EU to ban imperial measurements

You must be about 12 then! Anyone with mechanical experience will tell you that 30psi in a tap can be held back easily with a thumb - but 207kPa (or what's that in Hectopascals - the stupid new measure for barometric pressure) I wouldn't have a clue.....

Julian.

Indeed, a knight that goes "ne!" needs to be added ;-)

Richard

My point is that it is a number. Hold back 30 psi, hold back 200 kPa.

70 farenheit is warm, so is 20 celsius (actually, I tend to think in Kelvin, but then I am an Engineer). It is just a matter of learning the number that goes with the experience. Since I don't plumb, I don't know about pressures, but I can tell you how many volts hurts...

Stuart

Stuart Gray wrote: Exactly

By ditching a lot of the odd units, like tons and yards for a start. They talk of thrusts for jet engines for example in millions of pounds, instead of tons, distnaces in feet whatever.

Personally, I like the binary multiplier nature of measuring in 1/2,

1/4....1/64"

And yet, without exception, people we have trained (30 + ?) say exactly the opposite - including our very apprehensive new Polish machinist, trained exclusively in metric for 55 years. I think its because an imperial scale again is split into human sized units.

Steve

Julian wrote: Hectopascals - the stupid new measure for barometric

You ARE kidding right ?

Steve

Well, you have more experience than I do. I speak purely for myself. As it is, I tend to talk in millimetres, feet and metres (since a foot is a useful rough measure with no useful metric near match), but then my work is now away from that kind of realm. I'm more used to dealing in megas, gigas and teras (computing!)

Stuart

Sod and bollocks. Thank you chaps. Yes, 112lb to the hundredweight.

It was a typo, really :-)

How true. The old man was WEO on HMS Penelope when 110v a/c replaced d/ c for ships wiring. The world failed to end as widley predicted - though the sparkies pretty quickly got out of the habbit of licking their fingers before toutchng a cable to see if it was live!

Actually, thinkng about it, he might have been on Devonshire at the time.

Getting back on topic though.... most of my time in software was in the automotive field, and I don't recall anything other than metric being used thank god - doing wonderful tricks with formulae is far easier with SI units - spotting opportunies for cancelling out are much more obvious, and working to very tight tolerances is easier too - whats 2% of 7/16th?

Richard

- whats 2% of 7/16th? About 8 thou. from memory.

Steve

No, quite true, hand on heart. But thankfully a hectopascal is the same as a millibar (the old unit). The stupid idiots even force us to change the name of the unit but not the value of the unit itself!

Julian

Bet they don't. I think the biggest jet engine is around 100,000 Lbs thrust. Millions would be space shuttle rocket motors!

Julian.

Thats actually what I was thinking of as I started the sentence, but lost the thread of my thoughts.

Steve

So have I (46), though I was never taught the full imperial system. I haven't a clue how long a chain or furlong is, I have a rough idea about a link as I saw a chain (folded up), area not really a clue in either system. Weight and length depends on the size of the object being measured. Small thing grams and millimeters are useful, larger I use imperial as that is what I understand but I'm not averse to measuring something as 3' 4" 2mm

The yongsters I work with (early 20's) haven't much idea either. I ask 'em to move something a foot to the left and either get a wild guess at how far to move the object or a blank look.

Well it is over here but not in the US. Which Mars probe was it that failed due to the Americans using yards and the Europeans using meters and that in a scientific enviroment...

No, but 1 hectopascal = 1 millibar. S othe numbers for barometric pressure don't change just what you (are supposed) to call them.

Exactly. And that's what's been happeinging since I was a kid some 40 years ago. If they are going to change the system, change it once and for all. January 1st 2008 we all go metric on everything. Simple. Sorted.

We have indeed always used both systems. When I was a kid I knew perfectly well how big a 998 cc engine was, I have no clue as to how big a 428 cu inch engine is.

The bricks in my house are imperial but now you can only buy metric ones so where the builder has bricked up a window I have mortar joints thicker than the others.

But I object to the EU mucking about with our system, cranky or not. I want to buy a pound of bananas and especially I want to go into a pub and order a pint of beer, not some half baked measure based upon the volume of a ton of water or whatever. If I want to drink in litres I'll bloody well move to France and if I want to measure my engines in cubic inches I'll go to the States. Finally I have enough trouble sticking to a 70 mph speed limit, if it goes to Kph, or more properly Kps as I don't think the hour is an SI unit, I won't have a clue what speed I'm doing. So I'd be very grateful if the EU would stick its paperwork up its arse and leave us alone. TonyB

On or around Sat, 21 Apr 2007 15:58:49 +0100, "Rich B" enlightened us thusly:

The transpondian lot use 2000-lb tons as well, along with undersized pints.

28lb = 1 qtr, too.

5/8ths of f*ck all :-)

On or around Sat, 21 Apr 2007 18:27:38 +0200, Stuart Gray enlightened us thusly:

For some purposes the metric units are an inconvenient size. mind, there's no law that says you can't use cm, or even dm if you want - interestingly,

1dm is pretty close to the standard "hand" used for measuring horses.

A likely story! And it's 3 barley corns to the inch!