So you see £1.49, and say to yourself £1, 9 shillings, and about 10 pence? That seems weird and not very helpful to me (especially since the same item was probably about half a crown in the 1970s).
Yesterday I was saying to the assembled company, “Thirty bob to go through the Dartford Tunnel! I can remember when it was half a crown”.
It’s just as easy to say the numbers in either system, but how about using them? If you want to do anything at all with the numbers, you want to use the metric system.
An example: I have a rectangular fish tank, and I want to know how much water it takes to fill it. In metric, I can measure the length, width, and height in centimeters, multiply them, and I have the volume in milliliters. Divide by 1000, and I have liters. In American, by contrast, I measure the length, width, and height in inches, multiply them, and then divide by 231 to get gallons. 231! Tell me, how many of you knew that there were 231 cubic inches in a gallon before this thread? And even after this thread, how many of you will remember that tomorrow?
Explain this please. I don’t understand how these monetary units work. Also, what does “I also render down metric sums of money into £ s.d.” mean?? What is a “metric sum of money”?
Oh and as for my opinion here- pardon the cliche, but metric just makes sense. First thing I thing of is a socket set. Nicely organized by mm: 6, 7, 8, 9, etc. Then you look at a set in inches and it looks all stupid with dumbass numbers like 11/32 or 9/16. I know it’s not difficult to figure out with a little thought, but off the top of my head I’m much better at knowing whether a whole number is bigger than another whole number or not. A system where things go by ten just seems perfect.
As for fahrenheit, from what I understand/ recall, the story of its origins are based partly in fact and partly in speculation. It goes somethin’ like this: The guy who came up with that scale around 300 years ago started with a thin tube containing mercury and used ice and ammonium chloride to get the mercury as low as he possibly could. He labeled that as 0. It’s said that he wanted there to be 360 degrees (based on the degrees in a full circle) between freezing and boiling, but reduced that number to 180 since 360 would be too many marks on his tube. When he put the tube in ice water the mercury rose to the 32 mark. He allegedly took his temperature and thought it would be perfect that a human’s temp is about 100 degrees. Since he wanted 180 degrees between freeze and boil, the top of the scale was 212. The story is really stupid and sounds like he was convinced that his ice/ immodium chl. mix was as cold as anything could ever possibly get and that’s I guess why it was necessary to make that zero, rather than the freezing point of water. The more I think about the origin of fahrenheit, the more confused I get really. Regardless though, 0-100 is just plain logical.
I think the best argument for metric measurement worldwide is communication. I play games online with many people outisde of the U.S. and in conversation I wilkl convert measurements before saying them. Not that we have a lot of conversations where a measurement comes up, but it has happened when talking about weather, or the mountians I live in.
I love this converting tool. I don’t even know what the majority of the measurements on it even are.
AMEN! “Divide by 1000!” Brilliant and easy to learn once and never forget. Divide by 231: fucking stupid. It’s like when I was younger selling/ buying weed (just smaallll amounts) and we were doing the dumbass 28 grams in an ounce conversion because weed was sold in fractions of an ounce, but the scales measured in grams. Hated that shit.
Hell yeah! I had a thread the other month about how binary systems are great, and we should take it a step further and switch to writing our inch measurements in binary. Binary is great for engineering. When you make parts that need symmetry and have to fit together, going the 1/2, 3/4, 5/16 etc route is best. In decimal, everything is just a tad less neat. Decimal is best for measuring random natural values. Binary is best for engineering.
What’s cool is that the conversions between metric and imperial are mostly binary already. Four inches to the decimeter. Four cups to the liter. If you write both your imperial and your metric in binary, you can convert from one system to another by moving a decimal point.
This is sterling, the currency used in the UK. In 1971, the UK converted to a decimal currency (loosely called “metric”), with 100 pence to the pound (£). Before then, the pound was divided into 20 shillings, and each shilling was 12 pennies or pence.
And a crown was a coin worth 5/- (5 shillings), or £0.25 in the post-decimal currency, but it wasn’t a coin in general circulation. On the other hand, the half crown, worth 2/6 (2 shillings and 6 pence) was in general circulation, alongside florins, worth 2/- (2 shillings, or £0.10 in the new system).

Hell yeah! I had a thread the other month about how binary systems are great, and we should take it a step further and switch to writing our inch measurements in binary. Binary is great for engineering. When you make parts that need symmetry and have to fit together, going the 1/2, 3/4, 5/16 etc route is best. In decimal, everything is just a tad less neat. Decimal is best for measuring random natural values. Binary is best for engineering.
What’s cool is that the conversions between metric and imperial are mostly binary already. Four inches to the decimeter. Four cups to the liter. If you write both your imperial and your metric in binary, you can convert from one system to another by moving a decimal point.
Damn. Every time someone mentions binary I want to know how it works. From past experience though I know better than to go look it up again. Reading about it leads me to believe that I need to learn some other things before hoping to make sense of binary seeing as how when I go to a page that gives info about it, I’m confused by the first two sentences.

Hell yeah! I had a thread the other month about how binary systems are great, and we should take it a step further and switch to writing our inch measurements in binary.
Then you need to write it in binary (or possibly octal or hexadecimal). So you would have a 0.1001" spanner rather than a 9/16" spanner.

