The imperial measurement thing is a dead cat Boris threw on the table during his political descent.
When you see it for what it is, you can take joy in imagining the meeting in which the politicians tried to think up the best dead cats to throw on the table and settled on this.
There is an entire category of fallacies of distraction. People, especially those of the political persuasion, use them when they don't have valid or just arguments to support their position.
Personally, I prefer goat brains, monkey testicles, and the shrunken heads of vanquished enemies.
Observation as a Canadian: Until the US decides to finally convert (e.g. never), the rest of the anglo-sphere will be forever stuck in an awkward inbetween zone anyways. We supposedly converted to metric in the 70s but it's only ever been half-hearted, as many trades (especially construction) continue to work in imperial measurements, and most people work in an awkward combination of the two.
As Canadians we typically measure our height and weight in ft and lbs. But temperature in celsius and travel distances and speeds in kilometres and km/h. Except for cooking/recipes, where oven temperature is measured in fahrenheit and we have to deal with recipes with cups and ounces and so on. ... But recipes are also often in litres and grams. So...
And most people can think of thermostat or pool/lake water temperatures in fahrenheit as well as celsius.
We're supposed to be metric, but good luck finding a reasonable selection of metric screws/bolts/nuts at the hardware store. Online order.
Really this is all to do with deep integration with the US economy and its own bizarre mostly-imperial-but-metric-where-it's-important.
My poor father was a machinist, and originally was trained in metric Europe (Germany.) He found the whole situation extremely frustrating.
> "As Canadians we typically measure our height and weight in ft and lbs. But temperature in celsius and travel distances and speeds in kilometres and km/h. Except for cooking/recipes, where oven temperature is measured in fahrenheit and we have to deal with recipes with cups and ounces and so on. ... But recipes are also often in litres and grams. So.."
As British we typically measure everything in metric, including oven temperatures and recipes. Except for road distances and speeds, which are miles and mph. Unless it's an e-bike which always seem to be km/h. And most modern cars do have dual units, showing km/h in case you drive over to Ireland or the continent.
Oh, and a few things like milk and beer are sold in pint-sized containers, but must clearly state 568 ml on the bottle.
Yes I always find this funny. England is kind of totally opposite from Canada. Distances and speeds in miles, everything else metric.
Our speedometers can all switch, too these days. For travel into the US. Even Google maps will switch units right after you cross the border.
FWIW MPH has the advantage that it's easier to estimate travel times based on typical 60MPH hwy speed. A minute per mile more or less. 100KMH is more easily divisable etc. but doesn't map to time units as well. So in a way, I kind of enjoy driving in the US.
(In terms of localization stupidity, I find it obnoxious that Google's navigation can smoothly handle the transition into the United States, but cannot handle the mixed French/English nature of signage in Canada. I suppose I should have raised this as a bug when I worked there, but I find it awful that after over a decade of having text-to-speech facilities in both languages, Google can't handle bilingual countries and butchers mixed signs and gets completely fucked when driving into Quebec. Also Google photos thinks "thanksgiving" is end of November, despite me being in Canada.)
In reality here in Ontario on the major highways the legal limit is 100km/h but actual practice is 120km/h. It's rare to go below that on the actual multilane 400-series highways, and rare you'd get ticketed for going that high.
The nice trick with stones is that I don't care how much they are.
They're nice and vague enough that it's like .. if I go from 10 stone to 11 stone, I need to care. If I go from 10 to 10.1 I don't need to care. I don't convert them to pounds or kilos because I don't want to know the answer, it just adds anxiety that I don't need.
The funny thing is I'm otherwise metric-all-the-things. But for body weight, the lack of precision lets me focus on the trends instead of worrying about the details.
1 stone = 14lbs. Learned this "whilst" (another chiefly British word) at study abroad in England. Ever after thought of the Bush album "Sixteen Stone" in a different light.
Of course I never remember that a how much a pound is.
From my d&d days (when we mix and matched Italian and English material) I remember that 2.5lbs is about 1kg, but that's a very rough approximation. Similarly I remember that 10ft is ~3m.
I’m American and feel like I live in the “in-between” too. I measure people in ft and lbs. I measure wood in ft and inches. I design 3D objects in cm and mm unless I’m building in wood, in which case I’m back to feet and inches. I measure speed in miles per hour. I use tools mostly in metric but sometimes in SAE (depending on where it’s made and what it is).
