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Comment by DonaldFisk | Hacker News Reader

The US doesn't use imperial units. It uses customary units. An imperial pint is 25% larger than a customary one.

Metric conversion in the UK isn't complete: on road signs, distances are in miles and speeds are in miles per hour. Pints are used to serve draught or keg beer.

In aviation, height/altitude is measured in feet or flight levels (hundreds of feet), horizontal distance is measured in nautical miles, and speed is measured in knots.

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Pints are sold as pints but its marked up as 568ml on the glass.

Milk was the same for a while and you still see it occasional though we've gone to liters mostly.

Most things are metric now though.

With milk, the measurements used seem to depend on the type of milk sold. If it's regular milk, it will be sold by the pint. If it's UHT or filtered milk, it seems to be sold by the litre.

Nautical miles and knots kinda make sense because "Historically, it was defined as one sixtieth of the distance between two parallels of latitude separated by one degree."

Feet for altitudes are not ideal, but it's become a convention (in China they use meters) (Now if they were to mix feet and miles in the altitude that would have been bad)

>Pints are used to serve draught or keg beer.

Even in France, we use pints to serve beer...

Sure, but it is a normal metric pint (0.5L) - and the demi is 250mL.

In the UK and US they still have ye olde measures - 568.3mL and 473.2mL respectively.

AFAIK US pints for aren't 568ml. Whoever said everything is bigger in America didn't include the beer.

Except the french pint is metric (50 cl).

yes but only for beer in bars though.

I found this really surprising about the UK. Most of the other common wealth nations (Canada, Australia, NZ) all have their signs in metric.

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