Damn. Every time someone mentions binary I want to know how it works. From past experience though I know better than to go look it up again. Reading about it leads me to believe that I need to learn some other things before hoping to make sense of binary seeing as how when I go to a page that gives info about it, I’m confused by the first two sentences.
Well, do you know how fractional inches work? Say you have 5/8". That’s a half inch plus a 1/8 inch. It doesn’t have a 1/4 in it nor a 1/16. In the binary system, each power-of-2 fraction gets a spot on your piece of paper. So you got 4 spots: ____ (for 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16). And you just mark down what you’ve got. 5/8 is x_x_. Now replace ‘x’ with 1 and ‘_’ with 0, and you get the ‘proper binary’ .1010 The whole trick is that you can write down any number this way, just breaking it up into power-of-2 fractions like 1/2, 1/4, and 1/64, 1/128, etc.
Writing fractional inches in binary lets you see right away what you’ve got. It also makes math with them easier. Works like paper addition and paper multiplication that you already know, but simplified. (I won’t get into that now, tho.) It’s got all the benefit of decimal/metric, in fact, except base-2 is better than base-10 for engineering.
The only downside is now you’ve got a lot more digits. So you have to find a way to make them nicer. First of all, we should ditch writing '1’s and '0’s. They look too much alike. Maybe use 'x’s and 'o’s, or ‘*’ and ‘-’. Then you have to group them (the way we write 1,000,000 instead of 1000000).
Interestingly, my car (a Jeep) asked me if I wanted to use “US” or “Metric” measurements. Living in the UK, I assume I’m not permitted a speedometer, as I neither live in the US nor use metric for my speed and distance.
Whoever got the idea that miles were “US” measurements? Then again, I was told the other day online that Halloween is a “US holiday, for those who don’t know”.
I love this website, and thank you everyone for assisting me with this question.
But what I still don’t understand is why does the earlier question on this site ““am I farting holes in my underwear?”” have more responses than this legitimate question on the metric system???

Well, do you know how fractional inches work? Say you have 5/8". That’s a half inch plus a 1/8 inch. It doesn’t have a 1/4 in it nor a 1/16. In the binary system, each power-of-2 fraction gets a spot on your piece of paper. So you got 4 spots: ____ (for 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16). And you just mark down what you’ve got. 5/8 is x_x_. Now replace ‘x’ with 1 and ‘_’ with 0, and you get the ‘proper binary’ .1010 The whole trick is that you can write down any number this way, just breaking it up into power-of-2 fractions like 1/2, 1/4, and 1/64, 1/128, etc.
Writing fractional inches in binary lets you see right away what you’ve got. It also makes math with them easier. Works like paper addition and paper multiplication that you already know, but simplified. (I won’t get into that now, tho.) It’s got all the benefit of decimal/metric, in fact, except base-2 is better than base-10 for engineering.
Is it possible to feel your brain cringe in your head? Somehwere in the third sentence I swear I felt it. Thanks for the explanation. I’ve bookmarked it to look at later when I’m able to concentrate.

I love this website, and thank you everyone for assisting me with this question.
But what I still don’t understand is why does the earlier question on this site ““am I farting holes in my underwear?”” have more responses than this legitimate question on the metric system???
As much as I’d love to see everyone hopping on here and saying “Fuck the USA and their retard measurements”, I gotta admit that if I had known about the fart hole thread I woulda been there too!! :rolleyes:
Whoever got the idea that miles were “US” measurements? Then again, I was told the other day online that Halloween is a “US holiday, for those who don’t know”.
The US is the only country worth mentioning that still uses the old “customary” units predominantly. Some specific units like miles might still be used in one or two other places, but the system as a whole is distinctively American. And while Halloween is known in Europe and places which derive from European culture, it’s observed in the US to a greater extent and in a different way than it is in Europe: It’s just a given here that any particular group of people is likely to have a Halloween party, and put up decorations, and participate in Trick-or-Treating (either giving or receiving), etc.

The US is the only country worth mentioning
So fuck all y’all other bitches! USA! USA! USA! :eek::dubious:
Way to take that out of context. Between the US, Liberia, and Burma, yes, I’d say that the US is the only one worth mentioning. France, Australia, the UK, Russia, India, China, Japan, etc. are also worth mentioning, but they all use predominantly the metric system (even if there are still a few holdouts of the old system in British beer and the like).

How did the disconnect between UK and US units of volume originate, anyway?
I don’t know about volume specifically, but there used to be local standards for many of the units by region or by market (eg. jewellery vs crops vs fluids for weight).
Wikipedia has a handy-dandy conversion chart.

In 1971, the UK converted to a decimal currency (loosely called “metric”), with 100 pence to the pound (£). Before then, the pound was divided into 20 shillings, and each shilling was 12 pennies or pence.
NZ changed over in '67, and there were detractors then too , who claimed that the new-fangled decimal currency was too complicated, unlike good old £sd… just like metric measurement is more complicated than feet, yards, chains, furlongs, pounds, stone, pints, gallons, etc, etc.