Can't remember exactly how BUPAS current advert goes but they do use kilometres. Maybe worth watching out for other adverts using metric measure. Maybe worth a word in the shell like of their advertising agencies giving details of people's preference regarding weights and measures.

I haven't heard that advert.
I'm thinking of taking out private health cover. If what you say is true I might have to cross 'em off my list. There's plenty of quality private health firms out there.

Isn't that a bit drastic, skipping them because they have an ad in metric ?

More interesting though I find that they "dare" to put an ad in metric when most people only know their height in imperial. Supposedly an ad should reach as many people as possible, right ?

Ralf

Very interesting... you aren't going to start up your "every British person I know knows their height in metres and weight in kilos" bit again, are you?

I asked the south africans, new zealanders and aussies in the office there height, they all responded in ft/in. When I asked for that in metric they all started with "Ooh, I don't know, probably about ...."

Says it all.

Granted they didn't know their weight in stone.

Ralf: There are plenty of private health care companies clamouring for customers in the UK.

Steve, did they know their weight in pounds though?

They would work their weight out from KG -to- pounds and then do a little more arithmetic to get the st/lb.

So no they didn't immediately know their weight in lbs but they quickly worked it out.

I see where you're coming from though!

So they knew their weight in kg not st/lb. That says it all too.

Do you seriously expect us to believe that they knew how to calculate their weight in st/lb from kg?

Come off it!

Pip, 2.2 lbs= 2 kilo, 14 lbs= 1 stone (about 7 kilogrammes per stone- very simple).



Hmm, I wonder if I should again attempt an explanation of how to easily work out your weight in pounds, from stone, via hundredweights....

Bryan,

I am well aware of the conversion factors and I personally am quite able to do the calcuations. (Incidently 2.2 lb = 1kg).

Steve's claim that the people from those metric countries all knew conversion factors for units they no longer use and could quickly work it out seemed a little far fetched to me.

Now matter how you cut it a convesion factor of 6.35 kg per stone is not that easy and no your cwt method doesn't help much, it still involves a lot of arithmetic.

I find it reasonably easy actually, and I'm hardly a mathematician.

Maybe it would be esier to think of the ton as 160 stone, and not 20cwt of 8 stone:

16 drams= 1 ounce
16 ounces= 1 pound
14 pounds= 1 stone
160 stone= 1 ton.

Pip, work it out mate!

The "southernhemispherials" as I call them here at work (and there are loads of them) do this:

"Hey I'm roughly 80 keelows, that's about 160 paaahdns, fellah"

Like most aussies, rough and ready! None of you 2.2X malarky!

And my point about "says it all" wasn't me saying "hey look how much better imperial is" it was that people will use whatever measures they want regardless of superinterlligent (by your standards) people like you!

You'd hate the fact that these aussies here will mix metres and yards in the same sentence without even noticing eg: "Yeeeah mate, I drove about 200 meeders got aaawt of moi caaahr and was lidderely 100 yeards from the nearest pub!"

Of course you won't believe they say feet, inches or yards because "Australia succesfully went metric in '72 overnight with no dire side effects" (or something)

Bryan: you will never convince me that your silly system equals or surpasses the metric version where 1000g = 1 kg, 1000 kg = 1 tonne.

Steve: No further comment, I will leave you to your fantasy world.

^ Deja vu... It really doesn't actually matter how many pounds there are in so many stone or how many inches in however many miles- how often have we been over this point?

Bryan,

you're turning a necessity into a virtue.
People living with the imperial system had to learn to disassociate miles and yards because they have no clear relation to each other (1760), people living in metric know the relation between kilometres and metres without even have to think about it.

Ralf

But Ralf, the imperial system didn't just "appear", it evolved. People, in times past, when measuring long distances, used miles. Other people, perhaps the same people, when measuring short distances, used yards.

Presumably, at some point, to ensure a conversion, the two units were fixed at the nearest convenient match, which we now know to be 1,760 yards to the mile.

You're argument is that we are saying, retrospectively, that there is no reason to mix yards and miles, to justify an impractical conversion.

We say: mixing yards and miles had no reason in the first place, hence the reason why the system is as it is.

Look at it this way: did you know that there are 1,440 minutes in a day, or 3,600 seconds in an hour? Does anybody, without recourse to a calculator? It is not necessary to know, because people use time units separately: minutes for short periods and days for long periods.

If it comes to that most ordinary people in metric countries probably don't know for sure how many square metres there are in a hectare, or even in a square kilometre, still less how many millilitres there are in a cubic decimeter, or microns in a kilometre, or grams of water in a cubic metre, or newtons in a kilogram weight. It would be interesting to know of any surveys or studies putting things like this to the test.

BWMA,

since "mile" comes from "mile passum" (sp?), that already indicates that even the Romans, who you got that system from, considered a relation between a "pace" and a "mile" important.

Talking about "natural evolution":
1) The yard is based on some monarch's arm length
2) The mile is based on 1000 Roman (!) paces

There's nothing "evolutional" about it, both measurements were dictated by the respective goverment at that time.

Ralf

^Not true. The yard was in use BEFORE the king decreed that it would be the length of his arm. This action only standardized the unit, it did not create it.

MikeW wrote: "The yard was in use BEFORE the king decreed that it would be the length of his arm. This action only standardized the unit, it did not create it."

And thus this standardized yard was enforced upon the people !

Absolutely, Conrad.

If all people had been using exactly the same length for a yard, there wouldn't have been the need for standardization. Apparently that was not the case, so a substantial part of the people had "their" yard redefined by the government (the King) because their yard was off from the King's yard.

Now some posters may come up with the argument that the meter got "redefined" as well in its past, that is different though since the new definitions of the meter were always within the accuracy bounds of the previous definition, and they therefore never falsified the previous definition.

Meaning: If I say
"this thing is between 4 and 5 meters wide"
and the next week
"it actually is between 4.5 and 4.6 meters wide", that's ok.
If I say though "it's 3 meters wide" in the second week, I falsified the previous definition, which is what happened to most "yards" when it was defined as the King's arm length.

Ralf

If you go to Trafalgar square you will see the yard, inch, foot struck into iron where it's length is accurate at an ambient temperature of 60F.

Ralf and Conrad, as welcome visitors to this Great country, you can go down to T.Square and point at these artifacts, mocking and laughing at them - you are free to do this due to the "constitution" - the other tourists, however, may ask you to move so that they can take photos.

Incidentally if I came to your countries in the 40's and mocked something uniquely german then I will be arrested and detained. You need to reflect on how lucky and "free" you are.

Personally I wouldn't visit another country and mock their traditions, methods, culture. It's rude to the point of sickening.

But hey Ralf/Conrad, enjoy your stay!

The foot was not consistent in all countries. In particular, until 1973 (when they went metric), South Africa used the Cape (or Rheinish) foot for land measurement in three of their four provinces. The result was that when Johannesburg was laid out in 1886 (in a rush following the diuscovery of gold), the Cape foot was used to lay out half the city centre and the Imperial foot the other half. (The dividing line was Bree Street). The result is that many of the road have a nasy kink in them as motorists go from one half of the city to the other.

That's pretty interesting.

(P.S. and I didn't mean that sarcastically!)

{And thus this standardized yard was enforced upon the people !}

All other units called the yard were illegal, that much is true. But it was still legal to use other lengths, as long as you didn't try to convince people that your 28" piece of cloth was a full yard.