It's not (at least currently) legal to sell whisky in a pub in ounces. Until the 80s(?) it was sold in fractions of a gill: 1/6, 1/5, or 1/4. It's now sold in millilitres, usually either 25ml or 35ml. It's at the pub's discretion, I think: 35ml is very common in Scotland, but it's the measure in some English pubs too. There are legal requirements to post notices informing customers what your pub's measure size is (and for wine glasses, too).
Draught beer, on the other hand, is obliged to be sold in 1/3 and/or 1/2 pint measures or multiples thereof. So that's strictly Imperial. But bottled beer is labeled in ml and is now routinely 330ml or 500ml. [Edit: but you can sell pint bottles if you want to - you just need to label them 568ml as well! There are a lot of 454g jars of jam out there for the same reason...]
Very much a generational thing. I'm early 30s and think in miles for distance/speed, pints for beer, feet for height and metric for everything else.
This has always been a niche issue for the baby boomer generation, I don't know anyone of my generation that gives a damn other than metric being more sensible for international compatibility.
Much like Brexit certain parts of the older and more politically powerful / numerous generation go off the deep end about this stuff, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Martyrs
Out of curiosity (as a non-brit), do you ever measure anything in pints that's not a beer?
I'm somewhat aware that milk might still be sold in pints - I just find it interesting that the word has in common usage really lost the connotation of being a measurement and just mostly means "a beer" now.
E.g. "I'm going out for a pint", "I've had a couple of pints", "I'm not much of a drinker, but I'll have a pint or two a month".
I genuinely have forgotten now but I think you're right that milk is still pints. I just think of them as "the little one, the normal one and the big one" which I think are 1/2/4 pints respectively.
I think where stuff is still normally discussed in pints it's due to that still being the standard measure for retail. For whatever reason milk and beer retained the pint. Also volume of blood in pints weirdly seems to be standard, e.g. when talking about medical stuff informally.
The only measure that seems to have gone fully metric in day to day life outside of a few holdouts is temperature.
Milk is both. Reusable delivered glass bottles are pints. Small supermarket plastic bottles are 568ml (1pt). Larger ones are either 1136ml (2pt) or 1l. Big ones are 2l and 3l.
People over a certain age do, and that age tends to be different for different units. I'm 40, and 'natively' think in miles; both litres and pints (but not gallons or fluid ounces); kilos (except personal weight in stones); all of millimetres, centimetres, inches, feet, and metres (but not fractions of inches or things like furlongs or rods); and degrees Celsius (except for outdoor temps which are Fahrenheit). Younger people lose Fahrenheit (no longer used on weather forecasts) and stones, and use pints only for beer (milk in glass pint bottles is now rare). Older people use gallons, hundredweight, fractions of inches, and (especially) pounds and ounces. Everyone uses miles, some people know kms as well.
It's basically a bit of a sticky mess, but one with a clear direction of travel. And this announcement is for cheap popularity amongst older voters, who use metric less. The number of items that will be marked in Imperial only is going too be very small, because it'll confuse the young and mean different packaging is needed to sell abroad. A few cantankerous market traders will probably do it, but it's always been legal to give prices for both measuring systems simultaneously so there's not really much of an issue to solve.
Dunno 'bout you-all but for this US ex-pat, all the metric stuff is very much okay EXCEPT for them pesky Celsius degrees. After umpteen years, still doing mental conversions.
The UK's system is very simple.
Weight: stone for humans, kg for everything else, unless you're over 60 then it's lb. Or if the human is a newborn then it's always lb. But younger humans measure themselves in kg. But if it's weed then it's oz. But coke is g.
Length: feet and inches for the height of a human, and for the waist/leg/neck measurements. But feet? No, that's just a random number. Distances are metres, unless they're long then they're miles, and if they're at sea they're nautical miles. An aeroplane's altitude is in feet, but your altitude up a mountain is in metres.
Volume is easy. Beer is in pints, so are milk and blood. But water and juice are in litres. Petrol comes in litres, but your consumption of petrol is in miles per gallon.
Energy is btu if you're old fashioned and you're measuring natural gas, otherwise it's kWh, unless it's food then it's kcal. Joules are for science class.
Speed is miles an hour, except at sea when it's knots.
Letting each individual shop decide what measurement of weight to use will work out great.
This is a stupid headline and completely wrong. The imperial system has never gone away - pints of beer and pints of milk, six-feet tall humans, 12-inch records, quarter-pounder burgers, shoe sizes, clothes sizes - but they’re now saying that shops or store holders will be allowed to sell goods in older measures like pounds and ounces.
The imperial system is a system good for humans, metric is good for standardization.
Land mile, sea mile, metric ton, short ton, long ton, uk gallon, us gallon. In europe we also have this pfund (pound) and other historical measures. How accurate and how they differ from country to country is hard to say.
Meh. It's good for humans that already know it. I find measuring length in centimeters awkward as an American, however, plenty of people all over the world can do it just fine as naturally as I can with inches.
Temperature is another great example.
The important thing is what you were taught as a child and learned to interpret the world with. The only reason this continues to be an issue, is that it is painful for the current generation to adapt to the new standards, causing a self-fulfilling prophecy of not moving because you don't want to alienate the society around you.
IMO, we should transition things in daily home life to metric as quickly as possible, but where the table stakes are low. Food is actually a great area to start with, because you don't care what the number on the package is. Eventually, you'll buy that thing over and over again and build those neural pathways and associations.
