Glad to know that at a time when people are concerned about the economic outlook, crime and so forth, that those chaps at the European Union have not taken their eye off the ball:
The acre, one of Britain’s historic imperial measurements, is to be banned from use under a new European directive. The measurement, which will officially be replaced by the hectare, will no longer be allowed when land is being registered. After being agreed last week, the new ruling will come into force in January 2010.
I do not know why this story riles me so much, but it does. It is not that I cannot understand the logic of using a metric system so that it is possible to make instant comparisons between say, the price of a hectare of land in France and Britain, which is quite useful to be able to do when looking at the state of our respective economies. But it is the illegality of registering land by using certain measurements that is so barmy. If there is a market in land – well, partially free anyway – surely the persons buying or selling can measure it any way they please, so long as the amounts are agreed and are accurately registered. It is the accuracy of the register, not the units per se, that counts. Apart from anything else, cannot the EU and its minions do some basic maths? An acre is equal to 0.404 hectares. Every time one has to convert the old English Imperial measurements to metric and vice versa, it has the salutary effect of encouraging people to do a bit of maths, which is a good mental exercise anyway.
Many units of measurement used in the Anglo-Saxon world have been ingrained in our mental lives. I can – just about – visualise what an acre is. I cannot do that for a hectare. Far from being fogeyish or illogical, there is nothing essentially better or worse than one or the other. Roger Scruton has a nice discussion of the benefits of traditional weights and measures here. Every time there is an assault on such traditional measures, it is an assault on differences because they are differences, on the eccentric, the quaint, the odd, the unusual, the untidy.
Compared to many of the other creeping forms of “harmonisation” beloved of the Eurocrats, this may seem like a paltry measure, and I am sure that is right. But it has really annoyed me. Leave our acres alone, you tidy-minded bastards.
The obliteration of difference (except for officially approved difference) is part of the plan.
If there was a good reason for sticking to metric, one feels that personal choice would have made it happen. Since this is not so, the enlightened ones deem it necessary to enforce the correct choice.
One sometimes also feels that it’s really just about reversing Napoleon’s final defeat.
This merely reinforces what I’ve thought for years, namely, that the metric system is now less-about being a system of measurement than it is a tool of cultural hegemony. If the metric system of measure offers any significant advantage in a particular field of endeavour, users will adopt it voluntraily and with enthusiasm. If it doesn’t, they won’t.
Emerson wrote that ‘a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds’ and nowhere is this more true than in the thinking of those who seek to forcibly impose a single system of measure upon every field of human endeavour.
llater,
llamas
Well, metric is much preferable in engineering and science but that is not what the article is about.
It reminds me of a discussion I had with one of the other people in the flat: Bureaucrats are people with tidy minds. Liberty is messy, chaotic, disorganized and difficult to predict. Those with tidy minds therefor loath the real thing and unconsciously wish to stamp it out.
I’m 5’11” and weigh 75 kgs so what does that make me?
I really don’t give a toss. I still buy Midget Gems from the (Pakistani) newsagent by the quarter, not the 100gs. And they’re proper Lion’s ones not those Maynard’s crap either.
This is just an example of the EU regulating over something that matters not a jot. Yet still they regulate because that is what they do. My sister-in-law has done more to achieve European integration than all of the trough-pigs of Brussels. She did it easily and much more agreeably – she found a nice Polish chap.
Make love not law!
I like using the metric system because it is easy. My Father grew up with imperial. We never have family rows about measurements, because neither of these systems were the result of divine inspiration. We can agree to disagree.
The EU and its ilk hates diversity more than anything else. Thats why they invented a new meaning for the word.
As an American Engineer, I find the metric system to have all the faults in technical work it has in everyday life. The Imperial (now US Standard) system was built from practical use so things are measured in useful sized units. A multiple of 10 is much too large for ordinary use while factors of 2 and 3 are both common and helpful.
Dr. Farenheit’s scale still bounds the range of normal human temperatures and has the right degree of precision. A system of units based on force and not mass is still the best for people doing most of their work on the surface of the earth.
Remember the metric system was invented by the same people that brought you Thermador and the 10 hour day!
Ah yes, the old easy comparison con again.
They tried it with the Euro didn’t they!
Oh we must join, then it will be easy to compare prices across La La Land!
Well it’s easy now. To convert Euros to pounds all you do is multiply by 8 and move the decimal point.
The one that really pisses me off though is the temperature thing.
Sorry, but 16C is not a measure of temperature to my generation, it is a hat size.
