Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
0.57 litres of your finest warm India Pale Ale barman please.
Just spent some of yesterday afternoon calculating areas in perches and square feet (an old English document) ... I did have to look up the conversion for perches to feet, though I'm fine with acres and yards ...
My favourite is the ton / tonne / tonne. What a bloody mess that all is.
A (ton / tonne / metric tonne) is something you can't lift and don't want landing on your head. It doesn't matter exactly what definition you use. Also, more than one ton has exactly the same effect on you as one ton.
If you want to actually measure something, use kg.
It is instructive to note that kg is the unit used on containers.
A container ship overloaded by 10% is not a good thing.
Could be worse. How's this for an example of a suboptimal muddle caused by metric and imperial?
This idea to reintroduce imperial measures is traffic cone hotlines levels of pathetic from the government.
Reintroduce imperial measures to what? Speed limit signs still show miles per hour, for instance, but champagne can no longer be bought in pints, as Churchill would have had.
And life has gone on nevertheless. What benefits will occur from this new old path?
No idea. The devil is in the detail. I suspect teaching schoolchildren to measure their heights in feet and inches, while using metres for physics lessons, would probably be a good idea but I've not seen any detail of what the government intends, if it intends anything at all: some policies are for announcing, not enacting.
All of my son's friends (12-14 years old) already use feet and inches for their heights. I don't think metric is widely used for that purpose, even among the young.
There is something about the landmark of 6 ft. To get to 2 m is not so desirable
Feet are just more human-sized. 5 ft is small, 6 ft is a tallish man, 7 ft is a basketball player. Whereas 1 m is a child, 2 m is very tall and 3 m is impossible.
Yes, though middle-aged-fogey though I am, feet is the metric unit I am least comfortable with. I can visualise a person being 4', 5', 6', 7' tall - but ask me to visualise a 30' building and I have to mentally translate it to metres. And I can't visualise distance (rather than height) in feet at all. Again, I have to translate into metres (or yards, which is almost the same thing, for mental-picture purposes). That's just me though - I'm not trying to say one is better than another.
I'm very similar - distance is meters and miles. People are feet. Small distances are centimeters.
Drinks are liters and milliliters. Temperature is Celsius when it's cold, and farenheit when it's warm.
I'm fully celsius now. (Or centigrade? What's the difference?)
In the pre-smartphone era when we had to make our own amusements, converting centigrade to fahrenheit took up a significant chunk of time on any given holiday.
Though celsius isn't really a properly metric measurement, and leads to people confidently declaring nonsense like 20 degrees is twice as hot as ten degrees.
But I would love pints of wine. Half bottles are too small, bottles too big.
Still wine can be served in 500ml bottles, but not sparkling wine. Conversely by the glass you could sell a pint of sparkling wine, but not a pint of still wine.
Yellow wine in a bottle has to be served in only 620 ml bottles.
When we converted from funny money to metric we converted old into new. We missed a trick with weights and measures. Just round a pint down to 500ml (instant bit of shrinkflation but no different to all the rest), an inch to 2.5cm, a yard to a metre, a mile to 2 kilometres etc etc
You can't say "but thats wrong" because the existing measures are made up anyway and non-standard to colony imperial.
I see we are at that point in the PB cycle where @HYUFD is adamant that Le Pen is about to be elected president of France.
C’est la vie
No. I said Macron would still be re elected against Le Pen this year but she would get a 9% swing to her since 2017 on the latest poll if she made the runoff from Macron.
If she got a 9% swing again in 2027 then Le Pen would be elected President of France
Hey, shocker. If she got more votes than Macron in the run-off she'd be elected. And if I had a billion dollars, I'd be rich.
True, though to be fair, the French political system is experimentally attempting to find the limit to VoteForAnyoneButTheFascistInTheLastRound.
One of these days they will find a candidate who actually breaks that. But not with Le Pen, probably.
The French problem looks like lepenisme has a fairly low celing of support- still comfortably below 50 %, so it never wins. But it also has a fairly high floor, enough to clog up the rest of the system. Goodness knows what happens when Macron gets bored of France, or France gets bored of Macron.
Only on PB. We have a header about the French elections, a thread about metric units, so I hesitate to introduce Ukraine.
But Mad Vlad has saved BoJo's bacon, and the dozen or so Labour MPs who wrote the barmy letter of support for Vlad have written the next Conservative PPB. Unless Keir disciplines them.
I think this is a crunch point, and this is the sort of thing that might sway the Red Wall.
This is your moment, Keir. Neil Kinnock faced something similar, and faced them down, but Militant weren't MPs.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I'm almost 2 decades older than you and at least from where maths started getting at all complicated, I was taught entirely in metric and in SI mks units to the degree that I was thrown when asked to calculate dynamics in imperial - being completely confused by the use of 'pound' as both a mass and a force unit.
Presuambly the difference is a factor of g (9.81)?
The one which I find particularly difficult to grasp mentally is hundredweight. Which in a gloriously British bit of awkwardness is 112lb. Though I think in America it is rather more prosaically 100lb. Still used on some road signs, I think (and also for church bells).
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
0.57 litres of your finest warm India Pale Ale barman please.
Just spent some of yesterday afternoon calculating areas in perches and square feet (an old English document) ... I did have to look up the conversion for perches to feet, though I'm fine with acres and yards ...
Edit: the 'English' is because I'm not sure if Scots used the same perches at the time in question.
I could never understand why an acre is 43,560 square feet until one day, bored, I factored 43,560 and realized that it was one chain by one furlong. So I guess an acre must go back to the days of feudal strip farming. *Edit. This also explains why there are 640 acres per square mile, or per section in US-speak.
Incidentally, being aware that an acre was a chain by a furlong enabled me for the first time to calculate roughly in my mind how many acres a property might be.
It does - furlong = furrow long. Ideal length I believe before a horse had to stop and change back direction. And acre = one day's work for an ox team. Or something of the sort.
BTW one chain = 1 cricket pitch between the wickets ...
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
Happy IVIVth birthday, Monkey
(What! The system has changed since I was young??)
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity. It’s just another plank in the culture war, another way to try to secure the votes of the reactionary elderly as they continue to refuse to admit what a fucking terrible impact Brexit is having.
The Boomers in my family are beginning to look haunted as they contemplate the rapidly increasing prices for everything, half-heartedly muttering that it’s all down to Covid. I don’t think they even persuade themselves anymore. They know it’s hugely exacerbated by leaving the single market, they know collectively we’ve dropped a massive bollock whose effects fate has decided to spice up with Covid and now the turmoil in the east, they just can’t bring themselves to say it out loud yet.
Prices are rising in the EU too, you know.
I was in a cafe the other day where I overheard some fella saying that gas prices were down to one thing and one thing only: Brexit.
Moral of the story: don't go to the same cafe as Scott_P....
Only on PB. We have a header about the French elections, a thread about metric units, so I hesitate to introduce Ukraine.
