Metres

What are we looking at? That it should be yards? That it is a Mercedes? I bet there aren't many British-built ambulances in Germany.

For loading and unloading.

I bet there aren't many British-built ambulances in Germany.
....and certainly not with Imperial measurements on them!

We are a very confused nation....

The builder asks for an 8'x4' sheet of 15mm ply....

We buy petrol in litres but still talk of mpg..

The kid goes into the sweet shop and asks for a quarter of Midget Gems...
He will get a quarter, but the shopkeeper will weigh the metric equivalent!

We used to talk of 0-60 mph, acceleration time for cars, but this has now changed to 0-62 which is 100 km h...

Any other confused examples?

182.88cm under?

That's dead funny trilby....

NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter, because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement, while the agency's team used the more conventional metric system for a key spacecraft operation, according to a review finding.....

"By the late 1970s all British examination boards were requiring knowledge of the metric system, but even today most 18-24 year-olds still do not know how much they weigh in kilograms (60%) or how tall they are in metres and centimetres (54%)".

All interesting stuff....

"In 1983, Air Canada flight 143 from Montreal to Edmonton ran out of fuel midway through its flight because the amount of fuel had been calculated in pounds instead of kilograms. It glided to an emergency landing in Gimli, Manitoba. There were no serious injuries".

For science and engeering, metric is far superior but saying a man is 183 cm hardly has the same ring as "6 ft".

On the plus side using cm makes my whang sound bigger so .. swings and roundabouts

in 110m hurdles the hurdles are 3 ft 6 high or 42 inches

Sep 1, 2018 -- 12:12PM, Just Checking wrote:

For science and engeering, metric is far superior but saying a man is 183 cm hardly has the same ring as "6 ft".On the plus side using cm makes my whang sound bigger so .. swings and roundabouts

Not sure metric is superior in engineering. Everyone has their own preference but I would rather be measuring to 60 1/4" than 1733mm. Some places work to all imperial drawings and some all metric, some both, I can't see how either could be superior to the other as they're just units of measurements and it depends which you're more comfortable with.

THey aren't just units of measurent, they work on different systems. Metric is entirely logical and linear, imperial is broken up into stupid ****ing arbitrary sub measurements where it might be 1/16ths here, 1/12ths there, 1/20 here, 1/4 there, different names there, broken up AGAIN into different stupid ****ing arbitrary sub measurements if you go another way. Whats's 3 inches x 10 power of 3 in feet? Whats 1/10 of 6 ft? How easily do the map to other units if you have to multiply them?

It's easy to read a 64th or 8th or 32nd on a tape or ruler, no matter how high you go, for example measuring over 300 inches it's still as easy as measuring little numbers. You look for the big number and then the fraction, you don't need 4 or 5 digits like you do if measuring in mm. If you're measuring more accurate than a tape or ruler you use decimal i.e. 16.074", again it's big number and 74 thou as opposed to 3 digits and several decimal places in the metric equivalent.

pi is a bit of a bummer in metric or imperial

amazing that folk have coped ....

For very many years it was acceptable to use imperial for outline approval of planning submissions.

Detail submissions have to be in metric, but I've been out of it for a long time, so without checking I'm not sure this is still the case!