Monday’s Friday Reads – 6 April 2020

1. Was the LRB escalators article written in the 20th century? I got lost at things being “feet” and “fluorescent tubes”.

2. @Briantist It was written this century, but still relevant 🙂

3. @Brian
   Yes, I agree. I get very irritated when people refuse to use metric measurements. The metric system has been taught exclusively in schools since the mid 1960s, and yet we are still stuck with a system of measurements that no-one under the age of 60 really understands, or can do maths with.

4. @CHRISMITCH

   It’s OK most of the time because I can divide “feet” by three and I recall that “2.2 pounds of jam” is about 1 kg. It’s the derivatives that throw me. I have no feel for what what “feet per second” might mean, it’s need meters per second or meters per second per second.

   We were deliberately NOT taught imperial measurements! My head is full of base-X like binary and hexadecimal which I can do easily, but I have to look up feet-miles or ounce-pound-tons.

   Given that I’m distinctly into middle aged it seems odd when people write in unit systems no-one uses for work purposes, including London Transport.

   Sorry for the mini rant. I will try the article again, with a calculator to “correct” it.

5. There are very few dimensions quoted in the escalator piece, and that ideal speed limit was no doubt determined by LU many years ago when imperial measurements were the rule. A metric equivalent in brackets might have been given I suppose, but given a typical escalator step ‘going’ or ‘run’ (longitudinal step interval) is a little over a foot anyway, feet/minute is a rough and ready approximation to steps/minute, so useful for instantly visualising speed and carrying capacity in a way metres/second would not be. The article was published in 2002, when fluorescent lighting was ubiquitous for indoor commercial lighting.

6. At least two national newspapers still use “Imperial” measurements in their peices, I’m sad to say.

7. The best argument for having nothing to do with imperial units is the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter. Someone at Lockheed Martin designed a piece of software whose internal calculations were all in imperial. I think he first had to convert the metric inputs he was supplied with to do it like that, so this was the action of a stubborn fool. But he forgot to convert one of the final outputs to metric, as specified, so it remained in foot-pound-seconds rather than newton-seconds. I’m astonished his employer let work like this. They can’t have been unaware if they did any QA.

   But unfortunately the world won’t let you alone. I once assisted a public sector body with a matter relating to armament suppliers, to result in a published report, which was legally required to be metric. How then were we to write about an armament known as a six inch gun? An early draft had “152.4mm gun”. But it turned out that the gun wasn’t precisely 6″, it was precisely something but not that. The eventual solution was to call it the Six Inch Gun, proper name.

   I only understand the weather forecast given in celsius, and have to convert it from those 19th century people, mostly Americans, who still give it in degrees frankenstein (as I call it, for it is a frankenstein unit, 32 and 212 indeed). I am astonished at the number of British people, younger than me, who learned only celsius at school, who only understand it in frankenstein.

   In Britain, we sell fuel in litres, but road distances and car odometers are in miles. Why then is fuel consumption not given in miles per litre? That’s what you need to know to do any simple calculations using the data to hand. I suppose it would be also be a frankenstein unit, but at least it reflects the units we use.

   Then there are cheats and the not-quites. When Americans do metric, they often still do it in the 1880s centimetre-gramme-second (cgs) system which the rest of the world superseded with the metre-kilogramme-second (mks) system, ooh, as recently as the 1940s. But even European spectroscopists like their cgs wave-number measure of frequency, defined as cycles per centimetre. And meteorologists report atmospheric pressure in the unconventional unit of the hectopascal, because it is the same as millibars.

8. Some of the absurd imperial hangovers relating to roads have just become numbers. Miles per gallon is a good example as while most people know what a mile is, broadly, a gallon has become as archaic as a hogshead. It is not used for practical purposes any longer. So miles per gallon becomes a figure which is of use only in comparison with other measures of miles per gallon. Made more difficult because manufacturers published ‘miles per gallon’ figures bear little relationship to reality.

9. I still think of a “hot day” being over 80 degrees, a record being ten inches (or sometimes 8 or 9 inches), and my height five feet nine. I left the 6th form in 1968, so when was the official cut-off period was for Imperial measurements in schools?

10. Construction suffers from having ply in 8′ x 4′ sheets, all other boards are now generally 2400 x 1200.

11. Well good old Network Rail has stuck with miles and chains to define the positions of infrastructure and other features along their tracks, both on site and in various publications!

    Mile posts (and their quarter, half and three quarter mile siblings) are currently alive and well, with the maintainer in some locations even marking out the position of every chain between them, presumably to assist with the location of infrastructure faults that may not be obvious. Speed limit interface positions and other data, such as junctions, are still shown in miles and chains in the Sectional Appendices.

    I have just completed a piece of work on a project to investigate the potential for line speed improvements on a section of railway and it was a whole lot easier to reference the proposed speed limit changes in the final report in miles and chains, than to convert to metric and then cause confusion by being inconsistent with the existing published information that those in the rail industry understand.

    Track alignment design has been done using metric units for many years and this created a situation in the past on one project where the output was defined in Miles and Metres, with a mile post being selected at the low mileage (London) end of the site and subsequent measurements stated in metres. I think we conveniently ‘forget’ the next successive whole mile post and carried on with the continuous meterage beyond the mile post and above 1609 m (1 mile). We also found that some quarter mile sections between posts were significantly longer or shorter than others…

12. I’m happy using both forms of measurements, a bit puzzled why some people in the comments are getting so upset why some of the imperial measures still exist. Especially as 95% or more of us aren’t scientists or engineers, and the computer/internet age means that we can enter our weight/height/distances in the system we are comfortable with, and it will be translated.

    Miles per litre makes no sense anyway as it combines 2 different systems of measurement, and as road signs are measures in miles, it makes sense to have the “volume” in imperial too.

13. I use miles per litre because it saves converting one of the units from those given by the car (miles) and the diesel pump (litres), especially as my car does approximately 10 miles per litre.

14. ALex McKenna
    I was introduced to what were then called “mks” units in the IVth form in 1961 for the new (rapid-stream) “O” levels.

    JRB
    A chain is so close to 20 metres as to be only worth bothering with for very precise measurements (!)

15. @GT

    Such as a cricket pitch

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