> As Canadians we typically measure our height and weight in ft and lbs. But temperature in celsius and travel distances and speeds in kilometres and km/h. Except for cooking/recipes, where oven temperature is measured in fahrenheit and we have to deal with recipes with cups and ounces and so on. ... But recipes are also often in litres and grams. So...
These statements always amuse me, as someone who grew up in a purely metric culture. I always wondered: do you ever get confused when talking in so many similar but different units, or is it second nature?
Brit here. Second nature. It's either clear from context ("doing 70 in a 40" -> mph) or you instinctively make the units explicit. Metric is better though ;)
Especially since we are taught metric exclusively in school. But then get into the real world or deal with "adults" and find so many things in imperial.
Just to put another datapoint out there from the "anglo-sphere", Australia and New Zealand are completely metric.
The one exception you could say is height, where in casual speech people sometimes say "6 foot", but if it were a medical situation it would again always be in cm.
Sounds like distance from the US has made you saner.
In terms of other English-speaking commonwealth countries, it seem South Africa is similar; heights etc. in imperial, everything else metric.
That mostly describes the situation in Canada, but as I said construction trades and recipes really push people to have to have a feel for both systems.
Also grocery stores sometimes sell fruits, vegetables, etc in lbs, sometimes in kg so it's much harder to compare prices between the different chains. I wish it was mandated to use the metric price first and (optionally) put the imperial price in small print.
Oddly enough all the automotive fasteners and bolts switched to metric some time ago here in the USA. Which makes the (relative) lack of available metric bolts/screws doubly frustrating.
Yep, it's ridiculous. Mounting ski bindings myself -- it's all metric. Go to get fasteners... no luck. Have to order. But good luck buying them at a reasonable price online in consumer quantities. In "metric" Canada.
As Americans attempting to be more globally-oriented in these things, we set our thermometers to Celsius and all our GPS maps to kilometers.
It was interesting to watch ourselves slowly become "bilingual" over several months as we got used to what we needed to wear when it was 30° (F or C) outside.
I do wish countries (especially ours) would go all in.
Except for the pint. I always thought that was a good, allowable exception. :)
This phenomenon is neatly captured in the locker-room wisdom for the recommended amount of protein intake for athletes here: 1 gram per pound of body weight.
Moving to Canada from the US was a weird experience. They sell butter in 454g bricks. That's a pound, but it's sold in grams. The wrapper is marked with graduations of whole, half and quarter cups. They sell meat and cheese by the kilogram, 100gram, pound, or ounce, with different brands using different units -- making price comparison between similar products a bit of a chore.
As a lifelong Canadian, i still haven’t figured out when baking measurements are metric or imperial. Is a cup 8 ounces or 250ml? It depends on the recipe! Close enough I guess for some if ratios are maintained
Edit: liquid medicine are sometimes given in metric teaspoons/tablespoons but always always have the metric measurement beside. So that’s clear at least.
I can almost guarantee that this is being proposed because it performed well among a certain demographic during some focus group. So it’s a way to get a few cheap votes from the “back in my day…” crowd. It has the additional benefit of appearing like the government are doing something, while they somehow still continue to not tackle the other ongoing crises (among other things - energy prices and the recent mini-budget which cost the Chancellor of the Exchequer his job)
The metric system is too "European", and more specifically French for post-Brexit Britain. We need a patriotic system of measurement, not some foreign idea designed to take away our sovereignty.
India wants to know if they should ask Pakistan to get the band back together. Also, returning to fractional sovereigns, pounds, crowns, guineas, florins, shillings, pennies, and farthings would be extremely simple.
(It's the sad and cynical exploitation of tribal, nativist nationalism containing aggressive, neofascist, pining-for-the-past-more-than-usual, and anti-intellectual sentiments.)
That would serve the already-rich like Jacob Rees-Mogg as it would make it more difficult for the masses to measure the broadening inequality gap.
Perhaps that is the plan, including with Brexit: the currently rich maintain as much power as possible and push the rest as far down as possible (to prevent losing their positions at the top of the hill).
I mean its a silly idea but I don’t see why systems would necessarily need updating if people chose to sell in imperial measurements.
