Used to be worse, to quote messers Pratchett & Gaimon.
"NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee.
It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system
Two farthings = One Ha’penny. Two ha’pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). Once Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.
The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated."
Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
As an American: What the fuck?
You get my angry up vote. But seriously how is the imperial measurement any better? I mean it is completely and utterly broken with not unified conversions and I can’t imagine that learning all this as a kid wasn’t challenging.
The nice thing about the imperial system is that the units are mostly in scales humans care about. For technical purposes, metric is undoubtedly better, but on the day to day, I’d posit that they aren’t that far apart.
The official metric measure of temperature is degrees Kelvin, though people use Celsius instead because the zero point isn’t useful in day to day life. On that same line, how often do you honestly need to know the precise freezing point of water? The Fahrenheit system of “0 is basically as cold as it usually ever gets, and 100 is basically as hot as it ever gets” is more useful in day to day life.
1 Cup (unit) of water being about the same amount of water in a cup (glass) is useful. The Pint-Quart-Gallon system basically only gets used when buying liquids as discrete units - a gallon of milk, a pint of cream, etc. Metric does the same thing with liters, half liters, and colloquial slang terms for 2 and 4 liters. For continuous measurement of liquids, imperial has ounces and gallons, and metric has milliliters and liters. The clean conversion factor between milliliters and liters is nice, but rarely needed in day to day life.
Functionally, in day to day life, people almost never measure things longer than like 100 feet. Miles are for distances travel, feet and inches are for measured things, and the trickiness in converting between the two rarely comes up. In exchange for that you get units that are relatively easy to visualize in terms of the human body (an inch is about the length of a segment in your index finger, a foot is about the length of your foot or forearm). I’m personally indifferent between miles and kilometers, though the 0-100 scale for how fast your car could reasonably go is kinda nice.
Don’t get me wrong, Metric is better, especially for anything scientific or technical, and having one global system of measurement would be nice, but growing up learning imperial really isn’t that hard, and in day to day life, there are some benefits to using it. Also, we learn metric in school and for anything technical, we use Metric here in the states too.
degree centigrade
Or, as it’s called in the rest of the world, degree Celsius.
In Brasil we use both. Or just degree since we simply don’t mix metric and imperial.
Having lived in places that used both systems, I have to say - I’m objectively on board with distance and weights in metric, but I’ve been less on board with temperature. The Celcius scale is good for science, but less useful for human measurement than Fahrenheit is. Fahrenheit zooms in closer to the human experience of temperatures (around 0F/-17C to 100F/37C) and so allows for slightly more variation when describing temperature in sets of 10 (that range of 100 digits in Fahrenheit is only 54 digits in Celsius, so it makes Celsius feel roughly half as detailed when talking about it). Anything below 0 in Fahrenheit is unbelievably cold. Anything above 100 is unbelievably hot. Celcius centers on freezing/boiling, which I get, but that’s not terribly useful for daily human purposes; namely weather. The temps from around 40 to 100 in Celsius aren’t useful to humans. It’s all just “really fucking hot”. So I give a big thumbs up to everything metric except for Celcius.
Distance -> Yes -> “Are you in an aeroplane?” -> Nautical miles
but that’s just the majority of the aviation industry, isn’t it?
That’s what you get when you suddenly switch from imperial to metric 🤷. It’s a bit more “tidier” (from what I know) in the US. They started putting up distance signs with both miles and km in some states, so people get a general idea of how they correlate to each other… which is good I guess. I mean, most of the world has a general idea how to convert a mile to a km (it’s 1.6, but I use 1.5 to get a general ballpark figure), while only military personnel over there have an idea of how much of a distance a km is.
They still measure weight about anything flesh or food related in pounds though.
There’s a wonderful BBC archive video on YouTube of a 1978 video interviewing people on the streets of Britain about switching to Kilometres. Fascinating to see the attitudes and level of knowledge about it from the time.
Yeah, It did surprise me to be honest, didn’t know that many people actually knew how they relate to each other, back in the day I mean. Some were opposed to changing, but still, a lot said they’d be pro for it. Interesting.
Did we watch different videos? The only person who seemed in favour sounded like he was German. One person was worried that you get less mileage in your car with kilometres. Another mentioned that Britain used to rule the world and now it’s “part of a community”, which they said “ain’t right”. Yet another said they fought 10 years in the war (?) to keep things how they are, but now people want to change everything.
All in all, the sentiment was overwhelmingly negative.
We all know the “Britannia rules the waves” guy voted brexit if he was still alive haha.
Maybe, I didn’t get that cuz English is not my first language and Brits kinda talk funny, I can barely understand them, so you’re probably right.
Y’know what, I actually need a typing exercise right now, so since you didn’t ask for it at all, here’s a transcript:
Lady in blue jacket: “Well I travel abroad a lot, well when we go abroads you don’t get as much mileage too them… to it, and therefore your gonna use more petrol and then they say: ‘oh you… so many miles’ right? Well you’re not doing that, you’re not gonna do the mileage what they say you’re gonna do because the kilomolametres are not the same as the mileage; it’s shorter!”
Lady taking goods from a market stall and stashing them under her shawl whilst talking: “It’s the Treaty as Rome as my husband would say, everything’s been defs-decimalised, it’s horrible, I can’t bare it.”
Man in blue jumpsuit: "We’re losing a-all our national heritage in’t we?
Presenter: “Like what?”
MBJ: “Well like, y’know, the money’s all changed, the decimalisation, all the weights being changed, measurements and everything. And I think y’know, we’re an island on our own y’know and let’s face it; we once ruled the world didn’t we? Y’know? And now we’re just being part of a community. I don’t agree with it at all.”
Enthusiastic German guy: “It is much better. Much better, much easier.”
Worried looking Irish lady: “What?”
EGG: “The kilometres”
WLIL: "What’s ‘the kilometers’?
EGG: “Instead of m-miles. It’s goes in tens and thousands of… Thous-thousand metre is a 1 kilometre yes?”
Present: “Do you know what a kilometer is?”
London underground employee: “No.”
Man with bobble on his hat: “Well 8…80…80 kilometres is 50 mile an hour.”
WLIL: “Oh rubbish!”
EGG: “What the rubbish? What you talking rubbish?”
WLIL: “Rubbish! That’s what it is! Why don’t they leave everything alone… With their kilometre’s and their… so, oh for God’s sakes!”
Presenter: “But kilometres are nice and round. I mean…”
WLIL: “Oh sure.”
EGG “Yes! She don’t know.”
WLL: “I don’t! I don’t want to know either!”
Cheerful lady on mobility scooter: “It doesn’t much matter to me, I only go 4 miles an hour and I don’t really worry very much about either!”
Former solder: “I got a little old saying, it may not be at it… any beneficent for people like you. We had a little bloke with a moustache like that. His name was Chamberlain, he was the Prime Minister. He daid ‘Now we’re gonna fight a war to make it a better land to live in.’ That was for me, it was 19 years of age. Did 10 years in the war, come back here and now everybody wants to change the way that I went and fought for! It ain’t right, I want it as it is now! What I really nearly sacrificed my life for!”
Cheerful lady on mobility scooter: “It doesn’t much matter to me, I only go 4 miles an hour and I don’t really worry very much about either!”
This one’s like me 🤣.
- Gas prices went up again last night man…
- So? Doesn’t make any difference to me, I still fill for a 20.
Different views about the same situation 🤷. It doesn’t really bother me. I really can’t do anything about it, so why bother sulking about it.
Still, you’re right, the attitude towards changing to metric is all negative, except for the German guy, but that’s understandable 😂.
Lol. Those people definitely talk funny.
