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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?
It's time for national units to finally be put out to pasture. Both US units and UK units.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
You're not an empire anymore, and going back to imperial measures won't make you one.
Is this because he hasn't a clue about science or because he is catering to a particular political base?
Both.
Mostly though because so many conservatives have a "we have always done it that way" attitude. Many of them don't have a clue that imperial measures are very different from US customary ones (we have 20 fluid ounces to a pint, and the US has 16). Many also don't know their pecks from their bushels, or their furlongs from their rod, poll, or perch, but think the system must be good "because its traditional".
As a Breton I fully support the furthering of our national units to promote unity in these divisive times.
while "1 cup" and "1/2 cup" do. So when a recipe calls for 1 cup of anything, you can measure that quickly.
You rarely see this in UK measurements, for one thing in the UK cup sizes are not standard. My wife (from the USA) found it confusing at first that things were either given in capacity or weight (fluid ounces and pints/pounds and ounces in traditional UK books) and not various cups or spoon sizes.
Does not deserve to hold a place in office.
What, a fucking idiot.
No other way to put it, sorry.
... also known as a dick.
This unit measure, like inches and feet, comes from a body part of a ancien dead king.
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.'
The reason is, 125ml and 250ml have no practical relationship, while "1 cup" and "1/2 cup" do. So when a recipe calls for 1 cup of anything, you can measure that quickly. If it's half a cup, then you use half a cup, or if you have it calling for 1.5 cups, you use the 1/2cup 3 times.
Actually, cooking is the one place that US imperial measurement drives me up the fucking wall. 1 cup of something trivially measured by volume isn't so bad, though 100ml is just as easy to measure. The big issue is when you get to "1 cup of flour" or "1 cup of butter" - things that are much more easily measured by mass, or things like "1 cup of cherry tomatoes" where the amount you get will vary based on the size and density of the particular tomatoes you have today.
Basically, no, the kitchen is exactly the place I want metric measurement - it is if anything the best example around a house of where you need accurate scientific style measurement.
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.
Why is Snark Required?
Scotland had a chance to run away from that madness but they missed it.
A cup in the US is 1/16 gallon = 1/4 quart = 1/ pint = 8 oz. = 237ml.
Though Canada uses a "metric" cup, 250ml.
Sent from my PDP-11
Only if you're European. If you're from the US, 1 cup is a very exact volume.
1 cup of flour is trivially measured by volume: Just grab the "1 cup" cup from your set of measuring cups, scoop up flour from your storage container, level. You're done. If you're using measuring cups, you can make a batch of cookie dough without using a scale or having to look at the actual measurement.
US recipes usually don't use "cups" of butter, they use "sticks" of butter. If you live where butter isn't sold in US sticks (113.4 grams), you're screwed.
try and work will millimeters in engineering and you soon find out that thousands of an inch are the only way to measure small tolerances
What's wrong with thousands of a mm? Here in Europe, engineers, machinists and the like have happily worked with metric for ages.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Yes, this. Cameron has plenty of obnoxious policies he can be criticised for, but he's not about to abolish the metric system. This was just an off the cuff response to a question about his personal outlook, not the manifesto for the next election:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In the UK, a few Imperial measures are pretty entrenched (miles for distance, stones for body weight, feet for height, pints for milk and beer) but younger people tend to think in grams rather than pounds and ounces. The metric system has been taught to everyone since Cameron was in primary school, so he'll be perfectly familiar with it, though many of his supporters are from an older age group and the UKIP supporters he's trying to win back are, on average, older again (and probably think of grams as some sort of foreign plot imposed by the EU). But making an occasional gesture like this in an interview is not the same thing as seriously considering a policy change.
because EU is a good scapegoat. the really stupid stuff is home brewed in UK.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
Especially given that in the 2011 Scottish Parliament election the SNP only polled 45% of the popular vote, which interestingly is pretty much the same proportion of the vote they got in the referendum. They didn't have a democratic mandate for the referendum in 2011 and giving them one was stupid. Even stupider was allowing to drag on for years, should have been quick and in say 2012.
Nah, the stupid thing was to let it be a simple majority vote of 50%+1.
Weighty decisions, such as changing the fundamentals of a political system (including basic laws/Constitutions/political unions/etc) really do need to require a supermajority in order to add hysteresis to the system. It's just untenable to have a razor thin majority decide matters like this, because it could vacillate too easily.
No one would would have been sweating if the vote had set a threshold of 2/3 majority.
He said taught, not use. There is a massive difference. Personally don't see the harm in that at all.
He was responding to the point that "Schools should teach pupils mainly in imperial and not metric measurements". I have nothing against teaching arcane units, in fact I find it interesting - but to stop teaching metric is just plain stupid
Intel is now producing chips on it's 5.51181102 × 10-7 inch fabs and that's the way it likes them - you couldn't accurately describe that with the overly complicated metric system and you know it.
So please don't come here spouting off about how metric is better.
1 cup of flour is trivially measured by volume: Just grab the "1 cup" cup from your set of measuring cups, scoop up flour from your storage container, level.
And if you do that you are going to get a different amount of flour every single time. Flour is a powder with a LOT of air in between. If you are looking for consistency you MUST measure flour by weight because you'll get different packing densities by the method you recommend. Sometimes it doesn't matter but when it does you have to use weight, not volume. ALL professional bakers measure flour by weight and never by volume.
US recipes usually don't use "cups" of butter, they use "sticks" of butter. If you live where butter isn't sold in US sticks (113.4 grams), you're screwed.
