I love the metric system. I think it's great and easy to use. So why do I still say I need to lose a stone. And not 6 kg

[cakeorwine]

I had to Google that as well.
I think metric is great. Easy to calculate with. But it's just ingrained to use stones and fraction of a stone for weight (when talking about body weight) and feet and inches for height.

But I use Kg and cm / metres for other stuff. And I just use miles for distance. But not yards.

Anyone else like this? A metric fan but still uses some Imperial and just in some circumstances?

I can flit between the 2 quite easily and don't tend to favour one over the other. The only one I really struggle with is converting my weight to kgs, stones and lbs are too ingrained! Fine with using both for cooking, measuring etc. Taught metric at school but picked up parents use of imperial.

Measuring fuel consumption in litres per 100 km rather than miles per gallon has the advantage that if you have a fleet of vehicles the fleet average is the average of the individual fuel consumptions. This is not the case with miles per gallon.

Let's say you have two vehicles consuming 6 L/(100 km) and 10 L/(100 km) the average fuel consumption is (6 + 10)/2 = 8 L/(100 km).

If you have two vehicles that do 40 mpg and 60 mpg the average fuel consumption is 48 mpg, not 50 mpg.

Think of it this way. Imagine both vehicles did 1000 miles. The first vehicle would use 1000/40 = 25 gallons and the other one would use 1000/60 = 16.6667 gallons for a total of 41.6667 gallons. That's 41.6667 gallons to do 2000 miles or 48 mpg.

I think of it as like being bilingual.

Friends of mine from France can switch between French and English depending on where they are, who they are talking to, what they want to talk about. Often they mix the two. No one thinks they should only speak English in England and French in France.

The imperial system is bonkers and unfathomable to me in some aspects. Currency particularly so. But some things are more human and therefore more useful - eg, a 6 ft person is tall whereas a 5 ft person is short. If I want to change the quantities of a recipe it’s often easier to do that in oz rather than grams. So I pick and choose as I like, which is a good thing I think. There is no benefit to me in trying to work out my bra size in cm so I won’t.

I'm the opposite. Have no concept of my weight in imperial but have lost 6Kg this month with about 10 to go.

Most of the weight loss threads are I. Imperials and I can't join them as I have no idea what anyone is talking about. Annoys me the NHS BMI calculator defaults to feet and inches and stones. Should be metric by default with option to switch to old money.

I'm mid 40s so think for my generation it's that combination of being taught metric at school and imperial by older family members
Also mid-40s but my parents (70s) are really anti-imperial. Apart from cake mixture being an egg for every 2oz of other ingredients I don't think I've heard either of them use imperial for decades. They even use km for driving distance generally.

i always do my weight in kg because that's what the gym machines use it in. I run and walk in km and weigh food in grams.

love this handy flow chart explainer. It all makes perfect sense, honest…

I only use pounds and ounces, feet and inches, pints (although I can used cm and m too, I can just “see” feet and inches better).

Tell me you’ve lost 2 stone, 5lbs in weight, I’ll know exactly what you mean. Tell me you’ve lost 20kg, you could still be obese or you could now be emaciated, I’d not have a clue.

I’m 43 but the disclaimer is I hated maths throughout school, I couldn’t tell you what system I learned in primary, and I skived every maths lesson from year 9 onwards or sat and daydreamed, so wouldn’t have a clue telling you what I was taught.

I just picked up what my parents used.

I use miles too - not a clue about kilometres.

I was born in 1981 so definitely in the Metric era, but, like you, can "visualise" stones for weight, lb oz for cooking and miles.for distance far easier than their metric equivalents.

DP, 22 years my senior, despairs of me. Yet I had a giggle recently when he described something being a yard in length. Imperial just works better for some things.

I saw a hand wrote sign a few days ago on a boarded up shop that said
We have moved 300 yards that way ⬅
We are still trading
We are 300 meters that way ⬅

That's 300 yards for a Brit, 300 metres for mankind.

"Colloquial units" are a thing. It's why the French still use pints. Or rather a French person would understand "une pinte" as they served you 500ml (or 0.5l if you prefer).

You can call a weight, or a length etc whatever you like, if others can understand it. No one has ever said you can't. However because it's easy to work in base 10, metric makes perfect sense to trade by.

