Thanks for that, I had often wondered 
Oh, yeah… I don’t mean to imply that I don’t think it’s a superior system and much easier to work in – only that there’s no reason to mandate a total, absolute, all out switch, because as we see in other countries, it still doesn’t work completely.
In my experience, it can make the difference between something being merely good enough and making people say “wow!”. Not always, but perhaps more often than you might imagine.
Actually, the teaspoons and tablespoons are - or at least I’ve seen a lot of them - they’re a good way to consistently measure quantities that are too small to weigh accurately. Cups aren’t so popular simply because weighing is. I have a cup measure, but I don’t think many people here do. (lots of people have Pyrex jugs graduated in cups, but I doubt many have noticed it).
The switch from Imperial to metric was less traumatic for us that it would be for Americans, because we were already weighing stuff for recipes - just in pounds and ounces - so all that is required is one conversion factor, applied universally. Not so if you were to try to switch from cups to metric weights.
Don’t be obtuse. It’s 1/16th of a metric schlong.
Most British recipes (like this one for Bread and Butter pudding on the BBC website) have both Imperial and metric measures - just don’t use a mix of the two as they’re not exact conversions. They all use weight (oz or g) for dry/solid ingredients and volume (fl oz or ml) for liquids except that both small quantities of both solids and liquids will be given in teaspoons and tablespoons (with no conversion).
As to when the change happened I can’t really say but I have a recipe book from 1973 that is all Imperial whereas one from 1977 has metric added (in brackets at the end of the line).
I learned to cook with Imperial recipes but Miss Marcus learned to use metric exclusively cooking at school. Now I use whichever is more convienient - measuring jugs are marked in fl oz and ml and our electronic scales convert from oz to g at a touch of a button. One reason for using metric is that pre-wrapped items come in generally metric quantities - 250g of butter, 100g flaked almonds, etc.
I guess liters per 100km is correct and consistent with other measurements if you really mean fuel “consumption”. The rate at which you “consume” something is how much of the “something” is consumed related to something else. Think about something that consumes (or produces) electricity, water, food or whatever, A higher number always means that it consumes more. Liters per km might have been more correct but the 100 avoids awkward numbers less than 1. Those awkward numbers are probably why it was miles per gallon and not gallons per mile (even for big American cars 
).
What happened with athletic records?
I think the Olympics use yards long long ago. Does that mean that someone has the world record for 100 yards that will never be officially beaten?
I don’t know about the UK, but recipes here have been metric for many, many years.
Your schlong is only 16 centimeters?
I hope the women who say size doesn’t count are nice to you about it.
Heh, same age, same “tricky generation”, but while people’s height is still more immediate / obvious / visceral to me in feet and inches, weight is all in kilos… (which are easy enough to convert to pounds if needed… but stone are a true thing of the past).
My kitchen volume measures show, in addition to dl or l, weight (well, actually mass) in grams for flour, sugar and rice. It might not be perfectly accurate, but it’s close enough for most recipies. (Except for the rice, I wouldn’t trust that one.)
Recipies in Norway do not concistenly use either. You even see both in one recipe: X grams of flour, Y dl of sugar, 1 ts of salt.
And fuel consuption used to be l/mil here in Norway. That is, liters per (metric) mile*. But today all manufacturers and motorist associations give the consuption in l/100 km so I have to mentally divide by ten to get the “proper” number.
*Before metrification the Norwegian land mile was 36,000 feet, or 11.295 km.
That would make him slightly on the longer side of average, you know. But of course on the SDMB that would make him horribly under-endowed, since we’re all smarter, better looking, and more well-hung than everyone else :rolleyes:
Probably every country will have some legacy measurements still. Japan started adopting the metric system in the late 19th century and it still has quite a few traditional units remaining. Buildings, in particular, use traditional Japanese measurements for most parts; apartment floor space is sometimes quoted in both tatami and m^2. Sake and swords are measured in old units. The sword I use for iaijutsu practice is 2 shaku 5 sun 5 bu, for example (yes, that’s a long blade, I’ve got ape arms).
I moved here from the US a little over 7 years ago. It doesn’t take long to naturally acquire equivalencies if you actually use the measurements. I think in both systems, though I’m more metric than imperial at this point. Recipes are a pain, though. Weight is a much more sensible way to measure most dry goods whose volume might vary based on condition, and things like solid butter that don’t readily conform to the shape of a measuring vessel.
Sometimes when I’m doing weightlifting I’ll think about how much metal I’m moving. Considering that I mostly did body-weight exercises before I moved, I’m kind of impressed with myself when I do the conversions. I never thought I’d be able to pick up over 300 lbs. but my current max on the dead lift is 147.5 kg. Nothing compared to some lifters, but surprised me when I ran the numbers since I’d been thinking of it as a percentage of my body weight.
That reminds me, the vast majority of the United States’ land surveying system is highly, highly dependent upon English units. It’s the whole basis for how we divy up land that’s not traditional Colonial, French, or Spanish lands. It forms our baselines, counties, townships, and works its way all the way down to just the plat level.
What’s the standard in Canada, and how did you folks deal with that part of the metric changeover?
While not disagreeing with you on the general point, I’ll note that butter in the U.S. is normally sold in a standard size stick, and that the inside of the stick’s wrapper has tick marks showing the smaller amounts you need for baking: X number of tablespoons, or X fraction of a cup.