1 - any seller would likely in any case have to list the metric equivalent anyway.
2 - all imperial measurements are now defined by metric measurements anyway.
3 - any company choosing to sell B2B in imperial measurements would likely find itself at a commercial disadvantage, as businesses in the UK almost always work in metric.
The proposal as far as I’m aware requires businesses to also provide imperial units. That at the very least will require labelling changes and to have internal inventory systems to also need support for imperial units. It seems entirely nonsensical.
As reported in [0], the UK Government survey asked consumers: “If you had a choice, would you want to purchase items: i) in imperial units ii) in imperial units alongside a metric equivalent.”
There was no option iii) for using metric only (except a freeform entry field). Talk about biased.
I suppose we should be thankful that the recent self-inflicted destruction of the UK Govt's credibility has at least probably saved us from having to learn fortnights, furlongs and firkins again. Silver linings etc etc.
I mean Mogg is someone who comes across as having his finger on the pulse of society… the best description I’ve ever heard for him is “A haunted victorian drainpipe”. Ultimately the guys stake in Irish hedge-funds are served well by destabilising the pound. I can’t think of one member of the tories who isn’t in politics to make themselves even richer. Everything is grandstanding at the moment.
Like the festival of Brexit? Or leaving the single market? People said all these things won’t happen and yet they did.
Shit like this keeps happening and people are not pushing back. Because it’s tiring and more comfortable to just let it happen. Yet the UK is quickly degrading as a result of all this mess.
What the actual F. That is just insane. Brexit has been such a rolling disaster. It's constantly reminds me why compulsory voting in Australia is the best thing since sliced bread. It's just insane what the British have decided to do to themselves.
>It's constantly reminds me why compulsory voting in Australia is the best thing since sliced bread.
How about letting people decide if they wish, or not, to partake in a system that is rigged on either side? A choice of 'either pile of shit', is not necessarily a choice that is acceptable to those that would prefer their bread without.
I am horribly anti-brexit, it has caused me and so many I know so much grief. I hate everything about it, but you can take your 'actual F' and F yourself if you would like to force me to vote.
You're forced to follow all the other many, many, many rules in Britain.
Yet you think you're being denied a freedom by the possibility of being required to participate in a process that results in changes to the laws that you obey. Making a choice between two bad options is pretty much the whole of life.
You have been tricked into thinking that abstaining is a choice your making, and not an outcom that you've been led into by a society that's letting you down and exploiting your grievances.
When everyone votes, the candidates have to generally be more competitive. More balanced and less extreme.
Anyway, good luck with Brexit and the journey to the center of last century.
No. If you don't vote and you country gets destroyed by the politicians you don't get to complain - I agree on that part.
However, if you are required to vote, also people will vote which don't inform themselves very well. Populists will take their votes happily, and populists are often not an improvement for the state of a country.
Everybody's shitting on Imperial, U.S. customary, or whatever you want to call them units...
Allow me to give a slightly different perspective: as a scientist, if I'm doing chemistry then metric is the way to go. Conversions are easier, centigrade and Kelvin just make a lot more sense...
But for many day-to-day things I think the Imperial units are better. Temperature? Fahrenheit is a 0-100 scale, where 0 is pretty much as cold as it gets in temperate climates, and 100 is pretty much as hot as it gets. A mile is 5280 feet? Wtf? Well, it's 1000 paces (each pace bringing you back to the same state, so two steps = 5.28 feet).
I don't know if any good work has been done on it, but my guess is people who were raised with inches are better and quicker at estimating length than people who were raised with metric. Millimeters are too small, cm are also too small (and nobody uses them really). Inches are a good, intuitive unit for measuring human-scale stuff given our cognitive constraints, I'd guess.
As a counterpoint: I find the implicit imprecision caused by having poor/no divisibility a constant frustration in my day-to-day life.
For volume: US based recipes very often resort to "1 cup", and I generally find they're rounding a long way from... say... 3/4 cup. In metric, people don't tend to round more than 10ml at a time, so you'll see 120ml, not 100ml when they mean 120ml.
For distance: "About an inch" is the most useless instruction in DIY or crafting.
People seem to be very reluctant to use the awkward and 3 fifths or w/e you end up with in imperial.