But Mad Vlad has saved BoJo's bacon, and the dozen or so Labour MPs who wrote the barmy letter of support for Vlad have written the next Conservative PPB. Unless Keir disciplines them.
I think this is a crunch point, and this is the sort of thing that might sway the Red Wall.
This is your moment, Keir. Neil Kinnock faced something similar, and faced them down, but Militant weren't MPs.
I suspect PM has cleverly manoeuvred so that Starmer wont be able to now:
Harry Cole @MrHarryCole · 1h PM calls on Starmer to remove the whip on this lot who have accused NATO of aggression...
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
This idea to reintroduce imperial measures is traffic cone hotlines levels of pathetic from the government.
Reintroduce imperial measures to what? Speed limit signs still show miles per hour, for instance, but champagne can no longer be bought in pints, as Churchill would have had.
And life has gone on nevertheless. What benefits will occur from this new old path?
No idea. The devil is in the detail. I suspect teaching schoolchildren to measure their heights in feet and inches, while using metres for physics lessons, would probably be a good idea but I've not seen any detail of what the government intends, if it intends anything at all: some policies are for announcing, not enacting.
All of my son's friends (12-14 years old) already use feet and inches for their heights. I don't think metric is widely used for that purpose, even among the young.
There is something about the landmark of 6 ft. To get to 2 m is not so desirable
Feet are just more human-sized. 5 ft is small, 6 ft is a tallish man, 7 ft is a basketball player. Whereas 1 m is a child, 2 m is very tall and 3 m is impossible.
Yes, though middle-aged-fogey though I am, feet is the metric unit I am least comfortable with. I can visualise a person being 4', 5', 6', 7' tall - but ask me to visualise a 30' building and I have to mentally translate it to metres. And I can't visualise distance (rather than height) in feet at all. Again, I have to translate into metres (or yards, which is almost the same thing, for mental-picture purposes). That's just me though - I'm not trying to say one is better than another.
I'm very similar - distance is meters and miles. People are feet. Small distances are centimeters.
Drinks are liters and milliliters. Temperature is Celsius when it's cold, and farenheit when it's warm.
I'm fully celsius now. (Or centigrade? What's the difference?)
In the pre-smartphone era when we had to make our own amusements, converting centigrade to fahrenheit took up a significant chunk of time on any given holiday.
Though celsius isn't really a properly metric measurement, and leads to people confidently declaring nonsense like 20 degrees is twice as hot as ten degrees.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
One of the things I love about the UK is that we (mostly) don't get religious about how things should be. We don't try and force people to use one system. People do what they like, and it's a wonderful hodge-podge, and that's ok.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
0.57 litres of your finest warm India Pale Ale barman please.
Just spent some of yesterday afternoon calculating areas in perches and square feet (an old English document) ... I did have to look up the conversion for perches to feet, though I'm fine with acres and yards ...
My favourite is the ton / tonne / tonne. What a bloody mess that all is.
A (ton / tonne / metric tonne) is something you can't lift and don't want landing on your head. It doesn't matter exactly what definition you use. Also, more than one ton has exactly the same effect on you as one ton.
If you want to actually measure something, use kg.
It is instructive to note that kg is the unit used on containers.
A container ship overloaded by 10% is not a good thing.
Could be worse. How's this for an example of a suboptimal muddle caused by metric and imperial?
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
0.57 litres of your finest warm India Pale Ale barman please.
Just spent some of yesterday afternoon calculating areas in perches and square feet (an old English document) ... I did have to look up the conversion for perches to feet, though I'm fine with acres and yards ...
My favourite is the ton / tonne / tonne. What a bloody mess that all is.
A (ton / tonne / metric tonne) is something you can't lift and don't want landing on your head. It doesn't matter exactly what definition you use. Also, more than one ton has exactly the same effect on you as one ton.
If you want to actually measure something, use kg.
It is instructive to note that kg is the unit used on containers.
A container ship overloaded by 10% is not a good thing.
Could be worse. How's this for an example of a suboptimal muddle caused by metric and imperial?
"The primary cause of this discrepancy [went far too deep too fast and either melted or bounced off the atmosphere] was that one piece of ground software supplied by Lockheed Martin produced results in a United States customary unit, contrary to its Software Interface Specification (SIS), while a second system, supplied by NASA, expected those results to be in SI units, in accordance with the SIS. Specifically, software that calculated the total impulse produced by thruster firings produced results in pound-force seconds. The trajectory calculation software then used these results – expected to be in newton-seconds (incorrect by a factor of 4.45)[15] – to update the predicted position of the spacecraft.[16] "
I'd just like to say the *worst* measurement is the fluid ounce.
Who the hell invented that?
Can I propose 'the cup'? How big a cup? A cup which is 8 American fluid ounces, it would appear. Which is different from our fluid ounce. Surely we shouldn't differ in how big a fluid ounce is? Surely it's how much water you get in an ounce? Or maybe one of us uses a fluid which isn't water, which strikes me as particularly awkward.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
0.57 litres of your finest warm India Pale Ale barman please.
Just spent some of yesterday afternoon calculating areas in perches and square feet (an old English document) ... I did have to look up the conversion for perches to feet, though I'm fine with acres and yards ...
Edit: the 'English' is because I'm not sure if Scots used the same perches at the time in question.
I could never understand why an acre is 43,560 square feet until one day, bored, I factored 43,560 and realized that it was one chain by one furlong. So I guess an acre must go back to the days of feudal strip farming. *Edit. This also explains why there are 640 acres per square mile, or per section in US-speak.
Incidentally, being aware that an acre was a chain by a furlong enabled me for the first time to calculate roughly in my mind how many acres a property might be.
OED says roots of the word are "Old English æcer (denoting the amount of land a yoke of oxen could plough in a day"
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
Only on PB. We have a header about the French elections, a thread about metric units, so I hesitate to introduce Ukraine.
But Mad Vlad has saved BoJo's bacon, and the dozen or so Labour MPs who wrote the barmy letter of support for Vlad have written the next Conservative PPB. Unless Keir disciplines them.
I think this is a crunch point, and this is the sort of thing that might sway the Red Wall.
This is your moment, Keir. Neil Kinnock faced something similar, and faced them down, but Militant weren't MPs.
I suspect PM has cleverly manoeuvred so that Starmer wont be able to now:
Harry Cole @MrHarryCole · 1h PM calls on Starmer to remove the whip on this lot who have accused NATO of aggression...
While we're on about this sort of thing, there was a point in time somewhere about a generation ago, when the word 'billion' shifted from meaning 1,000,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,000. I would have thought this would be far more controversial, confusing and problematic than actually seems to have been the case.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
0.57 litres of your finest warm India Pale Ale barman please.
Just spent some of yesterday afternoon calculating areas in perches and square feet (an old English document) ... I did have to look up the conversion for perches to feet, though I'm fine with acres and yards ...
My favourite is the ton / tonne / tonne. What a bloody mess that all is.
