Are you still imperial?

[mleong]

Hi KrisB,
Thanks for clearing it up for me.

 

[BacardiSpice]

I was born in the UK to Aussies on a diplomatic mission, and have skipped around countries and education systems utilising both systems. As a consequence, I'm not consistent when it comes to measurement - feet and inches and pounds make more sense to me when talking about an individual's height and weight, and I can visualise them. Distances I can go either miles or metres/kilometres. In many other ways, thoroughly mucked up.

Did my certifications in metric in Oz. Locally we talked metric. In the tropical north, or up in the Pacific, most boats and liveaboards gave the briefing in both. Have also dived a Peter Hughes boat that gave briefings exclusively in Imperial, which wasn't a hassle - it was easy to translate PSI to BAR and depths given in feet to metres. However, all my gear is in metric - it's the system I find easiest to relate to as it's the system in which I did all my training, and I'd prefer not to make silly errors in conversions at depth. That's one point on which I suspect it's better to be consistently one or the other.

With running...I do all my training in miles and, although my GPS based speed/distance monitor can give me readings in either miles or clicks, I usually train in miles and then run the race distances (e.g. 10km) in kilometres.

 

[Albion]

I do every thing metric except for drinking pints and going the extra mile. The imperial system is just too confusing, especially Fahrenheit, it starts nowhere, and ends nowhere at least in centigrade Zero degrees has a sensible reference point.

As for the US not adopting metrication do you know how much international business you are losing. People buying large (and I suppose even small) machinery don’t like to have imperial bolts, nuts and fits. Something goes wrong or you lose some small parts your big machine is now screwed unitl you can get the parts which means the shipping in from the states not some distributor down the road. I work in the oil industry and our Bible is the API (American Petroleum Institute) standards and guess what their primary unit of measurememnt is? Metric with imperial now as secondary. The change is coming.

Anyway I’m thinking of getting an imperial SPG so I can have longer dives! I am being told consistently to come back to the boat with at least 50 Bar or 500PSIG!!!!!!

Talking of differences, I understand the Irish are going to switch over to driving on the right side of the road. From next month cars will switch over, if that is a success then the following month commercial vehicles will switch over as well.

 

[KrisB]

Albion once bubbled...
Talking of differences, I understand the Irish are going to switch over to driving on the right side of the road. From next month cars will switch over, if that is a success then the following month commercial vehicles will switch over as well.

Also, during that month of transition, pedestrians are advised to walk down the yellow line in the middle of the road, so as to be visible to both directions of traffic.

 

[blackice]

Albion once bubbled...
I do every thing metric except for drinking pints and going the extra mile. The imperial system is just too confusing, especially Fahrenheit, it starts nowhere, and ends nowhere at least in centigrade Zero degrees has a sensible reference point.

Totaly agree... extra mile and all.

but Fahrenheit is just silly .... start at -32 = 0 or something like that...

 

[sheck33]

blackice once bubbled...


Totaly agree... extra mile and all.

but Fahrenheit is just silly .... start at -32 = 0 or something like that...

the Fahrenheit scale is beyond silly but the celsius scale is also arbitrary

 

[Arnaud]

sheck33 once bubbled...



the Fahrenheit scale is beyond silly but the celsius scale is also arbitrary

By definition, a scale is arbitrary. However, I wouldn't call any of them silly. They just use different references. One makes sense and is easily understandable. The other, well...

 

[sheck33]

Arnaud once bubbled...


By definition, a scale is arbitrary. However, I wouldn't call any of them silly. They just use different references. One makes sense and is easily understandable. The other, well...

The Kelvin is a more fundamental temperature scale as it is more solidly linked to thermodynamics, absolute zero being the temperature at which molecules have the lowest possible energy. as a side note many physical laws and formulas can be expressed more simply when an absolute temperature scale is used. The references chosen for the Centigrade & Fahrenheit scales are on the other hand completely arbitrary, the boiling point of water depends on pressure & purity of the water for example. On the Celsius scale used today, which is defined differently, the boiling point of water is just a little under 100 degrees centigrade. Temperature measurement & definition of scales is not a trivial thing but very interesting

some reading material :

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/staff/blynds/tmp.html

 

[PhotoTJ]

as I see it, is that to change over, you totally have to rethink virtually everything you do. From your shoe size to cooking.

Travel is a perfect example. I grew up with MPH. You are travelling x distance, you know how long it will take to get there, allowing for traffic. Now how many KPH are you going, and you have to recompute your travel times.

I know, it's actually easy when you stop and think about it, but most people, (Americans), don't want to stop and think about it.

Here's a good example. On CNN, during the drive to Bagdad, one of the reporters said, "We are about 150 Kilometers from Bagdad, due to the heavy sandstorm, we're only going about 10 miles an hour." :wacko:

Anybody want to figure out how long it takes them to get to Bagdad? Sure, you can do it, but when you're watching the news, you want to know on the spot.

Watching a car race. "He's going at least 220 KPH."
Is that fast? I know 200 mph is wailing, but how fast is 220 kph?

I very clearly remember my 5th grade teacher trying to teach the metric system, she said we might as well learn it, in the next five years the US would be metric with the rest of the world.

That was in 1972.

 

[adder70]

Arnaud once bubbled...




A kid in a metric country learns 3 basic measures at school: the gram, the meter and the liter. That's it. Not inch, foot, or mile for distance, not ounces, pints, quarts or gallons for volume, etc. you get the idea. With metric, we don't have to switch to a different and unrelated (as rightfully so pointed out by Walter) unit depending on the size of what we have to measure. In Walter's beer example, a pint of beer is a pint of beer. It'll fill my glass and I don’t need to know more than that. But say I have a bigger bottle, a bottle of wine maybe. It is .75 liter and my glasses are 125 milliliters, well I know right away that my bottle that there is 6 glasses per bottle. Now, unless I use a converter, I have no idea how many 8 once glasses I can fill with half a gallon of OJ... Again, it's not very important. It just can make our day-to-day life is easier. The fact that I can't do that with the imperial system is frustrating. But I'll live.

Metric also allows handling pressure (bars) and distance (meters) and their impact on volume (liters) without the use of a calculator. Not only does the metric system uses one unit per measure, it also offers bridges between measures: 2 bars at 10 meters, 1 liter of water weights 1 kilo, etc. So, the metric system can also make my diving easier, thus slightly safer. Now, if you have a good computer, it doesn't really matter. Does it?

Finally, the debate about Fahrenheit and Celsius is probably not a big deal. I'm still not sure why 20° Celsius is 68° Fahrenheit and 30° Celsius is 86° Fahrenheit unlike 1 foot, which is 30.48 centimeters and 2 feet which is just twice as much (60.96 cm). But I don't think that one is more precise than the other; each uses fractions when a more precise measurement is need. The only thing I know is that water freezes at 0°C (32°F), it boils at 100°C (212°F) and I don't have a fever if my body temperature is 37° (98.6°F). Seems simpler and more logical to me. But it really isn't that important…

OK, if all of the SI measurements are so neat, how many liters in a cubic meter? The liter is a superfluous measurement devised only to make daily life easier. Since a cubic meter is fairly large, the term liter was devised for a common size of container.

The Fahrenheit/Celsius difference is because 0F is not 0C. 15C is 59F, or 27F above freezing (0C). 30C should be 54F above freezing, which would be 86F. Now I get my trusty HP calculator back out and it says...86!!