It has no resonance at all. Wheras 61F does. I know what that feels like and dress accordingly.
Imperial measures, as someone above said, have a human scale to them that you can visualise and feel.
Metric is impersonal almost anti human.
But as we all know here, the European Dream is to make all our systems and people, homogenous, and therefore much more easily controlled.
There is something far more messy about this edict. Acres are part of a system of area measures that are functionally base four. Land is divided into square miles (640 acres). Each square is divided into four equal parts (160 acres). Each quarter is divided into four equal parts (40 acres). Each quarter quarter can be divided into four equal parts measured in several different ways, the most common be a strip 1/4 mile by 1/16 mile.
It is obvious to even a child that a base ten system is all wrong because the orders of magnitude are far to great for dividing land. Base four has done so well because it is so perfectly suited to the need.
This system has been embedded into our geography so thoroughly in the US that all a change to hectares would do is mandate the massive use of lots of decimal places and, as Dave Moelling points out, an utterly unsuitable system of measurement.
This is one more part of the conquest to turn the British people into inhabitants of a European island named ‘Britain’. You guys need to DEMAND a referendum. The EU knows they are screwing you over. That is their purposeful intention.
The ‘imperial’ or ‘customary’ system of lane measuring is actually a very-finely tuned and very-specific system, as Midwesterner touches upon.
It is based in the methods of Edmund Gunter, a C17 English mathematician of some considerable genius. He devised the basic instrument of measure, known as Gunter’s chain, which is still in use today. His system is both base 4 (as Midwesterner describes) and decimal, and with this instrument, a compass and a transit, you can measure, survey, mark and draft any land area, in consistent units of both length and area. The system is completely scalable and includes several interconnected units of measure for both length and area which allow for the surveying of any land area from 1/10,000 of an acre all the way up to an entire continent. Virtually all of the US that was not bought from France or taken from Spain is surveyed using this system, and its may be easily seen from an airliner on a clear day. This is far-and-away the largest single land survey ever conducted in the real world, and its success was such that it still successfully in use 200 years later.
It is, quite literally, an arithemetical and geometrical tour-de-force. And absolutely useless for anything else. And the question we really need to ask is – if you have a perfectly-developed tool for a specific task, like this tool – do you really care that it’s no use for brewing beer, or making aspirins? Is there any real value in having completely-disconnected industries all use the exact-same system of measure? Is such consistency so important, and so valuable, that you must force it upon people (at the final reduction) at the point of a gun?
I’ll be the Amsterdam diamond merchants still sell diamonds by carat weight (not an SI unit) and I’ll bet the gnomes of Zurich still mark their gold bars in Troy ounces (not an SI unit). Apparently, consistency isn’t that important after all.
llater,
llamas
I like using the metric system because it is easy.
Umm. What is the force exerted by gravity on a 1 pound mass (lbm)? Thanks to some very cunning definitions by our ancestors, the answer is 1 pound force (1 lbf). Even a product of the modern British educational system can handle that conversion factor.
Now, what is the force exerted by gravity on a 1 kilogram mass? (And why is the basic SI unit of mass 1,000 grams whereas the SI unit of distance is 1 meter? Where is the vaunted consistency & simplicity?) Well, back to the question — the force exerted by gravity on a mass of 1 kg is 9.80665 Newtons.
Yes, you have to love those simple SI conversion factors. Really easy.
Imperial measures, as someone above said, have a human scale to them that you can visualise and feel.
Metric is impersonal almost anti human.
One word. Tosh.
The Farenheit scale is no more intuitive to the wife (who grew up a long way outside the EU) than the Centigrade one is to me. She just doesn’t get it on any level, same with pounds, stone, feet and inches – she can’t visualise them, she can’t process them. Even miles she has to swap into a variety of “large” kilometre before she get’s a feel for the distance involved.
It really is what you grew up with and what was ingrained early in life. There’s really nothing instintive about it.
I can quite easily visualise a 100m square and I’m sure even the products of a British education system can probably do the same now.
If you want a painful thing for me: the English/Imperial system isn’t even consistent between the US and the UK. Just try buying a pint of beer…
This is totally irrelevant trivia tangential to your point, but 9.80665 Newtons is an average, it actually varies between 9.78 N at the equator up to about 9.83 N at the poles. (And it is only even approximately true at the Earth’s surface anyway.) And other effects like the buoyancy in air affect weight by about one part in a thousand, so you can’t even rely on the last decimal place there.
And does anyone remember what a slug weighs?
Its a good thing they banned guns otherwise I’d have no clue what the bore a a 12ga is?