A (ton / tonne / metric tonne) is something you can't lift and don't want landing on your head. It doesn't matter exactly what definition you use. Also, more than one ton has exactly the same effect on you as one ton.
If you want to actually measure something, use kg.
It is instructive to note that kg is the unit used on containers.
A container ship overloaded by 10% is not a good thing.
Could be worse. How's this for an example of a suboptimal muddle caused by metric and imperial?
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I'm almost 2 decades older than you and at least from where maths started getting at all complicated, I was taught entirely in metric and in SI mks units to the degree that I was thrown when asked to calculate dynamics in imperial - being completely confused by the use of 'pound' as both a mass and a force unit.
Presuambly the difference is a factor of g (9.81)?
I woudl have to think. But in any case g would be different as it's not a nondimensional constant and the other units also differ - it's 32 lb something something in imperial.
I'd just like to say the *worst* measurement is the fluid ounce.
Who the hell invented that?
A twentieth (or sixteenth) of a pint. An eighth of a cup. A fifth (or quarter) of a gill. What's wrong with that, per se?
It actually makes more sense for American pint/quart/gallon measurements than British ones (i.e. quarter, eighth, sixteenth). A computer geek like you should love it.
This idea to reintroduce imperial measures is traffic cone hotlines levels of pathetic from the government.
Reintroduce imperial measures to what? Speed limit signs still show miles per hour, for instance, but champagne can no longer be bought in pints, as Churchill would have had.
And life has gone on nevertheless. What benefits will occur from this new old path?
No idea. The devil is in the detail. I suspect teaching schoolchildren to measure their heights in feet and inches, while using metres for physics lessons, would probably be a good idea but I've not seen any detail of what the government intends, if it intends anything at all: some policies are for announcing, not enacting.
All of my son's friends (12-14 years old) already use feet and inches for their heights. I don't think metric is widely used for that purpose, even among the young.
There is something about the landmark of 6 ft. To get to 2 m is not so desirable
Feet are just more human-sized. 5 ft is small, 6 ft is a tallish man, 7 ft is a basketball player. Whereas 1 m is a child, 2 m is very tall and 3 m is impossible.
Yes, though middle-aged-fogey though I am, feet is the metric unit I am least comfortable with. I can visualise a person being 4', 5', 6', 7' tall - but ask me to visualise a 30' building and I have to mentally translate it to metres. And I can't visualise distance (rather than height) in feet at all. Again, I have to translate into metres (or yards, which is almost the same thing, for mental-picture purposes). That's just me though - I'm not trying to say one is better than another.
I'm very similar - distance is meters and miles. People are feet. Small distances are centimeters.
Drinks are liters and milliliters. Temperature is Celsius when it's cold, and farenheit when it's warm.
I'm fully celsius now. (Or centigrade? What's the difference?)
In the pre-smartphone era when we had to make our own amusements, converting centigrade to fahrenheit took up a significant chunk of time on any given holiday.
Though celsius isn't really a properly metric measurement, and leads to people confidently declaring nonsense like 20 degrees is twice as hot as ten degrees.
For reasons discussed on the previous thread, I think OGH is in error on a couple of specifics. Le Pen will get to the first round with the support of Macron's party because he very much wants her in the race. Last time she passed 500 signstures with just 8 days to go. As for Pécresse I don't know the odds he got, but her problems are (a) she is too economic liberal to win any votes left of Macron, and indeed will rally the left to Macron more effectively than Le Pen; (b) Macron himself occupies her natural territory among educated professionals. Actually her best hope to win is to beat Macron into third place or less and steal his base.
I'd just like to say the *worst* measurement is the fluid ounce.
Who the hell invented that?
Can I propose 'the cup'? How big a cup? A cup which is 8 American fluid ounces, it would appear. Which is different from our fluid ounce. Surely we shouldn't differ in how big a fluid ounce is? Surely it's how much water you get in an ounce? Or maybe one of us uses a fluid which isn't water, which strikes me as particularly awkward.
I don't think it is - but a US pint is 16 fl oz and a UK pint is 20 fl oz.
I see we are at that point in the PB cycle where @HYUFD is adamant that Le Pen is about to be elected president of France.
C’est la vie
No. I said Macron would still be re elected against Le Pen this year but she would get a 9% swing to her since 2017 on the latest poll if she made the runoff from Macron.
If she got a 9% swing again in 2027 then Le Pen would be elected President of France
Hey, shocker. If she got more votes than Macron in the run-off she'd be elected. And if I had a billion dollars, I'd be rich.
True, though to be fair, the French political system is experimentally attempting to find the limit to VoteForAnyoneButTheFascistInTheLastRound.
One of these days they will find a candidate who actually breaks that. But not with Le Pen, probably.
The French problem looks like lepenisme has a fairly low celing of support- still comfortably below 50 %, so it never wins. But it also has a fairly high floor, enough to clog up the rest of the system. Goodness knows what happens when Macron gets bored of France, or France gets bored of Macron.
The problem will come when they get someone normal but really, really shit in the last round vs a fascist who has managed to pretend to be human.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
Yes, and most of the imperial measurements one uses are single syllables. 'Yards' is simply quicker than 'Metres'. Hence it persists in football commentary. (Rugby, interestingly, enthusiastically embraced metric: the 25 yard line becoming the 22m line, and whatever the 5m line used to be becoming the 5m line).
While we're on about this sort of thing, there was a point in time somewhere about a generation ago, when the word 'billion' shifted from meaning 1,000,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,000. I would have thought this would be far more controversial, confusing and problematic than actually seems to have been the case.
UK versus UK definitions, was it? I remember being taught something like that at school. I guess we bowed to the inevitable and embraced the US version. Should have gone for SI prefixes LFTs consting 100 Megapounds per month while T&T was 20 Gigapounds in total (or whatever)...
Edit: And UK National Debt in Terapounds, which sounds appropriately scary.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity. It’s just another plank in the culture war, another way to try to secure the votes of the reactionary elderly as they continue to refuse to admit what a fucking terrible impact Brexit is having.
The Boomers in my family are beginning to look haunted as they contemplate the rapidly increasing prices for everything, half-heartedly muttering that it’s all down to Covid. I don’t think they even persuade themselves anymore. They know it’s hugely exacerbated by leaving the single market, they know collectively we’ve dropped a massive bollock whose effects fate has decided to spice up with Covid and now the turmoil in the east, they just can’t bring themselves to say it out loud yet.
Prices are rising in the EU too, you know.
I was in a cafe the other day where I overheard some fella saying that gas prices were down to one thing and one thing only: Brexit.
Moral of the story: don't go to the same cafe as Scott_P....
If that really was Scott P, he's a lot fatter and hairier than I imagined him.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
0.57 litres of your finest warm India Pale Ale barman please.
Well quite. There's lots of imperial measures that remain the standard:
Miles for distances Ft and inches for height St and lbs for weight (although kg used more frequently than it was) Pints in pubs MPG Feet for elevation in aviation –– weirdly this is the global standard, presumably because it's more granular than metres and two feet can make a – erm – big difference...
