Britons moving towards 'Royales with cheese'?

[wellard]

Originally posted by Ilander: To be honest, Wellard, I'm just fine with the mixed system we have right now. Use whatever units you like, so long as you let the relevant people know what they mean. As such, I must now walk exactly one Lyle, arbitrarily defined as the distance from my desk to the crapper.

LOL @ one Lyle [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img]


Joking aside that 'fine with the mixed system attitude" does have it's drawbacks aside from Boeing and the dangers of refueling just ask NASA about one of it's missions to Mars. The Euro space agancy used SI measurements NASA used 'whatever' result was a bit of a mess i'm afraid [img]tongue.gif[/img]

The sooner we all 'speak the same' the better IMO even though it's quaint to use such measurements as troy's and fluid ounces

[Sir Degrader]

I use SI, but prefer Imperial in regular discourse, unless I put on my accent and use "hectares and "killometres" in my russian voice.

[Ilander]

...but what of "millimeters of mercury" and all those other crap units that are supposedly SI, but not really?

Incidentally, they claimed to have resolved the mmHg unit by calling it a Torr...but, that's just slapping a fancy name on a unit that should rightfully give way to good ole N/m^2 .

... [img]graemlins/rant.gif[/img]

[AzRaeL StoRmBlaDe]

good reading, thanks for that.

[wellard]

Of course the USA is under no obligation (or desire) to move away from it's current system but as the original article by Dreamer points to, the UK should really get off it's backside and fully change. The sun will still shine the day after and the sun newspaper will still be able to protect the great british sausage from those evil europeans [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[Sever]

Ah. SI vs Metric. Again. I've given up trying to talk sense into old people.

[JrKASperov]

Originally posted by Ilander: The kilogram is the mass of one cubic decimeter of pure water. The meter was originally 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the earth's equator to the earth's pole. There are two temperature scales, three units of pressure, and that's just the surface. SI is a nice thing, most of the time...but it has its own inherent drawbacks.

Well, you're totally wrang. [img]tongue.gif[/img] SI only supports 7 quantities and units:

Mass in kilograms
Time is seconds
Distance in metres
Electric current in Ampere(alternately electric charge in Coulomb, but Ampere = Coulomb/seconds)
Temperature in Kelvin (Celsius and Kelvin are easy to swap, just add or substract 273)
Amount of molecules in mole
Light intensity in Candela

All others are expressible in these seven. The metric system is something different from the SI system, so be careful not to mix these two up.

[ 02-27-2006, 03:07 AM: Message edited by: JrKASperov ]

[shamrock_uk]

Meh, I love the elegance of SI and used it back in school, but I can't get too worked up about changing the last remnants of the imperial system. As long as it's used in schools and the sciences, I won't fuss.

I'm just amazed that we've finally found an unimportant issue on which the government is reluctant to spend our money! [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img]

[Calaethis Dragonsbane]

I for one will be damned before switching to kilometres. I like my miles, damnit, and my stone, my pints and my pounds. On that note, they can keep their filthy euros. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[Ilander]

Originally posted by JrKASperov: quote: Originally posted by Ilander: The kilogram is the mass of one cubic decimeter of pure water. The meter was originally 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the earth's equator to the earth's pole. There are two temperature scales, three units of pressure, and that's just the surface. SI is a nice thing, most of the time...but it has its own inherent drawbacks.

Well, you're totally wrang. [img]tongue.gif[/img] SI only supports 7 quantities and units:

Mass in kilograms
Time is seconds
Distance in metres
Electric current in Ampere(alternately electric charge in Coulomb, but Ampere = Coulomb/seconds)
Temperature in Kelvin (Celsius and Kelvin are easy to swap, just add or substract 273)
Amount of molecules in mole
Light intensity in Candela

All others are expressible in these seven. The metric system is something different from the SI system, so be careful not to mix these two up. [/QUOTE]You did indeed get me...us physicists use some kind of metric system...most of the time...and the rest of the time we use what's most convenient, whether that be measuring time in meters, length in seconds, mass in electron-volts per c^2, and sometimes in just electron-volts...

Honestly, different units are often better. It's more convenient to talk about atoms in atomic mass units than in kilograms...and I could go on and on about the convenience of different units.

Meters...well, I'm okay with them, I guess.