Here's an example: do you know how big a 2L bottle of soda is? How about a 1L bottle? Most likely, you've seen these in the world before, probably a lot. If we do that for everything else, in a few years, everyone will have a much better handle on things. Older people might still use an internal conversion back to imperial units, but now we are no longer holding back new generations from adopting these concepts natively.
Once food is sold in metric, recipes will be adapted to match those conversions (if they aren't already for an international audience) and the world will move on.
I've been wondering about this ever since I read the article - does coming from a different cultural background that doesn't use SI make it harder or more complicated for scientists and researchers to do their work, having to often deal with units of measurement they don't see in their regular lives?
I always find it difficult to follow cooking recipes from the US or tutorials DIY projects (where even screws are completely different!).
But it's not something I do on the regular so I just can't imagine.
Which humans? I have grown up in a completely metric system, pounds ounces, fareignheit, miles, feet, inches and all the rest are absolutely meaningless to my brain. If I want to use them, I have to look up the conversion to metric and go from there.
The metric system is in the UK to stay and has been taught in our schools for decades.
If the UK wants to use pints for milk and beer, pounds for sugar and flour, miles per hour on road signs, who the hell is entitled to have a problem with that?
Do we want every country to be exactly the same as every other one just for the convenience of global commerce.
This is completely insane. The "Imperial System" (and the even looser defined US system) has no advantages vs SI. It confuses mass and weight. That disqualifies it right from the start.
Have you ever done thermodynamics in US/Imperial units? Horrifying, enough to make you swear off everything heat- and steam-related for life.
Knowing the difference between mass and weight is important. Otherwise, you will be constantly confused and unable to understand any physical system, even at a Newtonian level.
Well considering that the article says that they plan on allowing SHOPS to sell produce in pounds and ounces, I think we're okay. Unless there's an emergency need for someone to do some banana thermodynamics, in which case we're doomed.
32 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 77.4 ms ] threadSo I say they think differently about it, but they all know.
Maybe someone from UK can elaborate further.
Draught beer, on the other hand, is obliged to be sold in 1/3 and/or 1/2 pint measures or multiples thereof. So that's strictly Imperial. But bottled beer is labeled in ml and is now routinely 330ml or 500ml. [Edit: but you can sell pint bottles if you want to - you just need to label them 568ml as well! There are a lot of 454g jars of jam out there for the same reason...]
This has always been a niche issue for the baby boomer generation, I don't know anyone of my generation that gives a damn other than metric being more sensible for international compatibility.
Much like Brexit certain parts of the older and more politically powerful / numerous generation go off the deep end about this stuff, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Martyrs
I'm somewhat aware that milk might still be sold in pints - I just find it interesting that the word has in common usage really lost the connotation of being a measurement and just mostly means "a beer" now.
E.g. "I'm going out for a pint", "I've had a couple of pints", "I'm not much of a drinker, but I'll have a pint or two a month".
I think where stuff is still normally discussed in pints it's due to that still being the standard measure for retail. For whatever reason milk and beer retained the pint. Also volume of blood in pints weirdly seems to be standard, e.g. when talking about medical stuff informally.
The only measure that seems to have gone fully metric in day to day life outside of a few holdouts is temperature.
It's basically a bit of a sticky mess, but one with a clear direction of travel. And this announcement is for cheap popularity amongst older voters, who use metric less. The number of items that will be marked in Imperial only is going too be very small, because it'll confuse the young and mean different packaging is needed to sell abroad. A few cantankerous market traders will probably do it, but it's always been legal to give prices for both measuring systems simultaneously so there's not really much of an issue to solve.
Letting each individual shop decide what measurement of weight to use will work out great.
The imperial system is a system good for humans, metric is good for standardization.
"citation needed".
Meh. It's good for humans that already know it. I find measuring length in centimeters awkward as an American, however, plenty of people all over the world can do it just fine as naturally as I can with inches.
Temperature is another great example.
The important thing is what you were taught as a child and learned to interpret the world with. The only reason this continues to be an issue, is that it is painful for the current generation to adapt to the new standards, causing a self-fulfilling prophecy of not moving because you don't want to alienate the society around you.
IMO, we should transition things in daily home life to metric as quickly as possible, but where the table stakes are low. Food is actually a great area to start with, because you don't care what the number on the package is. Eventually, you'll buy that thing over and over again and build those neural pathways and associations.
Here's an example: do you know how big a 2L bottle of soda is? How about a 1L bottle? Most likely, you've seen these in the world before, probably a lot. If we do that for everything else, in a few years, everyone will have a much better handle on things. Older people might still use an internal conversion back to imperial units, but now we are no longer holding back new generations from adopting these concepts natively.
Once food is sold in metric, recipes will be adapted to match those conversions (if they aren't already for an international audience) and the world will move on.
I always find it difficult to follow cooking recipes from the US or tutorials DIY projects (where even screws are completely different!).
But it's not something I do on the regular so I just can't imagine.
If the UK wants to use pints for milk and beer, pounds for sugar and flour, miles per hour on road signs, who the hell is entitled to have a problem with that?
Do we want every country to be exactly the same as every other one just for the convenience of global commerce.
My point is, what ever system you use is good for you because you learnt it.
I have not said one thing about England and it's choice to revert systems. I don't care about that.
Have you ever done thermodynamics in US/Imperial units? Horrifying, enough to make you swear off everything heat- and steam-related for life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7oyZGW99os