While we're on about this sort of thing, there was a point in time somewhere about a generation ago, when the word 'billion' shifted from meaning 1,000,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,000. I would have thought this would be far more controversial, confusing and problematic than actually seems to have been the case.
American billion = 10e9. UK billion = 10e12.
Just the Americanization of UK language. I never use the word myself cos of the risk of confusion particularly with the older generation.
While we're on about this sort of thing, there was a point in time somewhere about a generation ago, when the word 'billion' shifted from meaning 1,000,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,000. I would have thought this would be far more controversial, confusing and problematic than actually seems to have been the case.
I struggle with the Indian lakh (100,000) and crore (10 million) despite them being decimal. A lot is down to familiarity/unfamiliarity as much as intrinsic logic.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
I see we are at that point in the PB cycle where @HYUFD is adamant that Le Pen is about to be elected president of France.
C’est la vie
No. I said Macron would still be re elected against Le Pen this year but she would get a 9% swing to her since 2017 on the latest poll if she made the runoff from Macron.
If she got a 9% swing again in 2027 then Le Pen would be elected President of France
Hey, shocker. If she got more votes than Macron in the run-off she'd be elected. And if I had a billion dollars, I'd be rich.
True, though to be fair, the French political system is experimentally attempting to find the limit to VoteForAnyoneButTheFascistInTheLastRound.
One of these days they will find a candidate who actually breaks that. But not with Le Pen, probably.
The French problem looks like lepenisme has a fairly low celing of support- still comfortably below 50 %, so it never wins. But it also has a fairly high floor, enough to clog up the rest of the system. Goodness knows what happens when Macron gets bored of France, or France gets bored of Macron.
The problem will come when they get someone normal but really, really shit in the last round vs a fascist who has managed to pretend to be human.
Le Pen nearly got there.
Hasn't anyone ever asked her if she should change her name to Le Stylo ? Le Pen sounds a little Angophone
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
Strangely, for money, it was the other way around - 10 and sixpence would be 10 shilling and 6 pence (52.5p)
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
0.57 litres of your finest warm India Pale Ale barman please.
Well quite. There's lots of imperial measures that remain the standard:
Miles for distances Ft and inches for height St and lbs for weight (although kg used more frequently than it was) Pints in pubs MPG Feet for elevation in aviation –– weirdly this is the global standard, presumably because it's more granular than metres and two feet can make a – erm – big difference...
Maybe Mogg is thinking of bringing back Rods, Poles and Perches. I suppose we still have furlongs. But is anybody seriously suggesting we bring back £.s.d.?
This idea to reintroduce imperial measures is traffic cone hotlines levels of pathetic from the government.
Reintroduce imperial measures to what? Speed limit signs still show miles per hour, for instance, but champagne can no longer be bought in pints, as Churchill would have had.
And life has gone on nevertheless. What benefits will occur from this new old path?
No idea. The devil is in the detail. I suspect teaching schoolchildren to measure their heights in feet and inches, while using metres for physics lessons, would probably be a good idea but I've not seen any detail of what the government intends, if it intends anything at all: some policies are for announcing, not enacting.
All of my son's friends (12-14 years old) already use feet and inches for their heights. I don't think metric is widely used for that purpose, even among the young.
You can round up easier in feet and inches.
Someone 5'11 and a bit can claim to be 6ft whereas someone 181cm isnt 183cm.
Aren't most clothes measured in inches? Or is it just I've never bothered looking for the metric label?
Yes, men's British clothing sizes are all imperial. I don't understand ladies sizes at all – 8, 10, 12 etc – or from where they are derived. And the fact that they only have even numbers is numerically annoying.
As an aside, Mrs Anabob reckons there is dress size inflation going on, that what was once a 12 is now marketed in stores like M&S as a 10, to flatter their customers and – presumably – boosts sales.
While we're on about this sort of thing, there was a point in time somewhere about a generation ago, when the word 'billion' shifted from meaning 1,000,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,000. I would have thought this would be far more controversial, confusing and problematic than actually seems to have been the case.
Mostly down to politicians thinking it sounded better that they were spending "a billion pounds", I think...
I see we are at that point in the PB cycle where @HYUFD is adamant that Le Pen is about to be elected president of France.
C’est la vie
No. I said Macron would still be re elected against Le Pen this year but she would get a 9% swing to her since 2017 on the latest poll if she made the runoff from Macron.
If she got a 9% swing again in 2027 then Le Pen would be elected President of France
Hey, shocker. If she got more votes than Macron in the run-off she'd be elected. And if I had a billion dollars, I'd be rich.
True, though to be fair, the French political system is experimentally attempting to find the limit to VoteForAnyoneButTheFascistInTheLastRound.
One of these days they will find a candidate who actually breaks that. But not with Le Pen, probably.
The French problem looks like lepenisme has a fairly low celing of support- still comfortably below 50 %, so it never wins. But it also has a fairly high floor, enough to clog up the rest of the system. Goodness knows what happens when Macron gets bored of France, or France gets bored of Macron.
This is still true. But the ceiling of the extreme right has been growing over time. And the candidates to the right of Pécresse are firmly more supported than the old left and centre-left. When Macron goes away, I imagine the most likely outcome all else equal is the Republicans versus the extreme right with persistent confusion of the left. Basically France has been riven by slow growth and terrorism for the last decade and the left have had zero to say about those.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
0.57 litres of your finest warm India Pale Ale barman please.
Well quite. There's lots of imperial measures that remain the standard:
Miles for distances Ft and inches for height St and lbs for weight (although kg used more frequently than it was) Pints in pubs MPG Feet for elevation in aviation –– weirdly this is the global standard, presumably because it's more granular than metres and two feet can make a – erm – big difference...
I hired a BMW X1 in Belfast Airport that had previously been registered by Budget in the South. It was a beggar to keep to the speed limit in the North as the speedo was in KM with no conversion on the gauge as on a UK car.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
0.57 litres of your finest warm India Pale Ale barman please.
Well quite. There's lots of imperial measures that remain the standard:
Miles for distances Ft and inches for height St and lbs for weight (although kg used more frequently than it was) Pints in pubs MPG Feet for elevation in aviation –– weirdly this is the global standard, presumably because it's more granular than metres and two feet can make a – erm – big difference...
Maybe Mogg is thinking of bringing back Rods, Poles and Perches. I suppose we still have furlongs. But is anybody seriously suggesting we bring back £.s.d.?
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
Yes, and most of the imperial measurements one uses are single syllables. 'Yards' is simply quicker than 'Metres'. Hence it persists in football commentary. (Rugby, interestingly, enthusiastically embraced metric: the 25 yard line becoming the 22m line, and whatever the 5m line used to be becoming the 5m line).
What do French/Italian commentators call the 6 and 18 yard boxes? As they are still 6 and 18 yards in France and Italy. I presume they don't call them the 5.4864 and 16.4592 metre boxes?
