Re: Point 57 of a litre please.

Aye, but with metric, a half of shandy would last the whole night...

Re: Point 57 of a litre please.

*I* buy milk in pints! Have done for YEARS and YEARS??

Pop into Tesco/M&S son. Maybe read the label before you purchase this time?

The retailers have changed to Litres because they make more money! 2 litres for the same price (and more) of 4 pints.

Re: Point 57 of a litre please.

Personally I buy it in the sizes it's available in.

I buy milk in the size of bottle that is delivered to the doorstep, I don't really care if it's metric or imperial, it's a bottle of milk.

I buy beer in the pub in pints, but the bottled 500ml ales that I get from the corner shop seem to work just as well as the been from the pub, although I'm about 7% less drunk per bottle.

Really, hanging on to Imperial is an utter embarrassment.

Re: Point 57 of a litre please.

no, actually its 2 pint, 4 pint, or 8 pint....

- 1.136 L, 2.272 L, 4.544L... :)

Re: Point 57 of a litre please.

If you check around you'll find you can buy it in either system depending on the supplier.

(Ah I see this place has finally worked out how to avoid the pink box impinging on the text window for those who prefer to remain unidentified. Glad they managed to work it out eventually.)

Re: Point 57 of a litre please.

The corner shops around here sell milk by the pint but the supermarkets sell it by the litre. Strange.

Re: Point 57 of a litre please.

Round my way it's vice versa. Supermarkets do two pints, corner-stores do liters. I imagine that way their price looks less exorbitant compared to the supermarket!

Re: Point 57 of a litre please.

Normal milk is in pints (or rather multiples of 568ml). Filtered milk, jersey milk and uht milk tends to be in litres.

Only recently changed the road signs in Ireland, didn't take that much effort. For a few years though the speed limit signs were mph while the distances were in km

Not preally

This is a standard argument trotted out all the time, most signs are replaced every 10-15 years, you have a phase of a couple of months where they're being replaced, but I doubt people are going to think that it's 200meters from Leeds to London.

Re: Not only that..

As mentioned below, the money would go into infrastructure work, which would go into workers' pockets, which would go into the economy. Like how they've solved the recession in the US, every time there's been a major recession.

Re: Not preally

"Most signs are replaced every 10-15 years". Not so, try every 30 years or so. Quite often much longer.

Re: Not preally

"most signs are replaced every 10-15 years"

Not on the A1 north of Peterborough..

1 - Ireland is broke, why were they burning money on switching road signs?

2 - slight difference in scale between the Irish and UK road network.

3 - the UK is broke too.

"Recently"?

They had started the conversion back in the mid 90's - using a different colour for the new metric ones. Suspect Ireland has a lot less road signs than the UK though.

Re: "Recently"?

According to the CIA World fact book, Ireland has 96,000 km of roads. The UK has only 4 times as much, at 394,000 km. Given that the UK has more than 12 times the population of Ireland, the Irish road network is proportionally 3 times as long as the UK road network.

(And we didn't know we were broke when we replaced all the signs!)

Re: "Recently"?

and look at the state of the irish economy...

Re: Not only that..

Theres good gdp and bad gdp. Building the pyramids increased gdp, put money in the pockets of someone, but it didnt improve the lot of the population... Like building say canals or diverting water or improving infrastructure instead.

Changing roadsigns and pints is like building the pyramids, no practical benefit whatsoever.

I did

But only got up to 90 due to traffic

Re: The 'mercans seem to be doing OK with feet, inches and funny sizes gallons.

Yes, I can count in base 8, then 12, then 16, or however the fuck Imperial weights go, changing base at different scales, or I could just use something consistent and easy. Using Imperial doesn't make you cleverer, it just means you waste more of your time.

'mercans seem to be doing OK,

if you are willing to overlook some sad facts about math literacy:

"In a study of how good 15-year-olds are in math, the "big, bad" USA ranked 24 out of 29 countries."

