruption would be…?

What does one measure capitalism in? Units Trump?

I’d be happy to order it as a half litre or a quarter litre, like they do in mainland Europe.

The tendency is actually to order “a beer” the quantity may vary each time.¹

There is a tendency among many in the UK to order a beer and it is only the requirement for this to be sold in defined quantities that causes the UK public to asked “pint or half” in return. They should actually be asking “pint, half or third” as these are the actual defined quantities.

¹ The service of bottled beer is obviously a known volume and is mostly 75cl, 33cl, and 25cl (wonderfully metric fractions don’t you think?) so before anyone points the metric finger perhaps they’d like to clean their own house?

When I was a teenager I worked out a completely metric system of time for days/months/years but it required a leap month to be added every decade. I thought it would be a good way to get a month off for a long national holiday every 10 years.

While the underlying problem of trying to apply a non-natural base system to a naturally occurring phenomenon (earth’s orbital period) the best solution to the calendar split is in actual fact to use 28 days per month and declare a natural holiday on the first day of the year which does not form a part of any month. Said natural holiday is not Monday – Sunday. On leap years there is a second natural holiday and it too is not Monday – Sunday.

OK, you now have 13 months of 28 days and the first day of each month falls on the same day.
Those people working on the prime natural holiday would be advised to transfer their holiday to their birthday.

Didn’t one of the South American civilizations have something like that…?

Didn’t one of the South American civilizations have something like that…?

Don’t know. On looking it up I see it’s a concept that has been around for a long time. If the internet had been around when I was young and dreamed up the concept I’d have known it was a recurring thought.
Even the extra day being a holiday is part of the earlier versions.