When you say "people are better at estimating", are you adjusting for the reduced precision?
> When you say "people are better at estimating", are you adjusting for the reduced precision?
No, I wasn't thinking about it that way. I was imagining a task where you get people to estimate the length of various objects by looking at them, and just take the mean error. So the size of the units wouldn't matter. If someone wanted to say 1.33268 inches, I'd let them.
Concerning divisability: it depends on how you think about it. Many people found dividing in half, and half again, etc. to be intuitive, and it is intuitive in e.g. woodworking (because physically dividing in half is easy), but yeah...in a lot of applications I just want to be able to move decimal points around.
For volume in recipes: you're right. I think the problem with the U.S. here is that we use volume in recipes at all. Weight! Use weight! Flour is many different densities...
But yeah, recipes are in general trash. For your case, you'll usually see cups and tablespoons (...lol) like "1 cup plus 2 tablespoons".
For distance: "about an inch" makes a lot of sense to people raised with inches. It doesn't strike me as weird at all.
Concerning awkward 3 fifths: imperial wouldn't use fifths, it'd be divisions by two. So half, quarter, eighth, etc. There are some specific cases, like a bottle of liquor is often called a "fifth" because it's approximately a fifth of a gallon, but that's specific to that application.
French perspective here : everybody uses centimeters and millimeters are common. I just came from a hair cut and the girl doing it asked for my clipper size in millimeters. I have an intuition, and it's usually pretty close, for how much à millimeter, centimeter, meter and kilometer are. All that to say it's got everything to do with habit and not random size body parts.
What I'm curious about is whether people raised with the metric system and nothing else are more accurate in estimating e.g. lengths than people raised primarily with Imperial / U.S. customary.
So we do an experiment where we have people look at, and maybe handle, random objects and then ask them to estimate the length. Does imperial / metric make a difference? My guess is no, but I have significant probability weight on yes...maybe 20%. And wouldn't that be cool!
I think you can go look at sociological experiment about crowd estimation, you might find a response: while those experiment are mostly done in the US, they are often replicated in metric countries. (i don't have any clues about the response to be honest)
I am French (so strictly SI) and an ex physicist (so I like powers of 10). And I agree with you, especially for the temperature, and generally speaking for anything related to everyday life.
I think however that we must have only one referential because it simply makes things difficult when communicating (similar to currency rates). We should have chosen °F for temperature because they are more optimal (no changes for science, easier in everyday life) but metric for distances and weights.
Distances and weights are often added, which is a problem for non metric units. We all remember the train starting from one city at 13:45 and the other at 9:12 and the time they meet. Super simple in metrics, super hard in train time.
The temperature thing is just whichever you're more used to using. We almost never see 30F or 70F, so the idea that it's a natural fit is rather forced.
OT: Can I ask a question about something that has long puzzled me about Brexit?
Note: I'm not asking about whether or not Brexit was a good idea. No matter where you stand on that, let's assume for the sake of argument that there were terrific arguments for both staying in the EU and leaving.
My puzzlement concerns the specific question asked on the 2016 referendum, which was
> Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?
with the options being remain or leave.
If you wanted the UK to stay in the EU, then clearly "remain" was the right choice for you.
Remaining didn't require the UK to do anything, so if you voted "remain" you were voting for something with a highly predictable outcome.
Leaving, on the other hand, requires a lot of action over the next several years. There were many quite different ways a post-EU UK could turn out, and much disagreement among the people who wanted to leave as to which of those ways they wanted. There could be changes of government over the years it takes to implement so even if you were confident that the people now in power would work toward an implementation of the kind of Brexit you wanted, they might not be the ones in power when it comes to actually finishing the thing.
If you wanted to leave then it seems to me that the best choice would still be to vote "remain" because this particular referendum was terrible. Instead, work to elect politicians who would offer a better referendum. Something like this:
> Should the United Kingdom develop a concrete proposal to leave the EU and then hold a referendum on that, and if that referendum passes negotiate a final deal to leave the EU, and then hold a final referendum on whether to implement that final deal?
The missing piece here is that the referendum was designed by people who wanted and expected remain to win. David Cameron, the PM at the time, was facing a minor rebellion within his own party from a faction of MPs that were anti-EU. They weren't a majority of the party, but they were large enough to cause trouble.