Alice wrote:
How many gallons in a cubic foot?
Or for a more practical question, I’ve got a room that’s not quite 8′ by 12′ — thanks to the walls taking up some of that space, the room is something like 7’8″ by 11’7-1/2″. Carpeting here in the US is sold by the square yard. How many square yards of carpeting would I need for that room?
Neither system is perfect, but metric certainly does have its uses, as my father came to understand when he installed laminate flooring as part of may parents’ home renovation. Metric made it easier not only to figure out how many planks he’d need per row, but more importantly, how many packets of planks he’d have to buy.
Uses yes.
Usage No.
Ted Schuerzinger wrote:
‘Or for a more practical question, I’ve got a room that’s not quite 8′ by 12′ — thanks to the walls taking up some of that space, the room is something like 7’8″ by 11’7-1/2″. Carpeting here in the US is sold by the square yard. How many square yards of carpeting would I need for that room?’
If you’re actually suggesting that you would buy carpet to such an degree of precison that a measurement of 1/2″ or even 6″ makes a difference to you, then I can tell that you haven’t installed much carpet . . . .
To a larger point, your story about your father’s flooring merely says that he found metric measure to be more-convenient for that application. Good for him. Is that sufficient reason that that (or any) system of measure should be imposed on everyone, to the exclusion of any other, with the force of law?
No, it isn’t.
Your question of how many gallons in a cubic foot – 7½ for any practical purpose. I happen to know this conversion factor from regular use.
Now, answer me this – what is the weight of 265 litres of seawater at a temperature of 52°C and a latitude of 62° N? (Hint – there’s at least one detail left out, so you can’t really answer the question accurately).
It’s not quite so easy to pop out an answer, because all those simply decimal relationships – don’t apply anymore.
And – guess what – it’s just as hard to do as if the units were all ‘imperial’ or ‘customary’.
‘Metric’ measure is a wonderful thing in textbook examples. In the real world, with all its nasty disconnects, correction factors and unaticipated deviations, its textbook advantages often evaporate.
llater,
llamas
A 12 gauge has a bore barely big enough to admit a 1/12 of a pound lead roundball.
‘Metric’ measure is a wonderful thing in textbook examples. In the real world, with all its nasty disconnects, correction factors and unaticipated deviations, its textbook advantages often evaporate.
Going back to my engineering degree and work as an engineer I’ve got to disagree. The real world might make things more complicated but using metric simplifies first principle calculations enormously. Especially for conceptualising problems such as…
Now, answer me this – what is the weight of 265 litres of seawater at a temperature of 52°C and a latitude of 62° N? (Hint – there’s at least one detail left out, so you can’t really answer the question accurately).
Well, as a rough approximation you’re looking at a tad over 265kgs of water mass, which for most purposes tells you what it would weigh at most points on the planets surface.
Of course, I’d be interested a couple of things, first, what you’re doing with that quantity of sea water at 52C that far North and, what the actual conditions are to have heated it to that much.
Second, what actual level of error in the calculation is acceptable to you. If you wanted to know the size of a storage tank and how thick/heavy is needed to be and was going to be then I’d be comfortable estimating that now for the materials with very little looking up. If you want something for aerospace tolerances then I’d want a lot more information.
As a rule of thumb I know, off the top of my head, how much a litre of water will mass (1kg) and have a rough idea of the physical space it would take up in cubic volume (10 cm^3).
I couldn’t do the same with the same puzzle in pints unless you specified if you were using the English or Imperial system, and then it’s still messy and hard to visualize even for pure water.
Llamas:
I’m not suggesting that metric be made mandatory, and certainly not suggesting that US/Imperial measurements be made illegal. It’s more that the trashing of metric is similar to another go we had when the idea of expressing time in the 24-hour clock was brought up. It’s an idea that certainly has its uses (in my opinion, it makes reading train and bus schedules easier than the US practice of putting PM in bold), but you had a lot of folks here dismissing the idea out of hand. (Of course, it was long enough ago that the particularly vile Verity was dismissing it simply because it’s the way the French do things….)
As long as nobody’s committing fraud, they should be allowed to contract amongst themselves to sell goods in whichever units they want.
As for the number of gallons in a cubic foot, your answer is only correct for the US gallon. It’s closer to 6-1/4 for the Imperial gallon. (I had to look up the exact size of the Imperial gallon to get the answer, although I, like you, knew that the US gallon is 231 cu. in.)
I can – just about – visualise what an acre is. I cannot do that for a hectare.
