I think us Brits are the worst of the worst when it comes to mixing units. Fuel is sold in litres but consumption measured in miles per gallon. Milk is sold in 1 pint or 2/4/6 litre bottles. Road signs to towns are in miles but in roadworks are in metres. And so on.
Yeah, the strange half-transition to metric in the UK is really odd. I'm from Australia, another Commonwealth country, and we're -entirely- metric here. The only thing I can think of is that people still talk about height of people in feet and inches, but on official forms it's in centimetres.
I wonder why the UK couldn't quite make the jump over?
To be fair, from my reading of the article, this was a metric-to-imperial conversion problem, meaning McLaren was used to working in metric, but the Indy 500 is in the USA, which uses the backwards and archaic US customary units, so someone screwed up in converting to those. This could have happened to any non-American racing team, and doesn't serve at all as an example of Brits sticking with obsolete units, but rather the opposite.
It does seem that McLaren made a lot of boneheaded mistakes here, but this example just doesn't go with the "Brits are still using imperial units" theme of this thread at all.
Not really. The problem with the Mars lander (not orbiter, it was a lander that crashed) was that they got some data from a defense contractor (Lockheed Martin I think) which was in imperial units, and then NASA assumed it to be in metric units. Both sides made a stupid mistake here: the contractor didn't even provide any units at all on the data sheet they provided, and NASA didn't bother to ask, and just assumed some units. IIRC, these weren't some simple 1-dimensional unit like meters or liters, they were some compound unit (like lb-ft/N-m), so it was a stupid mistake, because even if you have metric units, you don't know if, for instance, there's some prefix, such as kilograms instead of grams, kiloNewton-meters instead of N-m, etc. It was really unbelievable IMO that they just took a bunch of bare numbers and assumed them to have some units associated.
Humans, in general, do not use "feet" for measurement. It's only dumb Americans. They don't represent humanity: they're only a small fraction of all humans (around 4%). Don't blame humanity for something that only Americans do.
I think us Brits are the worst of the worst when it comes to mixing units. Fuel is sold in litres but consumption measured in miles per gallon. Milk is sold in 1 pint or 2/4/6 litre bottles. Road signs to towns are in miles but in roadworks are in metres. And so on.