So the allotment owners are horrified...
...at being forced to accept an extra 0.1 sq m?
Imperial traditionalists have expressed dismay that allotments will henceforth be measured in metres, thereby ending a 600-year-old system of staking out municipal veg patches in poles. According to the Daily Mail, shocked gardeners have received rent renewal notices from their town halls reclassifying the standard "10 pole" …
Graves died in 1985, and English copyright extends an eye-watering 70 years from the end of the year in which the author died. So yes, he's still very much in copyright until 2056.
After all, it's the only way we can make sure he gets rewarded for his creativity, right? Anyone remember what a cultural wasteland England was before we had these copyright terms?
Ooooh, downvotes for you I see. Some people don't like being told they do it the easy way.
Oddly, everyone I know who grew up with Imperial weights and measures is considerably better at mental arithmetic than those who grew up with metric but the affordability of the pocket calculator may also be implicated in this situation.
I don't know what effect it has on mental arithmetic. I would say that people who grew up with the Imperial system also grew up in an age where schools drummed more mental arithmetic skills into people, so it could be mere correlation. What I would say is that pre-Decimalization coinage was much more flexible. Twelve, and obviously 240 (pennies in a pound) have many more factors than ten (and one-hundred pennies in the pound).
This makes the calculations much easier and the results much more often easy numbers.
Measuring area in rods is as stupid as measuring the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight. And nobody would want to go back to pre-decimalisation money. It just used such stupid units. Quick, how much is 10 donuts at 1 pound, 3 shillings and 6 pence? Complete bollocks the lot of them and best left in the stone age, where they came from.
"10 donuts (sic) at 1 pound, 3 shillings and 6 pence" is... £1/3/6d.
Now - if you'd asked about doughnuts at £1/3/6d EACH... I'd say you're definitely shopping in the wrong places. But you'd pay £11/15/0d (10x £1 = £10. 10 x 3s = 30s = £1/10/0. 10 x 6p = 5s. Utterly trivial when you're used to actually doing mental arithmetic - even after 42 years.)
Now that's proper mental mental arithmetic... a counting system with multiple fields and different bases in each field. Who on earth would invent a system like that? Oh, hang on... I seem to recall spending several years of my life practicing that stuff.
FWIW I also recall we had a computer* made out of relays when I was at school that could do arithmetic in yards, feet and inches and suchlike. I think it could calculate pi as well, but rather slowly.
* IT angle.
Is your Basingstoke scale base 10 logarithmic? Because if we're in an anti-SI mode, we should really be using base 2 (or 12, 14, 16 or even 5.5).
Incidentally, here in the semi rural south west, there are still streets where the houses are 1 rod, pole or perch wide. I expect there are plenty of other places like that.
Its not really anti-SI - its just a silly change that will make life harder. Allotments are often divided. They are generally laid out in poles. To have a half allotment you normally divide it in two along its length. Now you will need a whole army of idiots with theodolites trying to calculate a fraction of a square root of 325 or something - and bandages for all the nosebleeds this will cause the tablet waving council officials.
> To have a half allotment you normally divide it in two along its length. Now you will need a whole army of idiots with theodolites trying to calculate a fraction of a square root of 325
Or you could just divide it in two along its length.
Also, and somewhat surprisingly, it's also so practically arranged that one pole can be rounded to five meters (five meters two centimeters).
Yes, this does strike me as something of a first world problem.
I would hazard a guess that with the computerisation of records, it's making less and less sense to build into new software, routines to back-convert records which someone had just been paid a lot of money to normalise under one consistent measurement system.
These people sound like that old woman who famously back in the day, suggested that the government wait for all the old people to die before introducing the metric system.
The smart money should have been on duo-decimalization with the introduction of Arabic numerals and positional notation, however Roman numerals, and abacuses, fairly conclusively demonstrate that even back then, ordinary people and bean counters calculated by looking at their fingers. It was basically only merchants and people divvying up land who found 12 and it's greater number of factors useful enough to bother with.
The Jimmy Wales is not an unvarying unit* since he might adopt, or give up, the 5:2 diet or suffer an injury that prevents him exercising.
*Yes, I know Wales is not invariant either but the percent change is minimal compared to the potential % change in the J Wales.
