How to measure like a Brit
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This is spot on.
When you shake someone's deep sense of self-worth, leaving a scar in their ego, they will persistently try to diminish you through petty arguments & obsessive captious criticism of your actions, just to soothe the wound.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Yeah, that's pretty much spot on. We're messed up.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@george-k said in How to measure like a Brit:
Do speed limit signs in Britain say kph, or mph?
What about the Canadians?
Britain is mph, Canada is kmh
Republic of Ireland is kmh, Northern Ireland is mph, and there's no real border.
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But is it really that much better in the US?
How do you even convert between all these units? Do you pull out a calculator or something? It's completely ridiculous to use different units for smaller things than for bigger things. Miles, feet, inches, yards, furloughs, leagues? Can you convert between all of them? And what if you need to be precise in your measurements and need to specify very small lengths, like 0.01mm?
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@klaus said in How to measure like a Brit:
But is it really that much better in the US?
How do you even convert between all these units? Do you pull out a calculator or something? It's completely ridiculous to use different units for smaller things than for bigger things. Miles, feet, inches, yards, furloughs, leagues? Can you convert between all of them? And what if you need to be precise in your measurements and need to specify very small lengths, like 0.01mm?
Pretty much all my engineering stuff is done with metric as the standards are IEC and what-not. The units given in that example are every day things, not technical. If some idiot decides to use inches, which happens occasionally, the conversion is easy.
I'm no expert, but...
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@doctor-phibes said in How to measure like a Brit:
Pretty much all my engineering stuff is done with metric
All of my medical stuff has been in metric as well.
And that goes back to when I was a medical student in the early 1970s.
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@george-k said in How to measure like a Brit:
Do speed limit signs in Britain say kph, or mph?
What about the Canadians?
From what I can remember about driving in Canada, I saw speed limit signs notated in km/h.
That’s another thing, while the imperial unit is often written as “mph,” most of the world that uses the metric unit writes it as “km/h” rather than “kmph.” I have never seen “kph” or “k/h”.
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Interesting short piece on aviation units
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@axtremus said in How to measure like a Brit:
That’s another thing, while the imperial unit is often written as “mph,” most of the world that uses the metric unit writes it as “km/h”
It's important to maintain that speed is distance divided and not multiplied by time. Sloppy in your notation, sloppy in your life.
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The biggest societal problem the Americans have, and it reflects something fundamental in their culture going back centuries, is that their restaurants, when asked to prepare tea, heat the water to 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
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@bachophile said in How to measure like a Brit:
aviation
Is flying safe with all these different units?
Yes! Pilots flying international routes deal with this assortment of units daily. We can juggle them in our sleep.
Pilots are superhuman.