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
Only on PB. We have a header about the French elections, a thread about metric units, so I hesitate to introduce Ukraine.
But Mad Vlad has saved BoJo's bacon, and the dozen or so Labour MPs who wrote the barmy letter of support for Vlad have written the next Conservative PPB. Unless Keir disciplines them.
I think this is a crunch point, and this is the sort of thing that might sway the Red Wall.
This is your moment, Keir. Neil Kinnock faced something similar, and faced them down, but Militant weren't MPs.
I suspect PM has cleverly manoeuvred so that Starmer wont be able to now:
Harry Cole @MrHarryCole · 1h PM calls on Starmer to remove the whip on this lot who have accused NATO of aggression...
Yet again another false step by Boris 😦 two very bad ones in a day.
First he was stupid to raise a Labour MP accepted £100’sK from a Chinese Spy at PMQs, it acted like a dog whistle: the heckling of Starmer began.
And here Boris is trying to make political capital from the Ukraine crisis. It beggars believe he could be so stupid. Tuesday didn’t go at all well for Boris, and These are the sort of mistakes you make trying to force a catch-up.
One thing that has not been commented on, I don't think, is that Tory tax cuts for next GE are completely out of the question now. We are going to have to spend a hell of a lot more on defence as a country in next five to ten years.
Doesn't seem very likely to me. Despite not going for austerity the armed forces were being cut back and presumably still will. No doubt some white elephants can be found to spaff money against but the general trend will probably be unchanged.
And they'll find something to cut - going in after 14 years in power theyll need it.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
0.57 litres of your finest warm India Pale Ale barman please.
Well quite. There's lots of imperial measures that remain the standard:
Miles for distances Ft and inches for height St and lbs for weight (although kg used more frequently than it was) Pints in pubs MPG Feet for elevation in aviation –– weirdly this is the global standard, presumably because it's more granular than metres and two feet can make a – erm – big difference...
I hired a BMW X1 in Belfast Airport that had previously been registered by Budget in the South. It was a beggar to keep to the speed limit in the North as the speedo was in KM with no conversion on the gauge as on a UK car.
Crikey. I can see that being a right pain. Newer cars have digital displays which will toggle natively. I'm looking forward to switching mine on my French holiday this year (haven't been away since I bought the new motor). There won't be many needle dials except as trim options soon because the digital ones are cheaper to manufacture these days.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
0.57 litres of your finest warm India Pale Ale barman please.
Well quite. There's lots of imperial measures that remain the standard:
Miles for distances Ft and inches for height St and lbs for weight (although kg used more frequently than it was) Pints in pubs MPG Feet for elevation in aviation –– weirdly this is the global standard, presumably because it's more granular than metres and two feet can make a – erm – big difference...
I hired a BMW X1 in Belfast Airport that had previously been registered by Budget in the South. It was a beggar to keep to the speed limit in the North as the speedo was in KM with no conversion on the gauge as on a UK car.
Crikey. I can see that being a right pain. Newer cars have digital displays which will toggle natively. I'm looking forward to switching mine on my French holiday this year (haven't been away since I bought the new motor). There won't be many needle dials except as trim options soon because the digital ones are cheaper to manufacture these days.
This was only last year and presumably the car would fail its first MOT.
I am not a big fan of either Sturgeon or Salmond but I don't think Sturgeon could actually distance herself any further away from Salmond without moving to Tahiti. Their mutual loathing is well known by all and I would suggest she has nothing to prove or feel embarrassed about on this particular score.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
Yes, and most of the imperial measurements one uses are single syllables. 'Yards' is simply quicker than 'Metres'. Hence it persists in football commentary. (Rugby, interestingly, enthusiastically embraced metric: the 25 yard line becoming the 22m line, and whatever the 5m line used to be becoming the 5m line).
What do French/Italian commentators call the 6 and 18 yard boxes? As they are still 6 and 18 yards in France and Italy. I presume they don't call them the 5.4864 and 16.4592 metre boxes?
I believe the official terms across the world is penalty area and the goal area.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
0.57 litres of your finest warm India Pale Ale barman please.
Well quite. There's lots of imperial measures that remain the standard:
Miles for distances Ft and inches for height St and lbs for weight (although kg used more frequently than it was) Pints in pubs MPG Feet for elevation in aviation –– weirdly this is the global standard, presumably because it's more granular than metres and two feet can make a – erm – big difference...
Imperial measurements (or at least the US versions of them) are still the international standard in the Oil and Gas industry as well. This was a basic necessity given that all the infrastructure worldwide including the oil wells themselves are drilled using the Imperial (API) standards and we all know how things start to go wrong when you start translating things wholescale.
Hats off to Johnson that he has no Russian skeletons in his or the Conservatives' closets.
As you know I am no fan of Johnson, but any Western politician appearing on RT at the moment is the latest incarnation of Lord Haw Haw
I agree entirely about Eck. I also agree with sanctions being placed by Labour on their 10 Soviet halfwits. I am disappointed in the MP for Batley and Spen. Most of the others are only to be expected.
Nonetheless I am more than alarmed by Johnson's hopeless sanctions. Still if he can get Starmer harassed over the Barry Gardiner business, he will probably view today's PMQs as a significant victory.
Only on PB. We have a header about the French elections, a thread about metric units, so I hesitate to introduce Ukraine.
But Mad Vlad has saved BoJo's bacon, and the dozen or so Labour MPs who wrote the barmy letter of support for Vlad have written the next Conservative PPB. Unless Keir disciplines them.
I think this is a crunch point, and this is the sort of thing that might sway the Red Wall.
This is your moment, Keir. Neil Kinnock faced something similar, and faced them down, but Militant weren't MPs.
I suspect PM has cleverly manoeuvred so that Starmer wont be able to now:
Harry Cole @MrHarryCole · 1h PM calls on Starmer to remove the whip on this lot who have accused NATO of aggression...
Yet again another false step by Boris 😦 two very bad ones in a day.
First he was stupid to raise a Labour MP accepted £100’sK from a Chinese Spy at PMQs, it acted like a dog whistle: the heckling of Starmer began.
And here Boris is trying to make political capital from the Ukraine crisis. It beggars believe he could be so stupid. Tuesday didn’t go at all well for Boris, and These are the sort of mistakes you make trying to force a catch-up.
I would suggest that highlighting labour mps signing Stop the War pro Russia propaganda is fair and is a problem for Starmer
I am not a big fan of either Sturgeon or Salmond but I don't think Sturgeon could actually distance herself any further away from Salmond without moving to Tahiti. Their mutual loathing is well known by all and I would suggest she has nothing to prove or feel embarrassed about on this particular score.
Well, except that he is the embodiment of the nationalist movement, he was her mentor, and she has subsequently described him as a sex pest (also stated by his own QC), which begs the question, what did she know and when?
For her to genuinely distance herself from Salmond is about as incredible IMO as John Major being able to truly distance himself from Mrs T.
Only on PB. We have a header about the French elections, a thread about metric units, so I hesitate to introduce Ukraine.
