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You just couldn't make it up, could you?...Originally posted by Bryn View Post -
Considering there's nothing stopping someone asking for imperial quantities, indeed milk and beer can still be sold in pints and if a customer asks for a half pound of cheese they will still be served (although it may take a while depending how clued up/old the assistant is) I do wonder what the point is. Won't do much to further our science, engineering and other technical industries, and has the potential for expensive mistakes https://www.theguardian.com/science/...ernationalnews ( Apparently the Hubble problems were not the result of imperial/metric mismatch as was originally claimed)
Well quite, political satire these days is straight reportage.ahinton
Quote Originally Posted by Bryn View Post
You just couldn't make it up, could you?...Comment
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Originally posted by oddoneout View Post
I wouldn’t bother…
The desperate, mind-boggling, beyond-satire scraping of the barrel for «Brexit gains» doesn’t half reveal the age profile of the relevant constituency (I was going to say loonies) - who under 60 really remembers the whole lb & oz thing?
Are we going back to £-s-d and guineas too?
It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic
"...the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices..."
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Just a figure of speech... Although actually I suppose the point is to distract from what they are actually going to do which is take away all sorts of EU legislation which benefits people the government isn't interested in and gets in the way of what Tory chums and donors want to do.Originally posted by Nick Armstrong View Post
A picture is worth a thousand words https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...the-eu-cartoonComment
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Originally posted by Nick Armstrong View Post
I was involved in educational publishing in the early 1970s, so I know for sure that SI units - i.e. the metric ones - have been taught in schools for more than 50 years!Comment
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Originally posted by Nick Armstrong View Post kernelbogey is right.
I can think of nothing worse than going back to Imperial measurements - having worked at the UK's Measurement Standards Laboratory.
Save us from Politicians who know nothing of Science.
Anyway, as oddoneout pointed out, I thought milk was already sold in pints, but just called ~568ml.Comment
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Dave Brown’s #RoguesGallery cartoon "Imperial Measures" made me laugh.
(Or https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E_ge5nYXMAENPXV?format=jpg)Comment
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Imperial for individuals; metric for machines. Being happily educated in both, at adequate schools in the 40's and 50's, I have never seen any problem with handling both systems. But times change.
I treasure my battered copy of Wightman's Arithmetical Tables (price 8d).
There's a PhD for a comparative study of the use of the units of both systems in poetry.Comment
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This is utter garbage and will never happen. It's pure distraction tactics from the Johnson, desperately trying to prove to those who voted for Brexit that there is some benefit to be found in it.
Why do these obvious distraction tactics work every time?"The sound is the handwriting of the conductor" - Bernard HaitinkComment
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What's more I can have it delivered to my doorstep in glass bottles - as indeed my son and his family do as being more convenient and enviro than supermarket plastic, and they get all sorts of other stuff delivered as well, including potting compost. They don't use imperial measures and struggle to interpret/visualise them when they do arise in connection with sewing, old manuals etc. until converted to metric equivalents.Originally posted by AuntDaisy View Post
So we can continue to have (the best of) both worlds without needing to legislate. Indeed, wasn't it one of the "triumphs" in "battles with the EU enemy to be allowed to continue to show and ask for imperial equivalents so long as the metric was clearly shown and the product was delivered and marked with metric? When I worked on a deli counter from the late 90s we had both displayed and customers used lbs and ozs in their requests and the scales had both. In due course the scales only had metric but by then we were familiar with the equivalents and could mentally convert a request for a half of ham into 225g when serving - and also deal with grumbles, suspicion etc. Some of the other quantities (6ozs, three quarters of a pound, etc ) took a bit more thought, and towards the end of my time there we were facing the problem with younger staff who didn't know what the old("proper" as some of the customers had it) measures were, or hadn't even heard of them in some cases (so much for national curriculum...) and even with the crib sheets on the scales struggled to engage with the mostly older customers who used them.Comment
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I think the pint-of-milk thing which the supermarkets have preserved is interesting. They have collectively decided that people cannot imagine what a litre or half-litre of milk 'feels like'. There is a modicum of truth in this. I can mostly happily work in both imperial and metric systems. But occasionally I will find myself doing mental arithmetic to convert from one to the other.Originally posted by kernelbogey View Post
I was involved in educational publishing in the early 1970s, so I know for sure that SI units - i.e. the metric ones - have been taught in schools for more than 50 years!
Miles per gallon is still a thing: why not per litre since we buy the stuff in litres?
And many of us still talk of personal weight in stones and pounds. I will admit to finding it difficult to remember my weight in kilogrammes (never mind that the bathroom scales lie so frequently
).
(Edit: written without sight of Oddie's no 11 above)Comment
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And distances are still in miles on road signage. I use hybrid "thinking" for petrol; the same number of litres goes in at each fill, which I don't mentally convert to gallons, but I know how many miles that fill should do, rather than kms. I could change the fuel monitor display on the dashboard to metric but there seems no point.Originally posted by kernelbogey View PostI think the pint-of-milk thing which the supermarkets have preserved is interesting. They have collectively decided that people cannot imagine what a litre or half-litre of milk 'feels like'. There is a modicum of truth in this. I can mostly happily work in both imperial and metric systems. But occasionally I will find myself doing mental arithmetic to convert from one to the other.
Miles per gallon is still a thing: why not per litre since we buy the stuff in litres?
And many of us still talk of personal weight in stones and pounds. I will admit to finding it difficult to remember my weight in kilogrammes (never mind that the bathroom scales lie so frequently ).
(Edit: written without sight of Oddie's no 11 above)Comment
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In 2007 the EU agreed that the UK and Ireland could continue to use imperial measures, but 'encouraged' them to adopt metric.
As with blue passports, Johnson is trumpeting something the EU agreed long ago.Comment
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Indeed, but that doesn't fit the wicked EU narrative does it?Originally posted by Pabmusic View PostComment
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