Sort of. on analogue speedometers, there’s a secondary ring of numbers indicating km/h, but they’re typically way harder to read than the mph ring - here’s a random typical example but some are even less clear than this.
Its the signage that would be the bigger problem - there’s a lot of it, and much of it seems to have been designed to cram maximum information onto minimum area - so there’s not even room to affix labels with km as a secondary measurement (especially as the current units (miles) aren’t explicitly stated - that is, most signs say something like ‘Berkington 35’ (not 35 miles).
Hey now, there’s no way to tell if we have the lights off!
Well the wood might’ve been 2x4" at some point, but then they had to sand it down and all that.
Do all countries sell TVs and monitors in inches (with an optional cm conversion, but still primarily inches)? Is this true for all countries? E.g. amazon.fr has them listed in inches, with cm in parentheses.
LCD monitors are pretty true to size, but CRT monitors were also lies, and measured the size of the tube, part of which was often behind the bezel.
It’s mainly gigabytes vs. gibibytes, isn’t it? Where 256 GB = 238 GiB, while my computer claims my SSD is 232, close enough maybe. Still sneaky of them.
I guess iljitsch might be talking about the overhead required by the disk controller and/or formatting to store the structure of the file system. No way to avoid that really.
My first wife was (is) a midwife, and I remember on the rare occasions when we talked about the nuts and bolts of her profession, she always referred to the amount of cervical dilation prior to giving birth in centimetres. This was back in the 70’s.
Perhaps there are some UK medical practitioners here who can inform us as to whether this particular measurement has always been assessed in centimetres, or whether the medical profession changed from imperial to metric at some point.
As a general rule, all the scientific and engineering things went metric all the way thirty years ago. Medical too, so dilation was in cms and injections calculated in mills per kilo of bodyweight. Mothers today, when told that they have an 8lb boy, will find that his chart says he is actually 3.6 kg. Ask a Brit how much he weighs and he will most likely say 14 stones or whatever, but when he goes to the doctor his weight will go down as 95 kg (everyone lies). When I buy sliced ham in the deli - I do what I used to do in France, and order six slices or whatever. If I asked for 4 oz, the counter assistant would not raise an eyebrow but would just weigh out 115 grams.
My car knows where it is, so when I recently caught a ferry to France, the computer switched over from mpg to litres per 100k; the speedo showed kph as the primary reading and the headlights switched to dipping to the right.
People are slow to change and it takes generations to get these things out of a culture. Farmers are a good example as many farms are passed on through many generations and the 100 acre field is not suddenly going to morph into the 40 hectare field, whatever it says on the DEFRA plan.
Timber is engineering, so that is all metric now. Back in the 70s I used to buy bulk timber, and would order 1000 feet of 10x10 (centimetres) and pay for it by the cubic yard. It just took a while to filter through. All screws and bolts are long since changed to metric, so all those BSF and Whitworth spanners in my toolbox are scrap.
I think that is pretty typical of us to embrace the good bits - money, science etc, but keep to the old ways where they is no good reason to change.
The numbers for guitar strings are a measurement of their diameter (thickness) in inches (or sometimes mm) but that does not denote wire gauge. Wire gauge is actually the opposite with the lower the gauge number, the thicker the wire.
Light, Medium, Heavy,etc. .gauges are a just label the manufacturers have given to a given grouping to give you a comparison. These are not standard either and may vary by manufacturer, “gauge”, or even string to string. This is determined by what each company believes will achieve the best tone with minimal affect on playability.
Plectrums may be measured in mm but again there is no standard “gauging” and they may vary by manufacturer. The Light, Medium, Hard labels are again just for comparison within their own products.
As a musician, I buy different strings for different purposes depending on the tone I’m trying to achieve on a certain guitar.