"In short, the percentages of high-achieving math students in the U.S.—and most of its individual states—are shockingly below those of many of the world’s leading industrialized nations.(PDF)

"Of the individual states, only Massachusetts had more than half (51 percent) of its students score at or above the proficient mark."

Re: metrically literate elite?

Homer Simpson, on declaring the virtues of Springfield

"...And we were the first town in the country to reject the metric system!"

Re: The 'mercans seem to be doing OK with feet, inches and funny sizes gallons.

>So people really can't count in anything other than base 10?

Seems strange that multiples of inches are 12 to the foot, but fractions are 'thou' thousandths of an inch...

Re: metrically literate elite?

Yes, they're dealing with it so well that the first page in pretty much any US Haynes manual is a big full page warning along the lines of: "It is extremely important that you are familiar with the metric system, with metric measurements and fasteners." Etc. etc.

Re: The 'mercans seem to be doing OK with feet, inches and funny sizes gallons.

> Seems strange that multiples of inches are 12 to the foot, but

> fractions are 'thou' thousandths of an inch...

In most common, everyday uses (carpentry, plumbing, mechanical fasteners, etc.), thousandths are not used. Fractions are. You have to know how to count by 64ths. And to make it even more confusing, they don't just leave the value in 64ths (5/64, 6/64, 7/64, 8/64, 9/64, ...), you have to reduce the fractions (5/64, 3/32, 7/64, 1/8, 9/64...

Mechanical engineers and machinists use decimal values (thousandths) when designing and manufacturing parts, but nobody in everyday life does.

Re: The 'mercans seem to be doing OK with feet, inches and funny sizes gallons.

Maybe you should resist telling other people what would be easier for them. I don't see my near-centurian grandfather struggling with imperial units.

Re: The 'mercans seem to be doing OK with feet, inches and funny sizes gallons.

"but fractions are 'thou' thousandths of an inch

No. Americans would call that a 'mil'. 'Thou' is a British measurement. In the UK 'mil' could refer to 'millimetre' or 'millilitre'.

Anyhow. I'm in favour of the metric system dying a death outside of the scientific community. The best system of units for a human to use in every practical situation is one where the counts are within a easily manageable range and precision, say between a quarter and a score. Outside that range the moderately arithmetically challenged (roughly two thirds of the general population) tend to become befuddled.

That makes metric units ok for roughly 33% of situations, unless non powers of 1000 are used, e.g. 10s of cl for beverages in France as opposed to 100s of ml in the UK.

For a trivial indication of this, check out the statistics for deaths by incorrect dosage in hospitals in the states compared to Britain.

Re: The 'mercans seem to be doing OK with feet, inches and funny sizes gallons.

"Outside that range the moderately arithmetically challenged (roughly two thirds of the general population) tend to become befuddled"

Funny I live in a civilised part of the world where the metric system is used exclusively and don't observe anything like that. Probably it happens only in the imagination of imperial system proponents...

Re: The 'mercans seem to be doing OK with feet, inches and funny sizes gallons.

Also 12 has a lot of factors.

It is an ideal unit division.

We use 10 only because we have 10 fingers, and therefore our numerical system is also 10-based.

There is nothing intrinsically great about 10 otherwise.

traditional subdivisions

JEDIDIAH, the traditional subdivision of the inch is twelve lines to the inch and twelve points to the line. However, other variations exist — you’ve noted the preference in carpentry to halve, halve again. Another example comes from typesetting, where the inch was divided into six picas and the pica into twelve points, resulting in the typesetter’s point being twice as long as the traditional point.

Re: metrically literate elite?

>The 'mercans seem to be doing OK with feet, inches and funny sizes gallons.

That's because they only have to teach the kids one set of units, so they end up with a detailed knowledge. In Britain they are taught in metric, with only a smattering of the most common Imperial units. Most British kids don't know how many cubic inches there are in a gallon or square feet in an acre, whereas a lot of Americans do. In fact, most British kids don't even know how yards there are in a mile.

Re: Finally !

Whereas in the UK its the other way around... remember Ali G asking an MP if children should 'deal in ounces and quarters?'