What country do they drive in MPH with the steering wheel on the right side of the car?
I've heard a lot of references to "miles" in British culture, but I assumed that was habits of older people. I thought the UK was all metric by now?
I've heard a lot of references to "miles" in British culture, but I assumed that was habits of older people. I thought the UK was all metric by now?
We use a mix of imperial and metric, so you'll see "300m to next service station" and also "30 mph" speed limits :).
People typically weigh themselves in stone and lbs, yet the food we buy is weighed in grams
Europe's last stronghold against the French Revolution's dictate of the metric system.
I jest but that isn't as mad as our pre-decimalization currency. We were still spending coins that called themselves a shilling and calling them five pence (and 2s as 10p) for quite a few years afterwards.
- 12 inches to the foot
- 3 feet to the yard
- 22 yards to the chain
- 10 chains to the furlong
- 8 furlongs to the mile
Using even more archaic units we can simplify further:
- 8 inches to the link
- 100 links to the chain
- 10 chains to the furlong
- 8 furlongs to the mile
And 1 acre is 1 chain by 1 furlong, or 10 square chains.
A rod, pole or perch. A rod was 12 feet and it was the width of the land ploughed in a day. A furlough was the length. Roughly.
Road signs and limits all still in miles exclusively.
People still refer to each other in feet and inches although official stuff often wants cms. TVs still in inches.
It's not as bad as America, because Brits have a very solid understand of metric and tend to use it whenever we can, but still needs work :(
As an American, I was taught metric in elementary school 30 years ago. It's used throughout education for science classes. I can't imagine there's many Americans who don't understand the metric system.
We just don't use it for anything outside the sciences, for whatever reason.
Or like a recipe calls for 1 pint of something that you've got 500mL containers of. Do you bother opening another 500mL container for that last 68mL?
British distance is measured in miles unless it’s a short distance under half a mile in which it’s metres or unless it’s someone old in which case it will be yards or feet. Of a horse race, in which case it’s yards and furlongs.
Land is measured in acres but industrial land in hectares.
Rooms are measured in feet and inches unless it’s for official purposes in which case it’s metres.
Liquid is measured in ml and litres unless it’s beer - which is measured in pints - or petrol which is measured in litres but talked about in gallons.
If you buy a fish you will weight it in grams and kilos. If you catch a fish you’ll measure it in pounds and ounces.
Buy suits and shirts and you measure in inches. Buy the cloth to make it yourself and it’s measured in linear metres.
How are cups even more insane than pints?
I do not understand cups!
A cup is a defined measure equal to 1/2 pint. (Or, equivalently, 8 fluid ounces.)
Or, since you can pour by eye to within 1ml, more useful to you might be ~236.6ml
Which is an example of how I'd rather things just be consistent instead of mixing units. If things are sold in pints, I'd prefer everything else I work with to be in tablespoons/cups/pints. If things are sold in liters and kilograms, I'll want things sold in reasonable divisions of those as well for the given application. When you just know half a cup is one stick or you need two tablespoons aka two ticks on the wrapper, its easy. When cream comes in pint bottles and you need a cup, you know its just half the bottle.
I do agree though, things start falling apart when recipes ask for like 2/3 a cup and you've got a pint, but if you're the kind of person who can figure out pouring something to +-1mL one could also learn how to pour just about 2/3 a cup every time.
This is great work, you’re a creature after my own heart!
This thing about cups is that 50g of flour = 50g of butter but 1 cup of flour does not equal 1 cup of butter. For me cups make sense for liquids but not for solids.
This is confusing because there are fluid ounces (usually labeled as FL OZ) which are a measurement of volume and are subdivisions of cups (a tablespoon being 1/2 FL OZ, 8 FL OZ in a cup) while there are also just ounces (OZ) which are a subdivision of pounds which is a measurement of weight. Which, weight and mass aren't necessarily the same things.
Because cups are a volume measurement, 1 cup of brand X flour might be a different amount of grams than 1 cup of brand Z flour. Still though, 1 cup brand X == 1 cup brand Z == 1 cup butter == 1 cup maple syrup, when measuring in cups. Different amounts of mass, same amount of volume. Loads of people cooking at home don't really care that much, or they'll just standardize on one brand of flour so its pretty close every time. Or for the majority of the dry goods for baking they'll end up buying some form of mix to use that's already measured they just need to add butter/oil/eggs/water/whatever. Professional bakers and those who really care will use scales and go by mass/weight for their measurements and not by "cups" for things like flour.
Here's an example photo of a pretty typical stick of butter:
https://sweetsandthankyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Mea...
They'll pretty much always have marks for tablespoons. Some of these other markings on the wrapper will vary from brand to brand. Each stick is 8 tablespoons, which is 1/2 a cup. They are then sold in a box of 2-4 sticks, which is either 1 cup or 1 pint (a pint being 2 cups). Like this:
https://images.heb.com/is/image/HEBGrocery/000113910-1
I greatly prefer this pre-graduated way of selling a product like this which is pretty much the standard of normal butter sold. There are other butters and margarines which are sold in tubs or odd sized blocks, but those are usually marketed as "spreadable" butters or have things like honey or other stuff mixed in and really more like spreads rather than stuff you'd normally cook with. Not that you need imperial units to have pre-graduated packaging though, just saying its nice having it.
Its bad when a recipe calls for like 1 cup of peanut butter which is sold in jars by weight. Absolute mess trying to measure it by volume.
Also… butter with honey mixed in?? Is this also American?
https://www.landolakes.com/products/butter-spreads/
Cinnamon sugar is very tasty on toast. I just picked up their Maple Me Crazy, it's nice to just quickly spread on a waffle when in a hurry to get out the door. Butters with herbs is pretty common, it's nice in a dinner roll or something like that. This isn't the only brand that makes products like this.
Next thing you'll be telling me is peanut butter and jelly come in separate jars!
https://www.smuckers.com/peanut-butter/goober
True innovation happens on this side of the pond.
Seriously, one thing that I've realized living in a country where metric went over like a loud fart in church is that metric only works when units are arbitrary; but many times we need to measure things that are not arbitrary.
I don't know why we "regressed," other than to say that when you live with both units, you realize that some metric units are silly, and some metric units make a lot more sense. More specifically, requiring that all units be merely powers of 10 of each other makes it very hard to use the most appropriate unit for the scale you need. (Don't believe me? Why do we have 24 hours in a day? 7 days in a week? 356.25 days in a year?)
IE, it's a lot easier to estimate short distances using feet or millimeters; but kilometers makes a lot of sense for long distances. Understanding "the weather" makes more sense in Fahrenheit, but general science makes more sense in Celsius.
Having your fuel economy measured in MPG but having your fuel tank size & fillups measured in L is always a fun game.
My previous car didn't have an economy reading anyway, so my only frame of reference before was calculating pence per mile rather than MPG. L/100km seems logical and I had got used to it in a matter of weeks. Mine is generally around 5-6L/100km on long, mostly petrol journeys, so this is now my new mental benchmark, and it's also trivial to go from this to pence per litre, and not much more to get to the pence per mile that I thought in before. I guess my brain has got good at multiplying by 1.6 as I use km for running and cycling too.
Apparently legislation still contains imperial units too.