As far as buying picks, I don’t concern myself with brands, labels, or mm really. I buy them for feel and purpose. I keep a variety of thicknesses handy. Light for light strumming, medium for heavy strumming, Harder for soloing, crunching, shredding, etc…
I like some texture a la Jim Dunlop which keeps me from losing picks if you’re hands get wet, etc…
It’s interesting to note that where you see temporary road works signs that count down, i.e. “800 yards”, those are actually set out on the ground at 800 metres. The difference between a yard and a metre is not considered relevant even over that distance, and it is easier to set the cones and signs out by counting the white lines and gaps on the carriageway surface, which are all measured out in metres.
No cite, but this was from a course I did a few years ago at the Highways Agency (now Highways England) about the design of temporary traffic management.
Yep, except no conversion. Which happens to mean redefined inches (2.54cm) rather than local inches, because again whatever unit was called “inch” locally varied wildly in size. That kind of variation was pretty much the whole reason for the metric system. Can you imagine what interstate commerce would be like if each state, or sometimes each county, had its own measurement system? That’s the mess ISO tried to solve.
Don’t ask my brother about metrics for nuts and bolts. Some are Imperial, some are metric, and it is usually linked to head type but not always. It’s not so much a rant as a dissertation along the lines of “what I never ever really give a shit about regarding screws for wood vs those for brick, concrete or metal, and the advantages and disadvantages of each head type”.
That’s a pretty big jump in logic. Even if true, why would one experience with one deli-counter employee suggest whether a whole nation understands the metric system?
I’d also point out that meat is one product which has resisted metric. A lot of customers still order it by the ounce or in pounds and the deli worker will give them the equivalent in grams.
Secondly, for deli meat, those that do use metric don’t convert to kilos but maintain the gram unit of measurement i.e. 500g, 900g, 1500g.
It seems we are destined to use different measurements depending on their usage.
My peeve is when for example, the news describes a bank robber as being between 180-187cm tall. Ok … even if I convert to 1.8m it’s still kinda vague.
As a contractor, I’ll stick to feet and inches, thanks.
I thought something similar when I saw a sidewalk sign here in America that said “sidewalk ends in 1040 feet”. The only time that extra 40 feet would make a difference would be if a blind person with a GPS was trying to use the sidewalk.
I suppose it could be a failure of math rather than a failure of metric. “500 = ½ × 1000” is hard for some people.
Yes. Both our oven and our thermostat are in Fahrenheit, which surprised me because weather reports and conversations are othewise consistently Celsius. In the UK our thermostats and ovens were Celsius. Having grown up in the US, I’m more comfortable with Fahrenheit, but it seems like it would be a drawback for most Canadians.
As someone who never experienced any non-metric measurements except when traveling, what I find strange is how people from metric-challenged countries seem to have no trouble mixing units. Or maybe it’s because those people aren’t good with math / aren’t engineers. When the doctor tells me that my blood pressure is 140/90 I immediately want to know how much that is in a unit that I understand, such as atmosphere or millibar. But many people seem to be fine with arbitrary units, such as elephantpaws or whatever weird and meaningless way to express pressure.
Okay, let’s leave out the word “gauge” altogether, since it appears to be causing confusion , and just re-iterate the bare bones of the question.
Why do US based manufacturers of plectrums, or picks, choose to denote the thickness of these picks in millimeters, instead of thousandths of an inch ?
I wonder if that’s why engine displacements are now always given in liters in the US. When I bought my first car many years ago, it was Japanese and had a 1200 cc engine. At the time, American cars had displacements given in cubic inches. Now, all engines are in liters.
As far as the difference in liquid measures go, the US and British are different because the UK redefined the gallon in 1824. The Imperial gallon was defined (originally) as the volume of 10 pounds of water at 62 degrees F. The US kept the old Queen Anne gallon which was defined as 231 cubic inches. That made the Imperial gallon about 20% larger. Both systems have quarts and pints with the Imperial units also being 20% larger. But for fluid ounces, the Imperial system has 20 per pint, which makes the Imperial fluid ounce slightly smaller than the US. So the redefinition broke the nice binarity (is that a word?) of the liquid measuring system.
Didn’t see anyone else mention it, but the US measurements are actually defined in terms of metric units. A pound us defined as a certain number or kilograms, for example.