Oh, it’s easy. Visualize an acre and then take 4/10ths. Or go the other way: an acre is about 2 1/2 hectares.
This was just your little joke, wasn’t it?
@Charlie,
Um…no!
100 hectares =1km^2=(5/8)^2mi^2 (roughly).
So 100 hectares=250 acres (roughly).
So 1 hectare=2.5 acres (roughly).
Daveon – and how does your lady wife say “Tosh” ?
Ask her how she says “Thumb”, and you will most likely find the word for “Inch” … “Foot”, while objectively imprecise, is a measure most of us carry around with us as a first approximation … even a mile is a thousand paces – 2 thousand steps …
The US pint seems to have been an attempt to make a pint of water weigh a pound …
A cubic foot of frech water is 62.5 Imperial Gallons … it’s a fact one memorises, just as 28C is effectively 82F – it gives you a reference point …
The biggest problem with the metric system is that very few people, comparatively, can count now …
It used to be, pre-decimalisation and the metric system, that the average educated British kid could do basic arithmetic in bases 10, 12 (pennies to shillings), 14 (pounds (weight) to stones), 16 (ounces to pounds (weight)), 20 (shillings to pounds (sterling)), 8 (stones to hundredweights (usually for coal)), and even, to a certain extent 60 (seconds to minutes, minutes to hours) …
Alasdair,
She’d say cack, although that’s in her second language – she is a native English speaker, which is another point. A lot of the Anglosphere is metric and has been for a long time.
Then she’ll counter that a centimetre about a finger tip width for most people and for “government” work a yard and metre based on the span from nose to end of arm is pretty approximation.
What people think is natural is really more down to conditioning and the way they think than anything else. There’s been lots of different weights and measures systems in the history of the world and I actually like that (with 3 exceptions World Wide) we have a simple and standardised one.
This discussion is as odd as wondering what language non-English speakers think in.
Thanks Alistair,
I was hoping someone would say just that.
When we were all on LSD
we were flying high…
No that didn’t come out quite right there did it?
Nevertheless you are right.
In 1971 in Nottingham my corner shop was run by twelve year old kids.
Think Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
The movie.
Cos nothing had changed in the Meadows over those years.
These kids lived in a white criminal ghetto that should have hugely disadvantaged them, according to my compulsory Sociology seminars,
Yet they were virtually running the business and could add up a column of figures faster than it takes a contemporary kid to turn his calculator on.
Then they brought in decimalisation
Cos it is easier on us poor peasants.
You know the rest…
It’s depressing to find the anti-metric brigade coming out of the woodwork, with their usual daft arguments about how because a foot is very very roughly the length of a fairly large man’s foot, it’s some kind of wonderful ‘human’ measurement that’s magically easy to use.
The only thing more depressing than this spectacle is when the metric brigade start telling everyone that the metric system is the only rational means of measurement in existence and the Imperial system is an insane superstitious medieval system that makes science impossible and stunts the minds of children.
From a practical point of view all the Germans I know manage to, you know, buy, measure, estimate and generally get along in life just fine with metric. What I also know, is that it for most simple uses it is better to have multiple measurement systems than one single one. When I’m climbing I measure water in litres, because I know they weigh a kilo, and that’s useful. When I’m filling my car I buy gallons because I know how many miles I can go on one. But I prefer to use barrels when it’s not yet refined. When I’m measuring sugar I use either grams or teaspoons or tablespoons depending on the order of magnitude. I find the coffee mug is the best way of measuring rice.
What the EU is missing is that in fact only relatively few problems are made easier by using a small set of measures everywhere. Many problems are made easier by using many different sets of measures in different places.
The only thing more depressing than this spectacle is when the metric brigade start telling everyone that the metric system is the only rational means of measurement in existence and the Imperial system is an insane superstitious medieval system
Yeah, you had me bang to rights to up until that point. Although it’s hardly superstitious just a bit daft at the end of the day.
… that makes science impossible and stunts the minds of children.
It doesn’t make science impossible, it does make scientific and engineering cooperation a lot harder than it should be. Ask the Mars Express mission crew…
And I’ll agree with some of the commentators here that having to handle manipulations of data in Base 12 and other esoteric number bases certainly helped people with some maths skills. Although frankly, I’d blame the rise of the calculator more than I’d blame decimal because, as you noted, there’s lots of countries where they’ve been metric for generations who don’t seem to have a population of dunces who struggle with basic maths.
German car anybody?
There is an entertaining book (if a person who rides a bike can really write an entertaining book?) called “The Measure of All Things” — Ken Alder, Free Press, 2002.