A couple years prior, he had faced a similar problem from Scottish nationalists, so he approved a referendum on Scottish independence. He was against independence, but when Scotland voted to remain a part of the UK, it weakened the arguments of the Scottish nationalists, making his job easier. He figured he could do the same with Brexit. Nobody seriously expected leave to win.
Problem was, it turned out there was a lot of money in leaving the EU. It would make tax dodges easier for the ultra-rich, and it would allow disaster capitalists to make a killing by shorting the market. So money flowed into the leave campaign from wealthy donors hoping to make a killing. As a result, leave ran a much slicker campaign.
All this might not have been enough for leave to win, but people were also pissed off at the government for years of austerity policies and a flagging economy since the 2008 crash. Lots of people, saw the vote as a way to express their displeasure in the government. Some of those who voted leave never expected it to win.
SO yes, you're right. The referendum was poorly worded and poorly planned. This was evident in the immediate aftermath. The House of Commons could not agree at all on what to do. A large chunk still backed remaining, but not a majority. Lots of MPs decided that, even though they knew Brexit was a bad idea, their constituents had voted for it, so they needed to switch sides. They didn't all switch to the same side though. Some wanted a no-deal Brexit. Some wanted to remain in the customs union and single market. Others wanted different arrangements. There was no majority for any course of action, because the referendum didn't describe a course of action, and it paralyzed UK politics for years.
The goal of the brexit referendum was to catch the voters that were leaving the conservative party for the ukip party, and give them a reason to vote conservative again.
It wasn't expected to pass, it wasn't expected to be remotely close. It was expected to shore up the conservative party so they wouldn't be dragged into another coalition.
The wording of the referendum needs to be seen in that light. It was intended to give ukip voters what they wanted to hear. "should we think about talking about thinking about maybe doing something" wouldn't have achieved that goal.
Just to be precise, they have not proposed to switch back to imperial, they are proposing to allow imperial units to be used (so for instance a supermarket would be free to sell potatoes in pounds instead of kilos if they wanted to).
Either way, this is indeed a distraction and it has very little chance of going anywhere.
Of course it's a ridiculous proposal, and so an obvious smokescreen to keep the plebs discussing irrelevancies.
But on top of that, the particular proposal, to revert to an olde-worlde measurement system, is surely a troll at all the olde people who were conned into voting for this ridiculous mess.
The temperature thing is complete nonsense, nobody uses Fahrenheit here unless we're translating for Americans.
The others are a fairer point, although we do actually sell liquids in litres or millilitres, but for some things it just happens to be some multiple of 568..
Weight is KG, unless it's a person, in which case it's Stones and Pounds.
Distance is fun, It's Miles on journeys, but metric for everything else, unless you're talking about people's height, then it's feet and inches.
It sounds confusing, but when you live here it's not something you really have to think about, you just switch rather effortlessly.
I lived in London and Castletown (IoM) for years and only ever felt like C was used. I remember distinctly because of how often I had to force myself to make the the calculation for conversion between the two whenever any topic of temperature came up early in my time there.
The consultation is on whether to allow weights and volumes of goods to be sold using imperial measures. There is no suggestion of switching engineering or construction to use imperial.
Prime-ministers are seleceted by the party in power, and they are selected by a minority of that party when required (Boris losing power - out, Liz losing power - soon out), so they will make as many 180° turns - and returns - as is required by the party that was voted into power so that same party remains in power.
I would guess that in British system quite many. As the members of party have no interest to move with new election when they aren't sure they are going to win. So PM needs to end up pretty unpopular before they make any moves for replacement.
Also considering current situation, I don't think there is too many that want to be in the shoes just yet.
That was also my first thought. I see only cost and no benefit. Except maybe when you have a cargo cult mindset and think that returning these measures will return Britain‘s glory.
Can anyone name one benefit?
It’s a distraction so shocking that it can’t fail to divert media attention.
It’s a favorite technique of Boris Johnson who is even mentioned in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy
The imperial measurement thing is a dead cat Boris threw on the table during his political descent.
When you see it for what it is, you can take joy in imagining the meeting in which the politicians tried to think up the best dead cats to throw on the table and settled on this.
“Yes, Prime Minister”