But Mad Vlad has saved BoJo's bacon, and the dozen or so Labour MPs who wrote the barmy letter of support for Vlad have written the next Conservative PPB. Unless Keir disciplines them.
I think this is a crunch point, and this is the sort of thing that might sway the Red Wall.
This is your moment, Keir. Neil Kinnock faced something similar, and faced them down, but Militant weren't MPs.
I suspect PM has cleverly manoeuvred so that Starmer wont be able to now:
Harry Cole @MrHarryCole · 1h PM calls on Starmer to remove the whip on this lot who have accused NATO of aggression...
Yet again another false step by Boris 😦 two very bad ones in a day.
First he was stupid to raise a Labour MP accepted £100’sK from a Chinese Spy at PMQs, it acted like a dog whistle: the heckling of Starmer began.
And here Boris is trying to make political capital from the Ukraine crisis. It beggars believe he could be so stupid. Tuesday didn’t go at all well for Boris, and These are the sort of mistakes you make trying to force a catch-up.
I would suggest that highlighting labour mps signing Stop the War pro Russia propaganda is fair and is a problem for Starmer
True, but Johnson not returning Putin backed donations I would have thought is a bigger headache.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
I am not a big fan of either Sturgeon or Salmond but I don't think Sturgeon could actually distance herself any further away from Salmond without moving to Tahiti. Their mutual loathing is well known by all and I would suggest she has nothing to prove or feel embarrassed about on this particular score.
Well, except that he is the embodiment of the nationalist movement, he was her mentor, and she has subsequently described him as a sex pest (also stated by his own QC), which begs the question, what did she know and when?
For her to genuinely distance herself from Salmond is about as incredible IMO as John Major being able to truly distance himself from Mrs T.
Well she allegedly connived to have him prosecuted which I don't remember Major doing to his predecessor though he might have felt tempted with some of her more strident acolytes.
Paul Mainwood @PaulMainwood · 35m Also, ZOE should rush out a press release to point out that their level is bang on ONS's and so everyone else should be defunded.
Only on PB. We have a header about the French elections, a thread about metric units, so I hesitate to introduce Ukraine.
But Mad Vlad has saved BoJo's bacon, and the dozen or so Labour MPs who wrote the barmy letter of support for Vlad have written the next Conservative PPB. Unless Keir disciplines them.
I think this is a crunch point, and this is the sort of thing that might sway the Red Wall.
This is your moment, Keir. Neil Kinnock faced something similar, and faced them down, but Militant weren't MPs.
I suspect PM has cleverly manoeuvred so that Starmer wont be able to now:
Harry Cole @MrHarryCole · 1h PM calls on Starmer to remove the whip on this lot who have accused NATO of aggression...
Yet again another false step by Boris 😦 two very bad ones in a day.
First he was stupid to raise a Labour MP accepted £100’sK from a Chinese Spy at PMQs, it acted like a dog whistle: the heckling of Starmer began.
And here Boris is trying to make political capital from the Ukraine crisis. It beggars believe he could be so stupid. Tuesday didn’t go at all well for Boris, and These are the sort of mistakes you make trying to force a catch-up.
I would suggest that highlighting labour mps signing Stop the War pro Russia propaganda is fair and is a problem for Starmer
I agree. It will be interesting to see whether Starmer and his whips have the guts to do something about it
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
Hats off to Johnson that he has no Russian skeletons in his or the Conservatives' closets.
They all have do they not
yes but some more than others. I am a massive critic of the current Tory Party and think their acceptance of dodgy money was extremely unwise. The true acid test now though is who would carry on taking Putin's money and giving him succour. Appearing on RT is pretty much as bad as it gets.
This idea to reintroduce imperial measures is traffic cone hotlines levels of pathetic from the government.
Reintroduce imperial measures to what? Speed limit signs still show miles per hour, for instance, but champagne can no longer be bought in pints, as Churchill would have had.
And life has gone on nevertheless. What benefits will occur from this new old path?
Let consumers choose.
I couldn't care less about imperial, I don't like imperial, but if others do then have free choice.
If there's no consumer demand for imperial, then there'll be no production of it. But if there is, then so be it, let consumers choose.
François Bayrou claims to have up to 200 signatures available to candidates in need. If he is right then he can deliver nominations to Le Pen and probably Zemmour also - given that his interest in doing this will surely be to support Macron by splitting the right.
I am not a big fan of either Sturgeon or Salmond but I don't think Sturgeon could actually distance herself any further away from Salmond without moving to Tahiti. Their mutual loathing is well known by all and I would suggest she has nothing to prove or feel embarrassed about on this particular score.
Well, except that he is the embodiment of the nationalist movement, he was her mentor, and she has subsequently described him as a sex pest (also stated by his own QC), which begs the question, what did she know and when?
For her to genuinely distance herself from Salmond is about as incredible IMO as John Major being able to truly distance himself from Mrs T.
Well she allegedly connived to have him prosecuted which I don't remember Major doing to his predecessor though he might have felt tempted with some of her more strident acolytes.
There is the inelegance of historical comparators!
Bad move by Wallace, and not only diplomatically. The Mail is going hard against it, and even using it to reframe its government incompetence narrative. Up to now all its coverage of "war Boris" had been all positive.
"Ben Wallace cited a 170-year-old conflict notorious for one of the worst military disasters in history today as he claimed the UK had 'kicked the backside' of former Russian leaders and 'can always do it again'."
Only on PB. We have a header about the French elections, a thread about metric units, so I hesitate to introduce Ukraine.
But Mad Vlad has saved BoJo's bacon, and the dozen or so Labour MPs who wrote the barmy letter of support for Vlad have written the next Conservative PPB. Unless Keir disciplines them.
I think this is a crunch point, and this is the sort of thing that might sway the Red Wall.
This is your moment, Keir. Neil Kinnock faced something similar, and faced them down, but Militant weren't MPs.
I suspect PM has cleverly manoeuvred so that Starmer wont be able to now:
Harry Cole @MrHarryCole · 1h PM calls on Starmer to remove the whip on this lot who have accused NATO of aggression...
Yet again another false step by Boris 😦 two very bad ones in a day.
First he was stupid to raise a Labour MP accepted £100’sK from a Chinese Spy at PMQs, it acted like a dog whistle: the heckling of Starmer began.
And here Boris is trying to make political capital from the Ukraine crisis. It beggars believe he could be so stupid. Tuesday didn’t go at all well for Boris, and These are the sort of mistakes you make trying to force a catch-up.
