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David Cameron Says Brits Should Be Taught Imperial Measures
00_NOP writes: Children in the U.K. have been taught in metric measures in school since (at least) 1972, but yesterday British Prime Minister David Cameron suggested that they should actually be taught in Imperial measures (which are still in use officially to measure road distances and speeds, but not really anywhere else). Is this because he hasn't a clue about science or because he is catering to a particular political base?
Avery other nation has already made the trade, they switched to metric because imperial units were completely unusable when dealing internationally.
Just recently it was found out that the Vasa ship was built asymmetrically because the workers were a combination of Swedish and Dutch and there was 11 inches on a Dutch (Amsterdam specifically) foot and 12 inches on a Swedish foot, so while the difference between the feet isn't that big the difference in the inch sizes are pretty significant.
Staying with national specific units is just retarded.
so true, UKIP is definitely the Tea party of the Conservative Party in the UK
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
It's clearly aimed at luring voters away from UKIP who are getting increasingly frustrated at EU interference in every level of UK life but are uneasy about voting for the "swivel-eyed loons".
As you said, another populist soundbite that will be quickly forgotten. The only advantage to teaching kids Metric was that learning to do all the conversions helped practice mental arithmatic but in an age where everyone has a calculator on their smartphone that's really not so important anymore.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Note that this has been true from the time of Mills, 1806 - 1873, so it's not a recent phenomenon.
I would hypothesize that there is a direct correlation between conservatism and stupidity; the more extreme the conservatism, the stupider the person.
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The US/Imperial does indeed have that 16/20 difference. I like my 568ml of real ale, but honestly the US system is much more sensible in that it's consistent with weights. But only marginally. They both share the 4 pints to the gallon, but there's no weight equivalent.
No the closest weight equivalent is the stone which would be weight of 3.5 gallons of water.
And what's the volume equivalent to a cwt and how many of them to the ton (long or short)?
And anyway should we measure volume in the ounce-derived system, cubic length units or acre-feet?
And anyway the differences are deeper. In the US/Imperial system, 1 floz is the volume of 1 ounce of water, but measured at different temperatures, so even teh base units differ.
Anyway I think we should go back to imperial units sothe 100m sprint can yet again be called the hundred yard dash. What ho!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Two things.
America knows it isn't special. America is lazy and hates change.
That being said companies are cheap and every package is already coming dual labeled every car is labeled. Most of the industrial standard bodies are making things dual labeled. Metric is taught in most schools, especially those in science.
The USA is changing to metric just not officially and at a very slow pace. Which works out well. The USA needs to let old people die off before it can change things for the better.By the end of the century America will be Metric too.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
"Water freezes at zero and boils at one hundred. What could be simpler?"
0 is a cold winter day, and 100 is a hot summer day.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Yes, very human friendly!
"A shilling was 1/20th of a pound or 5p in decimal
A farthing was a quarter of an old penny. There were 240 old pennies in a pound so a farthing was 1/960 of a pound or just over a tenth of a new penny
A half-crown was two shillings and six pence, or an 8th of a pound, so 12.5p"
I guess I know why brittish imperialism had such a hard time to shake the habit of slavery - it's so human friendly!
It's very unlikely the Conservatives will win another term thanks to UKIP, not because UKIP stand a chance but because the first-past-the-post system ensures Labour will win a handy majority.
It's a reaction to UKIP. Show how English he is, how much he wants to stick with English tradition instead of the modern EU way. Metric martyrs and all that bollocks.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
My French teacher (who was English) reckoned that everybody should use a comma (like the French) for the decimal separator because it was actually the only important piece of punctuation in numbers and therefore should be more obvious than just a dot.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Staying with national specific units is just retarded.
It's only retarded if trade is your primary concern. While I would prefer that the US were a little more metric, I can hardly blame the milk manufacturers for not abandoning their equipment just to make the 1 gallon milk jug round off nicely to 3 or 4 liters. And road signs - there really is no compelling reason to go towards km on the roads. It only becomes an issue for the minority who cross into Canada and Mexico, and those people are quite capable of reading the "km/h" letters on their speedometer.