Which is exactly where the UK is.

It's not just Americans that don't get stones. A South African colleague recently expressed a "what on earth are they ?" when weight loss was discussed. And as the UK/US pint situation shows, if the dream of imperialistas is to somehow create an English speaking rival to metric, they have a lot of heavy lifting to do. Starting with reverting the UK pint (and thus gallon). Unless someone here wants to tell Americans they are wrong ?

As you say, Imperial units were originally based on human measurements but modern societies need metrological standards that can reproduced anywhere. The length of the King's foot is something easily available world-wide.

Nowadays Imperial units are defined in terms of metric ones. The definition of the foot is 0.3048 metres exactly. The original 1793 definition of the metre was one ten-millionth of the distance from the north pole to the equator as measured along the meridian that runs through Paris observatory (the French didn't accept the Greenwich meridian until the early 20th century).

In 1799 the metre was redefined to be the length of a particular platinum-iridium bar stored at Sevres, near Paris. In 1960 it was changed again to be a certain number of wavelengths of light emitted by krypton-86 and in 1983 it was redefined to be the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second. It was tweaked in 2019 when the second was redefined.

As metrological science improves things can be measured to greater and greater accuracy and the standards have to keep up. With current definitions we are not dependent on physical artefacts, just the values of the fundamental constants of physics.

Any future lunar or martian colonies will be able to calibrate their measuring equipment to the full accuracy available on Earth without anyone having to send them a standard metre bar or a kilogram weight.

Sorry, I meant to say "the length of the King's foot is NOT easily available".

That's because you've turned around the measurement unit though.

I.e. you've done litres per hundred km and comparing it against miles per gallon

That's why you get a different average - if you did the comparisons the same, i.e. kilometres per litre against miles per gallon, you wouldn't get such a difference.

So it's your methodology that's different.

I was a very young child just as they were moving from imperial to metric so have worked with an absolute mix ever since. Food in grams, babies in pounds, height in metres, weight in stones, a run in km, a drive in miles, a small measurement in metric, purchase fuel in litres but work out fuel efficiency in gallons, weather temperature in metric.

For the older of us, does anyone remember those little red exercise books you could buy. Inside the back cover was a baffling range of conversations that my mum understood but I had no clue. Furlongs, chains, rods etc. etc.

I agree that this comes about because imperial is intuitive for "everyday life" stuff. I grew up in Australia so was fully metric - except that my mother talked in feet and inches, miles, pounds and ounces. So for baking I work in ounces (well, very approximately - tablespoon=ounce near enough for flour and sugar).

I had never bought fruit and veg in anything other than kgs when I first moved to the UK; but actually didn't have much intuition for how much a kg of apples eg might be. Then for a few months I often used a market stall that was still using pounds and very very quickly gained a sense of how much a pound looked like.

My point is that it's better to use Volume per unit Distance than Distance per unit Volume because you can use ordinary averages to work out fleet averages.

The latter requires you to average rates, and averaging rates requires the harmonic mean.

If you use kilometres per litre you will have the same problem as with mpg - averages don't work.

Imagine two vehicles. One has a fuel consumption of 20 km/L and the other has 30 km/L. They both drive 1000 km. The fuel used is 1000/20 = 50 L and 1000/30 = 33.3333 L, a total of 83.3333 L, or 2000/83.3333 = 24 km/L for the fleet average, not the 25 km/L that you might naively expect.

Yes, but you could use gallons per hundred miles which works the same as litres per 100 km.

Agreed.

Its because the British like to be awkward. Its as simple as that.

I am 44 and almost entirely metric. Height and weight both make more sense to me in metric. For distances I am happier to switch between the two (and if I'm doing a 10/25 etc mile event in running/cycling I would refer to it as such) but metric is what I default to.

I love this flowchart, but under "Temperature" it's missing "Is it a scorcher?" > Farenheit / "Is it freezing?" > Celsius

Very true!

It's perfectly possible to change - just set your scales to kg and g and you'll become used to it much more quickly than you'd think. I've never got my head around stones and lb (I have to think to remember how many lb in a stone) but used to cook in oz - got some recipe books which used metric and now don't use imperial in cooking either.

I have this too. I conceptualise length and volume in imperial and think in metric.
Put it down to growing up with older parents