The French, of course, are to blame for the metric system. Their idea was to create a universal measure, one ten millionth of the distance from the pole to the equator. (They mistakenly believed that the Earth was a perfect sphere, and that this distance would be the same everywhere). The astronomers sent out to measure the meter in 1792 wandered for years, getting diverted by the French Revolution and wars between France & Spain. (This was back in the days when the Euros were men, and always ready for a fight).
At the end of the day, the astronomers made some measurement mistakes, which were of course brushed under the carpet. (The first glimmer of the new Euros?).
So the “universal” meter ended up being as entirely arbitrary as the distance from the king’s nose to his thumb. Oh well! Now let’s discuss the erg.
For some time I have been working on GUS- Gray’s Universal Standards!
I realised that aliens might not have met french people, and so might not use metrics! Shocking, I know!
So I am working on using the commonest wavelength of hydrogen found in space. This is 21cm, or 8+1/4″. This would be the UL, or universal length. We can also use the Cosmic background as a temperature guide, and a cube of frozen hydrogen is 1.2kg, or 2lb 10oz. You can derive other measures from it as well, and divide by twos for measures, and we should use exponential numbering.
21cm is a handy size. What do you think aliens would use? I mention this here because libertarians are often future-orientated, and space-loving.
For some time I have been working on GUS- Gray’s Universal Standards!
I realised that aliens might not have met french people, and so might not use metrics! Shocking, I know!
So I am working on using the commonest wavelength of hydrogen found in space. This is 21cm, or 8+1/4″. This would be the UL, or universal length. We can also use the Cosmic background as a temperature guide, and a cube of frozen hydrogen is 1.2kg, or 2lb 10oz. You can derive other measures from it as well, and divide by twos for measures, and we should use exponential numbering.
21cm is a handy size. What do you think aliens would use? I mention this here because libertarians are often future-orientated, and space-loving.
My son (US engineering student) seems to use them interchangably. This evening he was describing a piece of tile and told me it was about a centimeter wide and an inch long.
Of course, because of that he’ll probably crash a satellite into Mars someday . . .
No.
J writes:
Well yes. Debating the pros and cons of one system vs another is a bit of a waste of time, although some of the engineers on this board might have some killer argments to put. But as I said, it is the attempt to make it illegal to use one system vs. another that is galling.
And this banning of a system of measurement is not some innocent piece of tidying. It is about the annihilation of a language of measurement, of a way of looking at the world. It is all of a piece with the “progressive consensus” that holds that anything that existed before the last few decades in Britain must be destroyed.
Daveon – I won’t repeat your reply, but it illustrates my point quite nicely.
Sure, for a storage tank, the approximations that you make in the mtric system would be just fine. I’d do the same.
If I had the same problem expressed in US gallons, and °F, I could produce a similarly-accurate approximation, with the constants and factors which I have in my head.
If I need the answer correct to ±1% or better – it’s just as complex a calculation in ‘metric’ measures as it is in ‘customary’ measures.
I will quibble with your first statement, though:
”Metric’ measure is a wonderful thing in textbook examples. In the real world, with all its nasty disconnects, correction factors and unaticipated deviations, its textbook advantages often evaporate.
Going back to my engineering degree and work as an engineer I’ve got to disagree. The real world might make things more complicated but using metric simplifies first principle calculations enormously.
Well, that’s rather what I said, isn’t it? Metric measure works fine in textbook examples = first-principle calculations. But in the step from first-principles to the real world, its simplicity usually disappears, because the real world is not decimal and the simple, direct relationships simply evaporate.
I knew that someone would eventually mention the Mars Express orbiter loss. But you suggest that the loss is somehow due to the fact that ‘customary’ measures were used. And that is not so. In fact, the Mars Express debacle shows exactly why it is so very foolish to mess with systems of measure purely for reasons of ideology. NASA put a whole bunch of men on the moon using ‘customary’ measures, with an enviable record of success. Mars Express was lost because somebody, somewhere, decided that the system that had worked for 40 years needed to be changed – not for any technical benefit, but for the sake of ‘consistency’ and ‘harmonization’ (with what, one asks oneself?) and so they ended up with some people working in one system and some in another. That is no reflection of the quality of either system – either would have done a perfect job. The issue was the decision to change. Google ‘Gimli Glider’ for another such example.
