BEVS

I will have a punt at this:-

Our English Stilton is now safe as our English cheddar . **

** I am not sure about this

dbd33

I prefer imperial as it's more useful for practical things. Suppose I use a metric recipe and it calls for 500g of butter then i have to guestimate 46g so as to cut it off a slab to go with a full slab. Using metric always involves estimating with strange numbers, 46, 18.5, it's tricky and error prone. Chopping something in half or quarters is much easier.

All your dates are wrong, of course, CCYYMMDD is the way to go.

scrubbedexpat142

Date: largest to smallest (YY MM DD)
Address: Largest to smallest (Country, town, street)

If a pool is 5 meters wide, 10 meters long and 2 meters deep, how much does the water in it weigh? I can easily calculate that in my head (100 metric tons)

Or using imperial equivalents -

(((5 x 3.28084) x (10 x 3.28084) x (2 x 3.28084)) x 62.42718356)/2240 = 98.4207 tons.

dbd33

But, in real life, the pool isn't built in meters, it's 7' deep, 50' long, 20' wide and built on a plot of 100 acres, 4 of which separate the streets. If you try to express any of the dimensions in metric lots of decimal places are involved so estimating is difficult. I accept that if one demolished all the buildings and moved the roads then one could achieve mathematical elegance in metric but that does seem rather a bother compared with keeping the easy, round, numbers in which God built the civilized world.

scrubbedexpat142

But it's not 7' deep, 50' long & 20' wide, is it!

scrubbedexpat142

By the way, you forgot that the example was of a calculation of weight!

Let me help.

The pool you measured as 7' x 50' x 20' but which should (as an equivalent to the original ) be stated as approximately 7' x 33' x 15' which equates to 3465 cubic feet of water, @ 62.42718356 lbs per cubic foot (there's those pesky decimal places again!) which equals 216,319.1910354 lbs / 2240 = 96.567049569375 tons!

Most elegant!

dbd33

Again, you have to forsake reality to make your point. The pool, like the house and the barns and whatnot, exists. It has dimensions 7x50x20 or, in metric 2.1336x15.24x6.096. You could give it neat dimensions in metric but you'd have to fill it in at the sides or dig up the garden. Metric only works neatly if you change the physical dimensions of things to match the measures, it's not practical to change real objects, no one replumbs cows, hence the 454g slabs of butter.

Why you would want to weigh the contents of a swimming pool escapes me. Do you want move it to the top of a mile high skyscraper and so need to know how many pounds the cranes can lift, how many horse power the transport lorries will need to have, and how many gallons of fuel they'll use? If so, you could consider emptying it.

Almost Canadian

In light of the fact that the Labour party seems intent on ripping itself apart. I can't see a referendum on the UK joining the EU again being on the cards anytime soon.

dbd33

I agree. I watched one of Mr. Pie's rants recently, probably a link from here, and thought his points well made, exactly what the Labour leader should be saying but isn't. Labour is ineffectual.

That said, I think the EU is a bridge burned. There aren't a lot of examples of acrimonious divorce being followed by successful remarriage.

Mordko

Only if you are thinking in the olden Imperial rater than SI units.

Its simpler. 3465 cubic feet = 98118 litres. 1 litre of water has a mass of 1 kg. So the actual answer in SI is 98,118 kg. Or 98 tonnes.

scrubbedexpat142

Structural engineers need to know the weight of water tanks as well as swimming pools!

You don't need to change anything, just use metric from the start!

scrubbedexpat142

In the context (Brexit) I think you'll find that most imperial enthusiasts in the UK would choke on using litres, kgs or ton​​​​nes!

Thats rather the point!

Mordko

You often need these types of calculations and they have to be in SI. If you are knocking down a large building, you need to price how many truck loads it will take to transport rubblized waste. Truck capacity by weight is regulated in SI units in Canada.

Mordko

Aren’t Imperial enthusiasts in the UK mostly focused on their ability to buy food by the pound? And I can’t fathom why not.

scrubbedexpat142

Yes, but many Brits don't want those nasty "foreign" units, they want British! For them, a return to Imperial is a Brexit benefit - just like the blue passports!