Yours a Physiologist
The timber industry works in "metric feet" i.e. units of 30cm.
There's clearly a "metric pole" waiting to be invented, namely 5m. The ~1% difference between a square pole and 25 square meters is surely too small for anyone involved in small-plot agriculture to notice. in any case there's no way to change the allotment boundaries for existing allotments in order sto squeeze in one extra one at the nd of a row of 100. (Are there ever as many as 100 in a row? )
Very sensible.
Metric is easy to do calculations in.
Imperial tends to correspond well to the size of everyday natural objects.
So metric feet, metric ton, metric pound, metric pole, metric firkin, metric mile all seem to be a sensible and practical compromise.
I remember being in a French market and people were asking for a livre of whatevers, and they've been metric for a couple of centuries.
I remember being in a French market and people were asking for a livre of whatevers, and they've been metric for a couple of centuries.
It's common in Germany and the Netherlands to ask for fruit and veg in multiples of Pfund/Pond rather than fractions of a kilo. Everyone knows it's 500g so there's no problem. But somehow I just can't see it working in Tunbridge Wells…
"But somehow I just can't see it working in Tunbridge Wells…"
I can. The sort of people who make a big fuss about Imperial units tend not to be terribly technically minded, so if you change the size of their "pint" or "pound" then they probably won't notice. You could probably swap their miles for kilometres and they'd be pleased about getting better mpg.
"Metric is easy to do calculations in."
Not really, unless you avoid all division and round everything nicely. The imperial system evolved to be easy for people to do calculations in. Specifically, it was used by people otherwise unschooled in maths let alone geometry.
There are some decimal relations in the imperial system. For example, 1 cubic foot of water was 1000oz (50 pints) and a gallon is 10lbs of water (160oz) but the underlying non-decimal sub-devisions tend to make up for the shortcomings of the decimal system in these cases.
If it's so easy to do calculations, why is the length of a car specified in mm for manufacturing? Because ordinary workers can't do conversions from mm to cm to m to km.
Stupid metric/imperial measurement failures that you read about are the result of errors in conversion between metric and imperial measures, which points to the only actual real advantage of a single common measurement system: it makes trade and manufacturing easier, cheaper, and less error prone. For this reason, both France and the UK had to give up thousands of traditional measure, to create imperial measurement systems.
Then the French and the English had to further agree to consolidate to only ONE common measurement system. As you no doubt know, the English agreed to use the French mesurement system and the French agreed to use the English navigation system.
Removal of conversions BETWEEN multiple national, local, and trade measurments has been a benefit. Don't confuse that with thinking that "decimal point" conversions WITHIN the metric system are easy. On an absolute scale, conversions within the metric system are approximately just as difficult and error prone as converson between systems.
> why is the length of a car specified in mm for manufacturing?
Because of significant digits. The tolerance is a fraction of the unit used.
> Stupid metric/imperial measurement failures that you read about are the result of errors in conversion between metric and imperial measures
Yes, the smart solution is to only pick ONE system, not keep translating back and forth. Metric is considerably easier to use, especially in science and engineering; imperial is traditional.
> On an absolute scale, conversions within the metric system are approximately just as difficult and error prone as converson between systems.
Only when comparing base-10 units. How many grains to 0.17 troy pound?
If it's so easy to do calculations, why is the length of a car specified in mm for manufacturing? Because ordinary workers can't do conversions from mm to cm to m to km.
Technical drawings specify the unit ("All sizes in mm") to keep size and weight information consistent within the drawing. Those units will be engineering units, ten to the power of multiple_of_3, so mm, m or km, but not dm or hm. Also, there's generally no reason to do otherwise, because you'll find few drawings that have a dimension spread of more than three orders of magnitude
Where I worked, in France, the purchasing section sent an order to a supplier for a length of a standard cable with standard connectors attached. The order referred to an accompanying engineering drawing for the item. The length of the cable was shown as 600.
The item was meant to be 600 mm long. Guess how long the manufactured item was.
It all ended happily, the price of copper went up shortly after and we had a large stock of cable at the old price.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most UK measures really metric 'under the bonnet' so when they check you're not shorting people on a pint they compare it to 568ml?
So what measures in the UK are still truly Imperial and not just an alias to a given number measured in metric?