Posted on 05/26/2012 9:44:14 PM PDT by Olog-hai
Miles, pints and ounces should be abandoned in favor of a fully metric system because visitors to the Olympics will think Britain is living in its “imperial past”, a former Tory chancellor has said.
Lord Howe of Aberavon, who served in Baroness Thatcher’s cabinet, called on ministers to end the “deeply confusing shambles” of using a mixture of metric and imperial measures.
He said the lack of any attempt by the Government to clarify the arrangements was the “most glaring omission” from the Queen’s Speech.
During debate on the speech in the House of Lords, he said: “Weights and measures are in a mess. Liters for petrol and fizzy drinks, pints for beer and milk, meters and kilometers for athletics and the Ordnance Survey, miles per gallon for cars, the metric system for school, still pounds and ounces for the market. …"…
Lord Howe said he was responsible for metrication as consumer affairs minister in the early 1970s, while as a “penny-saving chancellor of the exchequer” from 1979, he had readily accepted the abolition of the Metrication Board. …
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Much better than living in Europe’s non-existant future.
I think even mexico uses feet, inches, and miles.
Can't say about feet and inches. But their "mile posts" are in kilometers.
If you have an IQ over room temperature
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Fahrenheit or centigrade?
He surrounded himself with greater state, and in particular he called into his service twelve lictors. Some think that he fixed upon this number from the number of the birds who foretold his sovereignty; but I am inclined to agree with those who think that as this class of public officers was borrowed from the same people from whom the "sella curulis" and the "toga praetexta" were adopted- their neighbours, the Etruscans-so the number itself also was taken from them.
I find it a good mental math discipline and exercise to think in both metric and imperial terms. I don’t mind it a bit. Shut down imperial measure and they’ll be selling us ten eggs for the same price as today’s dozen.
What really stuns me is how many kids these days do not know what 12 times 12 is and have never heard of a “gross”...and look at you funny if you ask for a half dozen of something or a dozen and a half.
They can ditch everything else and I won’t care, but they better damn well keep their hands off my pints!
Especially when it comes to good Irish stout.
An englishman embarrassed of being english?
Yeah, unheard of, right?
One real problem - people who think in metric have real problems with fractions.
Today I grappled with TORX designations, which are not measurements per se. I had a TORX 20, which was way too small for the screws on the rear light fixture which the owners manual helpfully instructed me to “remove”. I used some Play-Doh to make an impression of the head, and found the sizes on the internet. It seemed that the TORX 30 was close, at .216 “ to the ~7/32” I measured with my calipers on the Play-Doh impression. It so happened that my wife was on this mission, and she came back with a 5 piece TORX set, of which the largest was a TORX 30. Fortunately, this was the correct tool, and I derived great satisfaction from my efforts.
So anyway, I trust Great Britain is not burdened with TORX. ( They do work nicely, though! )
I’ve got a strange mix of units I feel comfortable with. Miles, yards, feet and inches, but then I switch to millimeters, microns and nanometers because of a couple jobs which did a lot of small measurements in metric. A mil (0.001 inches) always means 25.4 microns to me. For radio bands I figure wavelengths in meters, but always think of those as “big yards” when doing anything practical with them. Fahrenheit is for temperatures, but in college I was almost as familiar with Kelvin temperatures.
Lord How - you do know who he is, don’t you?
He was the minister who plunged the dagger in Mrs Thatcher’s back, when she decided that her government would never, ever join a common European currency.
I’m surprised that he dare show his face in public these days. The common currency works so well, doesn’t it?
Well, he must be feeling brave due to the rise of a kindred spirit (Cameron) to the Prime Ministership, and of course the preponderance of other “liberal conservatives” (really hate that oxymoron, especially since Cameron had the temerity to utter it in public). As for the “common currency”, its only purpose was (and still is) to subjugate.
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We ain’t gonna play football in meters either.
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