Engineering is another matter - in the vast majority of cases there really is no excuse to be using anything but metric. We have a certain failed Mars probe to prove the case. It drives me crazy that I need both a metric and a standard set of socket wrenches and hex keys. A small matter, but still quite strange. Many (most?) of the appliances that I have are assembled with standard-unit nuts, bolts, and screws. Now, I'm sure there aren't a lot of American appliances exported overseas, but it still seems insane... Whirlpool must replace their drill bits and driver bits fairly often - it's not clear to me why they stick with standard sized consumables.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
and they'll take 1609.34 meters. 0.473 liters is 0.473 kilograms the world around. Centimeterworm, centimeterworm, measuring the marigolds... The whole 8.22 meters... 28.35 grams of prevention is worth 0.453592 kilograms of cure. He's done it! He's broken the 240 second 1.6 km! "Express'd in the condition, let the forfeit Be nominated for an equal 453.592 grams Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken In what part of your body pleaseth me." HBO. Next up. 1.8288 Meters Under. "You're gonna lose that smile / because all the while / I can see for kilometers and kilometers..."
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I am surprised this is a thing. I cross into Canada regularly at both Fort Erie and 87/A-15 and it's funny to watch.
In Ontario, the signs say 100km/h = 60mph. This isn't quite true but it's a good safe number if you want to prevent speeding.
In Quebec, their signs say 100km/h != 60mph.
It's much closer to about 64mph. Bust people end up speeding anyway.
In the US they use "point" which is one syllable. There is no place in aviation radio where the decimal point isn't implied which makes using "decimal" a bigger waste of radio time.
I get where your teacher was coming from in thinking it should be made as obvious as possible, but the primary problem we contend with in making it obvious is one of ambiguity, not recognizability. Commas are frequently used for denoting entries in a series in a sentence, and numbers oftentimes appear in a series. Consider the following:
A) 123,456, 789,0
B) 123, 456, 789, 0
C) 123, 456,789, 0
Effectively, we're relying on the spaces to provide necessary meaning. (A) represents two real numbers, (B) represents four integers, and (C) represents two integers and a real number, but at a quick glance, it isn't necessarily apparent which is which since the only difference between them is where the spaces are located. Moreover, had a space been forgotten due to a typo, it would have substantially altered the meaning of the series, and unlike words that may be affected in a similar way (e.g. "good one" vs. "goo done"), which are relatively easy to recognize as typos within context, we rarely have useful context clues with numbers from which to recognize that a simple typo has occurred.
Contrast that with the use of the decimal point:
A) 123.456, 789.0
B) 123, 456, 789, 0
C) 123, 456.789, 0
It's clear where each number begins and ends, and what quantity it represents. That said, decimal points have the potential to become ambiguous when dealing with the ends of sentences, but even there, they are unlikely to cause confusion, given that it's rather rare that we have back-to-back sentences with the first ending in a number and the second beginning with one. Besides which, even when we do, we generally have ample context clues in the text that can help us to recognize that one sentence has ended and another has begun.
Just as I don't see how most of* my fellow Americans can keep arguing for using Imperial units, I don't understand how some Europeans can continue to argue for using commas instead of decimal points. Using an entirely different punctuation mark may be a better option than either the comma or the point, but if we're constrained to choose between the two, I have yet to hear a great case for why the comma is the superior choice.
* I say "most of", because I actually have had several of my engineering friends, particularly those in petroleum engineering, provide specific examples of situations in which they greatly prefer to use Imperial, rather than metric, units. Apparently it's one of those situations like weight vs. mass where the two units aren't actually analogous, and working with the metric unit ends up making the computations significantly more convoluted. In most other cases though, they, and I, tend to prefer metric (even if I don't necessarily think in terms of metric on a daily basis).
How much flying do you do? I do a lot. Commercial, Instrument, CFI. Communication is standardizing on the ICAO phraseology. It used to be standard to hear things like "Skyhawk Four Kilo Uniform, contact Seattle Center on One Twenty-eight Four Five" or "Skyhawk Four Kilo Uniform, left on Alpha Six, ground on Point Seven."
You still hear that, but even in the last year, ATC has changed drastically. Those examples are now, pretty consistently: "Skyhawk Fow-er Kilo Uniform, contact Seattle Center on Wun Too Ait decimal Fow-er Fife" and "... ground on [Wun Too Wun] decimal Seven."
Using "decmial" in communications uses more time, yes. However, really listen to radio communications on LiveATC. You should notice two things: 1) communication flows just fine, 2) pilots waste an insane amount of time with "um", "uh", explaining things verbosely, not planning what they are going to say ahead of time, etc.
As far as Americans using "point", I know, I'm an American. My original point though, was that "Thirty-three comma Thirty-three" is not how you would read "33,33". Idiots would read it that way, but there isn't any reason we would need to get used to as the poster said because it should be read as "Thirty-three decimal three three".