I would suggest that highlighting labour mps signing Stop the War pro Russia propaganda is fair and is a problem for Starmer
I agree. It will be interesting to see whether Starmer and his whips have the guts to do something about it
I totally disagree with you guys. Fact is Boris was getting irked by Starmer getting plaudits over Labours Ukraine position, and government blame for the slowest weakest response in the Western world - PMs need to be smarter than red mist and dog whistles, it’s a National Crisis situation here, not least how energy prices hitting businesses and households, hence a different tone is needed today - you have to know when you can and can’t demand your opponent remove whip from his own MPs, and when it looks too opportunist to insist it. Just like you don’t wear a baseball cap when formal attire suits the occasion. Boris could so easily have remarked on it in a way that flagged it up so helping him in just the way he has sought to do - but instead a lazy person and a slow witted politician has done it all wrong all day, he is the one changing the tone, breaking the consensus between the front benches, Boris the one putting clear water between the front benches. 😕
Of course Boris should never have mentioned the Barry Gardner money, having been so sensible not to till now, that one line effectively opened a box, let something out he can’t put back in because his own Party has been even more exposed to the Chinese spy and Chinese lobbying.
Personally I am pleased Russian and Chinese money and influence front and centre of the political narrative now. For too long our parties have been “can’t throw stones we alltogether in glass houses on this issue” now they have started throwing these stones at each other I think it can only be good news for us everyday people, and our hard pressed security services trying to keep us free fair democratic despite idiot and greedy money mad MPs. But definitely dumb of Boris to have brought a rock to the snowball fight, and helped make this issue front and centre considering how much exposed skin the Tories have in this game.
Hats off to Johnson that he has no Russian skeletons in his or the Conservatives' closets.
They all have do they not
yes but some more than others. I am a massive critic of the current Tory Party and think their acceptance of dodgy money was extremely unwise. The true acid test now though is who would carry on taking Putin's money and giving him succour. Appearing on RT is pretty much as bad as it gets.
Eck is no longer affiliated to the SNP. One could say by starting Alba he is an opponent.
A national disgrace nonetheless, whoever he is representing.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
But any with 28.3495g of common sense will stick to metric
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
One - or both - of us is either not listening hard enough or is a little hard of hearing
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Any good engineer or scientist can work in both metric and imperial as a matter of necessity.
I think it is a bit like being able to speak different languages. The more you are fluent in, the better, overall.
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I'm almost 2 decades older than you and at least from where maths started getting at all complicated, I was taught entirely in metric and in SI mks units to the degree that I was thrown when asked to calculate dynamics in imperial - being completely confused by the use of 'pound' as both a mass and a force unit.
Presuambly the difference is a factor of g (9.81)?
Otto English is a pseudonymous political EU enthusiast, so hardly given to precision
This is useful but it needs setting in context of what's going on with healthcare. First day in a long time fewer than a 1000 people nationally admitted to hopsital testing positive with covid.*
Just heard about the study at bringing back Imperial measurements, went to Twitter to see what the hive mind thinks. This made me chuckle:
They won’t bring them back. It’s insanity.
Am I the only person wondering what the hell all the fuss is about?
Particularly since imperial measures have never actually gone away.
You’re right, it’s never gone away in the kind of convenient measurements we use every day, saying an inch rather than 2.5cm, for example. So why the need to have a study to reintroduce them? It’s just a performance to tickle the Boomers’ nostalgia. A Brexiter dog whistle.
In what industries could they meaningfully bring them back without incurring huge costs and making us a global laughing stock?
Does anyone under 50 know understand fractions of an inch? I sometimes watch this Canadian luthier on YouTube who expresses tiny measurements in both systems and it’s like ‘That’s 3mil, or 1000/264ths of an inch,’ or whatever bonkers fraction it is. Have you tried using imperial spanners?
It’s fantasy to think bringing them back in any serious way is going to work.
But they know that. It’s just about the headlines.
Yes, I do, and yes, I have.
Unless that second one is a slang phrase for the Moggster. In which case the answer's no, because he's useless as a spanner, although he does a lot of screwing.
Second point - do I care much? Not really.
Good, glad you do. Excellent. You’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Like I said, it’s performance. Like having crowns back on pint glasses. It’s pathetic.
I don't know how small a minority I'm in. Possibly rather larger than you realise.
But then, because it doesn't interest me, I've never actually asked anyone.
You may well be right, it probably is bigger than I imagine. But shrinking rapidly.
It’s my 44th birthday today. I was never taught imperial measurements. Decimalisation obviously happened a few years before I was born. The people who were taught it, who grew up surrounded by the Imperial measurements and florins, ha’pennies, tanners, they get smaller every day.
It’s not a serious proposal, it’s nostalgia. From the same tired old playbook as the Blitz spirit, Spitfires, all that shite.
I'm five years younger than you, and I was taught in imperial measurements. Sure, there was a very half-hearted effort to teach us metric in primary school but the teachers had to admit they didn't understand it and they gave up. At secondary school, it was imperial all the way.
As it happens, I can use either with equal facility and I can convert in my head (except apparently when measuring flour for bread) when I feel the need to, which happens only when I'm filling up the car and estimating the range I've got.
And everyone around me, insofar as they ever use anything, still seem to use imperial.
Edit - by the way, Happy Birthday. Hope you have a good one.
I'm two years older than Monkey - 7 years older than ydoethur - and I was taught entirely in metric. But, because I'm a human rather than a robot, and I have parents, and grandparents, and exist alongside other people who grew up pre-metric, and have read the odd book from before 1974, I know how long a yard or an inch is; how heavy a pound is, how much a gallon is. This feels a bit like the trope on Pointless of 'before my time'* - surely one picks these things up? There wasn't a year zero of metrification after which we started again and never mentioned the old units or things of old.
Metric is a system for calculations, and is wonderful for the purpose. But its words aren't much fun to say, and so the old measures persist in our speech and our habits. For anyone who enjoys ease of calculation and relishes language, this seems a perfectly acceptable circumstance.
I think it's just convenience of language, as much as anything. To take height, it's a lot quicker and therefore more natural for me to say I'm "6 foot" than "one-hundred-and-eighty-four-centimetres" or "one-point-eight-four-metres". So I do. Decimetres could work, if they were popular and we used 'dm' (I'm "eighteen-dee-em") but that lacks precision - rounding up and down 5cm/2 inches rather than half an inch either way or approx 1.25cm. "eighteen-point-four-dee-em" starts to get long, again.
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
You wouldn't say the smaller unit, though. "5 foot 11", "12 stone 4".
Works for feet and inches. I'll take your word for it on weight, as I don't have the experience. I've not heard anyone younger than my parents' generation (i.e. retired+) at least mention stones, pounds or ounces for as long as I can remember. At least, outside of birth weights.
What?! I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
I'm in my 40s and would say it's 50:50, often both used interchangeably by the same person. The rise of kg I would attribute to people who go to gyms and monitor their weight carefully. Whereas those people who rarely if ever weigh themselves and don't worry unduly about being overweight are still using the units their parents taught them about when they were children.
Comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
In the pre-smartphone era when we had to make our own amusements, converting centigrade to fahrenheit took up a significant chunk of time on any given holiday.
Though celsius isn't really a properly metric measurement, and leads to people confidently declaring nonsense like 20 degrees is twice as hot as ten degrees.