Thus, there’s no need to squish an amorphous blob of butter into a measuring cup and hope you’re close to the target amount. You just slice the stick at the right mark.
I’m sure this is useful… to people living there. It doesn’t make recipes very internationally portable though (of course the same can be said of any other system)
As far as I can tell, we didn’t. Mind, it wouldn’t have been easy; like the United States, our land surveys and associated necessities are built on the Imperial system. In Ontario, for example, most of the province was laid out in townships that were 16 miles square (where practical, lakes tended to get in the way). Townships themselves had 12 concession roads spaced 1.25 miles apart, which does make things not so bad because 1.25 miles will convert to 2 km–handy for road signs, since concession roads still exist today and exits from the freeway need to be signed.
Here in Alberta, I believe the surveyors followed the American plan mainly, with only a few changes from how the western US was surveyed. Townships were square, six miles on a side; subdivided into 36 square sections, one mile a side. Each section was further divided into four quarter-sections of 160 acres apiece–the basic “building block” of land settlement in the Canadian west. Again, the system still exists today, and “range roads” (running N-S) and “township roads” (running E-W) are still clearly marked in rural areas.
I’m unsure about Quebec–I do know that the oldest settled rural parts in the province used a river lot system that may have been measured in a pre-revolutionary French measurement. But perhaps a Quebec Doper would know more.
For the most part, roads themselves were built on a 66-foot road allowance in most of the country, and their allowance continues to be that wide. Whether planners still use the 66-foot designation or its metric equivalent, I have no idea.
As far as I can tell, matters involving such things are simply “dealt with.” Legal descriptions on title might use metric or Imperial, in addition to relying on survey monuments that may have been planted over a hundred years before (using Imperial measurements), maps based on those surveys and thus calibrated in Imperial, and more recent surveys that may be in metric. But (again, as far as I can tell), registration of title won’t be refused if the survey of that title shows Imperial measurements–there are certainly plenty of titles currently on the register that are in Imperial, that have been registered for years, and thus have never been converted to metric. When one of those changes hands, it is likely to carry the same measurements it always has.
Interestingly, I just finished a law school course in land titles, and all the measurements used in the class were in Imperial (except for such natural landmarks recorded on title as rivers and mountain peaks). They had to be; in some cases, we were looking at documents that were quite old and their legal descriptions referred to surveys measured in Imperial, while their schedules of metes and bounds, in Imperial, had never been changed from the time they were filed. Even in the more recent court cases we studied, the judge used Imperial measurements.
They do that here too, but the units are different; the ticks are for 20 g increments. That’s for the major brands, though. Even in the same country you don’t have standard packaging. Ever buy butter in a tub or tin? I did when I was in the US. Not margarine, which almost always comes in those kinds of containers, but real butter. Oh sure, you could almost always get the sticks too, but you might have to buy it special if all you had was the tub o’ butter in the house. Some of the better stuff doesn’t come in sticks. And as Mangetout said, it doesn’t help for portability.
The whole point of standard measurements is to provide portability and interchangeability. The reason we came up with the ANSI was to make sure that a bolt you bought from a manufacturer in New York would fit a nut made in Washington. Before that, there was no guarantee of any sort that even your tools would work with the materials you purchased. Some companies tried to lock in people who bought their stuff by making proprietary fittings, because then they could sell the tools too.
Heck companies still do that kind of thing. Microsoft has had to be bitchslapped into adopting even a facsimile of open standards. The companies that make security fittings, like the one-way screws on bathroom doors, still try to corner the market on both tools and fittings. The reason they don’t get away with it for long is because everyone in industry and out of it sees the need for some kind of agreement on interchangeability.
And while I’m back, I might as well comment on something upthread; I’ll bet the reason the EU is insisting on having just standard SI units on all packaging is that there are literally tens of different units that you’d have to cross-label everything with if you tried to keep legacy units too. Every little area would be bitching about why their odd units weren’t on there. “Dammit, we measure potatoes in poods. Why are pfunds listed, but poods aren’t?” As it is, have you seen the EU packaging? Just doing the ingredient lists and other necessary labeling in the major languages takes up so much room that there’s almost no room left for a logo or anything else.
Today’s misadventure: what looked like a 1/4" shaft turns out to be a 6 mm shaft, and I can’t find any flex couplings to join it with a 1/4" motor shaft. Although, oddly enough, the 1/4" to 1/4" couplings I had use a 3 mm Allen wrench on their clamp screws, so I had to go back for a metric Allen wrench set before I could find this out.
Also, precision movements with a 0.2" leadscrew require a multiplier of 4921.25984252 on a stepper motor drive to do everything in millimeters, but the multiplier has to be an integer, so there is an error of one part in 20,000 created purely by the metric conversion unless I bypass the standard method (if I can without messing anybody else’s software up, that is). In one version of this system that error will be the largest one.
All the products we can buy and use have at least some trace of these hassles built into them, and into their price and their performance. And all the new products, new inventions and discoveries we could use, get delayed at least a little bit by this constant distraction.
What’s that in grys?
The funny thing is that when surveying in the imperial system, you don’t screw around with 1/8, 1/16 or anything like that, you use decimal feet. You measure in tenths and hundredths of a foot. cite