As an engineer, I don’t give a toss which system I use. What matters to me are referrable standards and consistency. I don’t care what the base units are, and decimal math works with any unit of length, mass or time. Suggestions that any system is ‘better’ or ‘more universal’ or ‘more consistent’ are just tosh, and efforts to mandate the use of one to the exclusion of all others are not matters of technical merit but rather matters of social and nationalistic pressures which amount to cultural imperialism.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds”, wrote Emerson, and this latest insistence upon consistency above all else tells you all you need to know about the minds that run the EU.
llater,
llamas
As far as I’m aware (I have some family connections in the legal profession), acres haven’t actually been used in land registration for years. So this looks like the old EU “there are no plans…”/”formalizing measures that already pertain” switcheroo. They’re getting really good at that.
For what it’s worth, I don’t like Metric. And the point here is that there shouldn’t have to be any other reason than that, neither for me nor for whole countries. Making systems of measurement that people have used for centuries illegal is purely a symbolic act of domination. One of the legitimate functions of a state is to standardize and regulate the measurements that people use in order to protect them against fraud; it’s not to impose alien systems against their will.
Daveon – I am insufficiently pretentious for a German car …
I used to drive Volvos (safety first) and now, due to changing circunstances, I drive Fords … (my circumstances didn’t change, Ford bought Volvo (embarrassed sigh)) …
The well-known Mars Explorer mission had its problems because its engineers and techies weren’t used to thinking in both systems enough to CHECK everything at least twice … just as the UK and the US are two great countries divided by a common language, the metric and imperial systems are two attempts to decribe the same things with different words …
English speakers’ brains are already soft-wired to handle synonyms – so the correct English-speaker answer with metric and imperial is to have both systems co-exist, like current english words with Latin roots usually have their equivalent english words with German roots … how else does one make good faith attempts to establish one’s bona fides ?
Banning either impoverishes everyone …
Oh – and the existence of calculators isn’t reponsible for modern innumeracy – the encouragement of their use may have hastened its advent, but what doomed kids to innumeracy was the erosion of standards … the tyranny of lowered expectations has gradually doomed them to become more and more clueless about more and more interesting subjects …
To send this discussion of on yet another tangent — “innumeracy”.
Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (1989 edition) — the closest one to hand — does not include the word “innumeracy”. Closest word is innumerable — in the sense of uncountably numerous.
Innumeracy is a fine word, with obvious parallels to the ancient word illiteracy. But this raises an interesting question — how did English-speaking peoples come to dominate the world without ever needing a word to describe the inability to count?
Could it be that the problem did not exist before recent times, outside of the obviously feeble-minded. Even the illiterate shepherd knew how to count his flock. And the unlettered serving girl knew how to count her change.
Could the very recent need for “innumeracy” be proof positive of Alisdair’s postulated declining educational standards? And can a technologically-dependent society be “sustainable” without a well-educated population?
This is all just to soften you up for Eurolingo, the tongue that Brussels will try to impose on the rest!
The French will try to entrench French, but english is more widely used, so the French will probably nominate Esperanto as the first language of Europe.
Vi parolas Esperanton, jes?
Esperanto has some nice ideas, and is not bad, but it would have already taken the world by storm if it was going to do so. Insist on British English as the ideal language!
Call it .729 caliber. I’m not going to go next door at this hour of the night and tell that goof neighbor of mine that I want my micrometer back just to check it. (Never mind adjusting for choke: I’m positive that using non-numeric measurements like ‘full,’ ‘modified’ ‘improved cylinder’ etc. was not what the EU had in mind.)
Everybody knows that beer is dispensed 12 ounces at a time from bottles[1], by the pint from tap, and ideally directly into the kitchen sink from cans.
And when you’re framing in a wall, studs go 16 inches on-center, unless you’re doing the post-and-beam thing in which case the posts are either 24″ or 48″ on-center. I dare the EU to take on the might of the Carpenter’s Union.
So, how many rods should my SUV get from a hogshead of 85-octane?
[1] growlers and 22’s excluded.
Sunfish wrote:
‘(Never mind adjusting for choke: I’m positive that using non-numeric measurements like ‘full,’ ‘modified’ ‘improved cylinder’ etc. was not what the EU had in mind.)’
It’s only a matter of time before the EU outlaws the standard British choke designations (¼-choke, ½-choke and so on). Those of you in the UK had better learn whatever choke-marking system is used in France, because I wager that is what will be mandated as being the required EU system.
llater,
llamas
Alice – I’ll forego the obvious responses (like the english term for someone who cannot count is “NuLab economist” or “EEC Economist”) …
Your comment is a little like observing that there is no french word for “shallow” (and, no, “anglaistypique” doesn’t count !) … the French are content with “peu profond” …
When anglophones encounter a civilisation which has 23 individual words for various forms of people who cannot count at some level, all of a sudden, english will have one or two individual words for a person who cannot count …
(“He’s such a Brown”, while understandable, is not a valid example)
Oh – and who is this “Alisdair” person to whom you refer, Alace ? (grin)
Llamas,
What matters to me are referrable standards and consistency.