A stick of butter is 8 tablespoons or approximately 120mL. You're only screwed if you are clueless.
I'm fine with 90 - 60 - 90, too.
Which definitly HAS that ring that your... what would you be calling it? does.
bickerdyke
America knows it isn't special.
I live in the US and a good portion of the US population does think it is special. They are wrong but they do honestly and earnestly believe it. "Greatest country in the world" and all that nonsense.
America is lazy and hates change.
America is anything but lazy though you are correct that many of them do hate change. Americans work more hours than almost anyone else in the world on average so lazy isn't a label that really fits. But people in general do not like change.
Metric is taught in most schools, especially those in science.
Foreign languages are taught in most schools too and yet only a minority of native born americans are bi-lingual. Doesn't matter what is taught in schools if it isn't used in the real world.
By the end of the century America will be Metric too.
I do not share your optimism on that though I wish it would happen. Officially we do use metric but I don't see the US switching to metric for daily use in my lifetime and I'd honestly be surprised if it happened in the next 100 years. Maybe it will but I'm dubious.
An ounce of gold surprisingly "weighs" more than an ounce of feathers because gold weights are in Troy units (1 oz=31g) whereas feathers are Avoirdupois (1oz=28g).
But a pound of feathers weighs more than pound of gold, because Troy pounds have only 12 ounces.
If I know the size of a cm, I can make a container for a litre of water. Once I fill it, I can weigh it to get a kilogram. That's why metric makes so much sense.
1 cup of flour is trivially measured by volume: Just grab the "1 cup" cup from your set of measuring cups, scoop up flour from your storage container, level. You're done.
This is indeed easyâ"but very inaccurate: it can lead to the measurement being out by as much as 30%.
MOD PARENT UP.
Professional bakers actually don't use volumes or weights when they state a recipe -- they use something called "baker's percentage," where 100% = the weight of the flour. Not the volume; the weight. All other ingredients are stated in proportions relative to the weight of the flour, making it easy to scale a recipe up or down. This is because bakers actually realize that weighing is so important because of the compressibility of flour.
If you're making bread, for example, an error of 30% in measurement of flour is the difference roughly between the stickiest wettest possible dough you could work with (producing a very crusty bread with large holes, like pizza or ciabatta dough) and a dry dough that is so tough that it's barely kneadable by hand (like bagel dough). Almost all of the varieties of bread fall in that range of about 30% error in flour measurement.
Baking requires somewhat more precision than other cooking, because once you throw the batter/dough in the oven, you can't make modifications. It's not like making soup where you can just taste it while cooking and say, "oops! I forgot the salt!" and just add some and everything will turn out okay.
If you're baking bread or a cake and say "1 cup of flour," you might as well just say "Add enough flour to get the 'right' consistency... whatever that is... you just have to know." Because with volume measurements of flour, it's REALLY hard to get consistent results unless you're skilled in recognizing what the final batter/dough is supposed to be like already.
Right on. The yanks will never put a man on the moon with such backward thinking.
All I see here is imperial proponents having serious issues with the metric system, where the ones using the metric system has no issues with the imperial, when expressed as fractional metrics. I don't have an issue whatsoever with 1 pint expressed in either litre or ml. Nor a pound expressed as grams. Its all the same to me, and I know exactly what it is. Same with miles to m or km. A mile is 1657 metres, or 1.657 km. Working in engineering - a mm is 25.4 times as accurate as an inch to begin with, and we can still subdivide by any power of 10. Fractional inch is not limited in precision, nor is mm or any of the si units, they are just inherently less awkward to use from start, as almost all share the same base and relation to each other. 1mm is 1/1000th of a metre. 1m x 1m is a square metre. 1m x 1m x 1m is a cubic metre, or 1000 litre. For clean water, 1L, 10*10*10cm is a good approximation for 1kg (difference is about 3mg 0.003g ) which is too small to count for anything but scientific work.
To respond to just two of your straw men (three bullet points): Do you really think changing to metric means we'll stop using d/m/y dates? And for liquids, I've been buying 2L bottles for decades now, and you don't order "0.28L," you order (in Germany/Åustria) "kleine" (0.3L) or "grosse" (0.5L).
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
To understand the past, including literature and some old science and engineering, people ought to know what the old units were, about what the metric equivalents are! And where to find exact conversions. Going forward, things ought to be metric; but we still will need inch based tools to work on old stuff.
As an American, I'm tougher than the Europeans, and I can prove it. I can take heat up to 104 degrees. The Europeans are in trouble when it's only 40!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
This. Teaching both and their conversions isn't a terrible idea. Favoring the older units that are different from the rest of the world is a pretty bad idea.
Science uses the metric system universally, even in the UK and the US, and outside science, it hardly matters. In particular, while the thought of dealing with non-metric units may seem daunting to people raised on metric, to people raised on imperial units, it's just another unit; if you have inches, miles, feet, and acres, having one more length unit hardly makes a difference.
Advocacy of the metric system seems to be more a kind of political shibboleth. Keeping non-metric units is a matter of national pride, an expression that a country is rich and powerful enough not to have to give in to international uniformity. Advocating metricization is something people use to appear more rational and more scientific, and people from countries who are already metricized like to use it to express their silent resentment at the fact that other countries have been able to maintain a larger level of independence.
Anybody interested in this issue should look at http://www.metric.org.uk/
It gives a lot of information about how stupid the imperial system is in general, and in particular in its implementation in Britain.
1) Those that use the Metric System; and
2) Those that have landed a man on the Moon.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
The metric system is a crutch for people who can't do any math except moving decimal points...
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.