Oddly, UK railways are still distanced marked in miles, chains and feet.
As an engineer I’d never want to design or build anything in imperial measurements.
Oddly, UK railways are still distanced marked in miles, chains and feet.
As an engineer I’d never want to design or build anything in imperial measurements.
I’m a bit weird in that I flit from using metric to imperial and back again. I weigh myself in Stones and Pounds but use metric cooking weights.
I judge short distances in metres but plan longer routes in miles.
Age obviously I can’t change. But if I’ve had seven pints then that’s obviously only one beer in dog beers?
You’re not alone in that way of thinking. That’s pretty much how the whole UK is.
There’s 10 chains in a furlong (just looked it up) so that’s no good.
Surprisingly a furlong is just over 200 metres so could cause some big problems. Then again that might be just USA measures and UK ones could well be a lot more silly.
Anyway with the state of UK education at the moment I find all this very adventurous.
Decimalisation was one of the greatest days of my childhood.
Decimalisation was a rip off. Prior to 25/2/71 I was able to buy myself a toffee bar called a ‘Penny Arrow Bar’. If I was fortunate enough to have sixpence (6d) then I could buy six of them. When decimalisation happened the price became 1/2p. 10 year old me was made up. Overnight the price had halved. I trotted along to the shop with my sixpence piece to carry off 12 Arrow Bars only to be dismayed to find that my sixpence piece was now worth only 2 1/2p and I got only 5 bars for it.
Apparently Liz Truss looks regal, according to the numpties at channel nine:
It was worth it for the massive simplification of maths lessons.
Oh come on, imperial is simple. 14 ounces in a perch, 12 inches in a yard, 18 feet in a pint. All very simple. None of this complicated base 10 nonsense. I don’t know, kids today……
It was 1971
I like the end of the clip where you can tell he is about to say something like “We are at the stage where the people arriving are very minor” before someone tells him it’s Liz Truss.
Couldn’t even do it in an even year.
Waiting for somebody to mention the moon landings. But in fairness, the mechanical engineering was in imperial.
Jacinta Arden mentioned in her interview a couple of days ago that NZ will become a republic in her lifetime. That of course might mean decades but will we see more and more such comments from different countries under the monarchy?
I had an engineer make a funny quip to me recently about the decimal system. He is a proud American chap, who is a graduate of Purdue University, here in Indiana. Purdue has a long history of graduating astronauts and people connected with the space program.
Anyway, this fella said, “The countries in the world are divided into two groups. Those who landed a man on the moon, and those who use the decimal system.”
It was a bit of gentle ribbing, coming from the place of American exceptionalism, which flows freely in the Boomer generation.
The guidance was done in metric, the rest was imperial. It’s a good line though.
NASA switched fully to SI units a good few years ago. They’d had too many cock ups due to conversion.
Its about American Exceptionalism. It it was factually correct it would miss the point.