Indeed. Which given that, according to my last check, only 3 countries on the planet still routinely use non-metric systems is part of the problem. It’s extremely inconsistent these days to use something other than metric, so mistakes like the Gimli Glider and Mars _Climate Observer_ (my bad, sorry) will happen when people venture out of the “customary” system.
The fact is metric is the more universal, it’s used everywhere in the world with very very few exceptions. For any American engineering business wanting to work outside of the US it’s also essential.
To also quibble, finally: Metric measure works fine in textbook examples = first-principle calculations.
Those two aren’t synomyms.
I’ve a terrible memory for standard formula but I could easily remember SI units and what they represented. Being able to work out what I needed to know because I understood the standard unit and the measures in it has been essential to me in the past. It’s helped me in chemical and electrical calculations in the field where I didn’t have references but needed to check if somebody was about to do something partircuarly dumb.
You are right in that if you need something to a 1% tolerance then it’ll be a pig of a real world calculation in either system – but then I’ll refer back to avoiding problems like the Gimli Glider. More fuel is sold in litres and kilos than in gallons and pounds around the world.
Although I am surprised you haven’t mentioned that altitudes are still in feet… 😉
I am insufficiently pretentious for a German car
But you are sufficiently so for a Swedish one? They were designed in metric by engineers who think in metric too 🙂
Sunfish: (beer)… by the pint from tap,
To really get onto a bugbear of mine, what do you mean here by a “pint”. Do you mean the 0.568 litres that I think a pint is? Or do you mean the 0.473 litres that is sold across the US pretending to be a pint?
Not only do we have the difference in the size of the pint, but we also have the problem at the core that the Imperial Fl Oz is 0.96 US Customary Fl Oz’s…
Alasidair and others seem to place a lot of store in the customary and “natural” use of these terms and what people visualise and yet I am sorely tested in most bars I set at across the US unless they’re actually using decent sized Imperial glasses.
At least when I travel outside of the UK and US I know what I’m getting in a half litre.[1]
[1] – well ok, mostly cold yellow fizzy stuff, but you get the point.
Oh – and the existence of calculators isn’t reponsible for modern innumeracy – the encouragement of their use may have hastened its advent, but what doomed kids to innumeracy was the erosion of standards … the tyranny of lowered expectations has gradually doomed them to become more and more clueless about more and more interesting subjects …
So we are agreed, the rise of the use of the Metric system in the UK has had nothing to do with it.
I’m fairly certain that you’ll find high educational standards in lots of other countries where they use metric.
Sunfish wrote:
For some values of “everybody”. Some of us have the good taste to drink alcoholic beverages other than beer. :-p
You forgot the 19.2 inch studs.
(I’m a 68″ stud myself….)
Alasdair wrote:
I have to apologize for mis-spelling your name, Alasdair. I got it right in the original SI, but the spelling got messed up during conversion to metric. (I had forgotten that a lot of metric units are verbotten under SI). Almost makes one long for the simpler times of troy ounces and carats.
Daveon wrote:
‘Indeed. Which given that, according to my last check, only 3 countries on the planet still routinely use non-metric systems is part of the problem. It’s extremely inconsistent these days to use something other than metric, so mistakes like the Gimli Glider and Mars _Climate Observer_ (my bad, sorry) will happen when people venture out of the “customary” system.
The fact is metric is the more universal, it’s used everywhere in the world with very very few exceptions.’
I don’t fully agree with all of what you say but that doesn’t really matter. What’s your point? That there is one system that is used by more people than other systems? I agree. But does that mean that that one system should be mandated to the exclusion of all others? By force of law? If so, why?
Being an engineer, in the US, I have noticed that the nations which are growing their economies aggressively (China and India) don’t give a toss what units you use. They may be ‘nominally’ metric but the only units they care about are denominated in $$. I have a process engineer from India visiting with me this week to iron out some pre-production problems in a new product. He’s 100% fluent in metric and ‘customary’ measures, just like me. He undersdtands – as I do – that while systems of measure are important, and you need referreable standards and internal consistncy, they’re really nothing to get excited about.
Then you wrote:
‘More fuel is sold in litres and kilos than in gallons and pounds around the world.’