Yellow wine in a bottle has to be served in only 620 ml bottles.
All a bit bonkers.
But Mad Vlad has saved BoJo's bacon, and the dozen or so Labour MPs who wrote the barmy letter of support for Vlad have written the next Conservative PPB. Unless Keir disciplines them.
I think this is a crunch point, and this is the sort of thing that might sway the Red Wall.
This is your moment, Keir. Neil Kinnock faced something similar, and faced them down, but Militant weren't MPs.
Putin’s denial of Ukrainian statehood carries dark historical echoes
https://www.ft.com/content/1df8a99b-804c-467b-98e1-ce8b47b5b513
Who the hell invented that?
BTW one chain = 1 cricket pitch between the wickets ...
(What! The system has changed since I was young??)
I suspect PM has cleverly manoeuvred so that Starmer wont be able to now:
Harry Cole
@MrHarryCole
·
1h
PM calls on Starmer to remove the whip on this lot who have accused NATO of aggression...
https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1496491491300159491
Thou' are the work of Satan, mms every time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimbo_and_the_Jet-Set
"The primary cause of this discrepancy [went far too deep too fast and either melted or bounced off the atmosphere] was that one piece of ground software supplied by Lockheed Martin produced results in a United States customary unit, contrary to its Software Interface Specification (SIS), while a second system, supplied by NASA, expected those results to be in SI units, in accordance with the SIS. Specifically, software that calculated the total impulse produced by thruster firings produced results in pound-force seconds. The trajectory calculation software then used these results – expected to be in newton-seconds (incorrect by a factor of 4.45)[15] – to update the predicted position of the spacecraft.[16] "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
And it's easier to ask for "a pint" than "half a litre" (the pint is also deep in our language/culture, of course). Conversely, I'm 78kg and I've no real idea what that is in stone, but it's more fiddly anyway to say [looks it up] "12 stone 4 pounds" - for person weight the nearest kilo is fine, for me anyway. And "one-point-one-kilos" is not clumsier, maybe less so, than "two-pounds-seven-ounces"
It actually makes more sense for American pint/quart/gallon measurements than British ones (i.e. quarter, eighth, sixteenth). A computer geek like you should love it.
Le Pen nearly got there.
Edit: And UK National Debt in Terapounds, which sounds appropriately scary.
If that really was Scott P, he's a lot fatter and hairier than I imagined him.
Miles for distances
Ft and inches for height
St and lbs for weight (although kg used more frequently than it was)
Pints in pubs
MPG
Feet for elevation in aviation –– weirdly this is the global standard, presumably because it's more granular than metres and two feet can make a – erm – big difference...
UK billion = 10e12.
Just the Americanization of UK language. I never use the word myself cos of the risk of confusion particularly with the older generation.
As an aside, Mrs Anabob reckons there is dress size inflation going on, that what was once a 12 is now marketed in stores like M&S as a 10, to flatter their customers and – presumably – boosts sales.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/opinion/putin-ukraine.html
Advocates of the duodecimal system would like to change our entire number system to base 12. So today would be the 1Bth of February 1206.
ISTR George Bernard Shaw left a substantial sum in his legacy to advance the cause of the duodecimal system.
While I admire the mathematical idealism, the mind boggles at how difficult this would be to implement.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/nicola-sturgeon-appalled-after-alex-salmond-continues-to-broadcast-on-russian-backed-tv-channel/ar-AAUda2y?ocid=entnewsntp
I am in my forties, and I have never heard anyone of my generation refer to the weight of a human in anything other than stone and pounds.
Hats off to Johnson that he has no Russian skeletons in his or the Conservatives' closets.
First he was stupid to raise a Labour MP accepted £100’sK from a Chinese Spy at PMQs, it acted like a dog whistle: the heckling of Starmer began.
And here Boris is trying to make political capital from the Ukraine crisis. It beggars believe he could be so stupid. Tuesday didn’t go at all well for Boris, and These are the sort of mistakes you make trying to force a catch-up.
And they'll find something to cut - going in after 14 years in power theyll need it.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/lifestyle/family-relationships/vegans-are-more-interested-in-open-relationships-than-meat-eaters-survey-finds/ar-AAU02Kd?ocid=entnewsntp
Nonetheless I am more than alarmed by Johnson's hopeless sanctions. Still if he can get Starmer harassed over the Barry Gardiner business, he will probably view today's PMQs as a significant victory.
For her to genuinely distance herself from Salmond is about as incredible IMO as John Major being able to truly distance himself from Mrs T.
Alternatively this is one of those great ideological devides and we inadvertently seek out like-minded people to populate our echo-chambers with our preferred metrological lexicon.
I'm sincere though. My parents and parents in law talk only of stones and pounds and bake in pounds and ounces. But I really don't know anyone younger than them who does the same. I should note perhaps that most people significantly older than me but under retirement age that I know are scientists or engineers, so that might explain it.
Paul Mainwood
@PaulMainwood
·
35m
Also, ZOE should rush out a press release to point out that their level is bang on ONS's and so everyone else should be defunded.
https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1496487206105534468
I couldn't care less about imperial, I don't like imperial, but if others do then have free choice.
If there's no consumer demand for imperial, then there'll be no production of it. But if there is, then so be it, let consumers choose.
Weirdly, the story isn't too far away from that...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10542729/Ben-Wallace-claims-Putin-gone-tonto-Ukraine-crisis.html
"Ben Wallace cited a 170-year-old conflict notorious for one of the worst military disasters in history today as he claimed the UK had 'kicked the backside' of former Russian leaders and 'can always do it again'."
Of course Boris should never have mentioned the Barry Gardner money, having been so sensible not to till now, that one line effectively opened a box, let something out he can’t put back in because his own Party has been even more exposed to the Chinese spy and Chinese lobbying.
Personally I am pleased Russian and Chinese money and influence front and centre of the political narrative now. For too long our parties have been “can’t throw stones we alltogether in glass houses on this issue” now they have started throwing these stones at each other I think it can only be good news for us everyday people, and our hard pressed security services trying to keep us free fair democratic despite idiot and greedy money mad MPs. But definitely dumb of Boris to have brought a rock to the snowball fight, and helped make this issue front and centre considering how much exposed skin the Tories have in this game.
https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1496522487210950660?s=21
A national disgrace nonetheless, whoever he is representing.
Infections continued to decrease in England but increased in Scotland.
The trend was uncertain in Wales and Northern Ireland http://ow.ly/yRUg50I2g4J
https://twitter.com/ONS/status/1496485236753981440
John McDonnell MP
Richard Burgon MP
Ian Lavery MP
Beth Winter MP
Zarah Sultana MP
Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP
Apsana Begum MP
Mick Whitley MP
Tahir Ali MP
Ian Mearns MP
are the 11 Labour MPs I see who want to "stop the war" - who is the 12th ?
Cases down. Seeing the fall slow a little (R rising slightly)
Admissions down - R steady
In hospital down
MV beds down
Deaths down
*How many are due to covid is not clear.