Not true for aviation fuel. This was always calculated for flight in units of weight, because weight is what matters in an airplane. The worldwide standard unit used to be pounds, and once again, the actual unit used matters little – what matters is internal consistency.
Air Canada decided, unilaterally, that they knew better, and that consistency with a different system of measure was more-important (a socio-political decision) than consistency with the eixtsing system of measure that everyone who used it knew and was trained and experienced in ( a technical/human resources decision). An d so the plane ran out fuel. That’s the price that has to be paid for this ‘foolish consistency’. I think it’s too high.
Appreciate your thoughts.
llater,
llamas
Units are normally only a problem when politicians get involved with them. E.g.: new EU-nified motorcycle tests need large off-road areas to do parts of the test because certain maneuvers like emergency stops must now be carried out at 50km/h. 32mph. 2mph too fast to do them on the suburban roads where they were previously done.
Further to my earlier comment, there’s a letter in the Telegraph from the “Head of Media” at the “Representation of the European Commission to the UK”:
Just as I thought. I had forgotten there was bound to be the usual trade-off, though: if we give up acres, we get to keep miles and pints. For the time being.
We adopt Euro standards in the UK time and again… that’s how it always seems.
But if we had a good method, or for that matter a decent measure, would Europe adopt it from the UK?
I would be interested to know if this sort of alteration to our methods is purely one way traffic.
(Which reminds me, how long before driving on the left is “dealt with”?)
But if we had a good method, or for that matter a decent measure, would Europe adopt it from the UK?
Yield to traffic on the roundabout. The French and the Swedes used to do it the other way around for some weird reason.
There are probably other examples.
Although, I do take exception to the idea this is some over arching European conspiracy. There are only 3 non-metric countries left on the planet and given only a couple of handfulls were French colonies or part of the EU it suggests that the metric system appealed to a lot of people more than the competing alternatives (homegrown, Imperial and English).
I don’t fully agree with all of what you say but that doesn’t really matter. What’s your point? That there is one system that is used by more people than other systems? I agree.
Yes. That would be my point in a nutshell.
But does that mean that that one system should be mandated to the exclusion of all others?
It depends on the system. If individuals want to trade in Groaks and Okri I have no issue. But anything which, as you so elequently put, can cause a problem for “internal consistency” should probably be mandated out of “official” global systems. Such as aviation fuel, standards for international equipment and so forth.
If the US wants to continue to use “customary” measures then I don’t really have an issue with it, I find it a little odd, as I also find people in the UK who are clinging to Imperial units. At the end of the day I don’t think it really needs an act of law because the market, which has already decided that metric won, will always win at the end of the day.
Assuming this to be the case, what I do wonder is how long it takes for the transition to finally happen in the US and UK and how painful on people that transition ultimately is, and how many more critical problems occur as people have to get used to the different measures.
It seems now that all we’re doing is postponing the inevitable.
A lot of the “emotional” arguments here about natural language and how English/Imperial unit names are more logical for English speakers to process doesn’t really take into account the millions of English speakers in Canada, South Africa or Australia where they seem to have no trouble with the transition.
By force of law? If so, why?
Force of law?
Interesting question. I only really think the law should be involved if there is a question of honesty in the transaction between buyer and selling in terms of the weights and measures used. If you don’t think your Groat of Widgets was a full Groat and you complain, what is the basis for your complaint?
There’s not issue as long as everybody agrees that there is a standard Groat and you can refer to it but if everybody sets their own groats then it needlessly complicates tranactions and would make life more difficult.
If the law and the legal system are to be used to ensure fairness then at the end of the day I can’t see an easy way to do it without standard weights and measures – which is what we have now. Ultimately I suspect the cost of maintaining 2 or more systems will only be born for a finite time and we might as well live with it.
Sure they’ll be a few old farts like myself who like a Pint (568ml naturally) and know their height in feet and inches, but over time we’ll adapt.
My 77 year old mother told me that it was 42 degrees where she was on a cruise in Egypt. What ever next?
Some of us have the good taste to drink alcoholic beverages other than beer.
I hope you don’t buy that in 500ml, 750ml and 1000ml bottles 😉
I take it that at the end of the day you are having a laugh?
Metrication was of course forced on Britain by law, it had nothing at all to do with market forces. If left to the market we would still be using our traditional measures. Metrication was imposed by 60’s White Heaters who thought is was new, despite being 200 years old, and European. It was all part of the loss of national nerve, and the cultural cringe towards Europe which led to our repeated, and, sadly, eventually successful attempts to join the “Common Market”.