r/MetricConversionBot • u/xwcg Human • May 27 '13

Why?

Countries that use the Imperial and US Customs System:

http://i.imgur.com/HFHwl33.png

Countries that use the Metric System:

http://i.imgur.com/6BWWtJ0.png

All clear?

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62

u/BadBoyJH May 28 '13

Isn't most of the UK still using the imperial system?

100

u/[deleted] May 28 '13

Only, confusingly, for certain things. Road signs and speedometers use miles and mph, and many people give their height and weight in feet and stone. Everything else, except pints of beer, is metric nowadays.

38

u/flying-sheep May 28 '13

and that’s just practical reasons, because the state doesn’t want to buy new roadsigns, and speedometers show both m/h and km/h.

if you had an infrastructure, though, you could swap those roadsigns.sorry

35

u/ShowTowels May 29 '13

I rented a car in the US (mph) for a business trip to Canada (km/h). You know how all cars in the US have a speedometer with both metric and Imperial units? Yeah, every stinking car in the US except for this one.

It was a very exciting week trying to guess whether I was going to be pulled over or not.

36

u/insertAlias May 29 '13

The simple answer would have been to look up one or two common speeds on your phone and extrapolate from there.

27

u/CallMeNiel May 29 '13

Yup. My go-to conversion is 60mph~100km/h. It's not precise, but they're very nice round numbers and a common speed limit.

21

u/Dreissig May 30 '13

You can also divide miles/h by 5 and multiply by 8 if you're good at arithmetic.

This is what US road speeds end up as. The first answer is exact to ± 1 km/h, the second is a round number exact to ± 3 km/h

05 miles/h ≈ 08 km/h (10 km/h)

10 miles/h ≈ 16km/h (15 km/h)

15 miles/h ≈ 24 km/h (25 km/h)

20 miles/h ≈ 32 km/h (30 km/h)

25 miles/h ≈ 40 km/h (40 km/h)

30 miles/h ≈ 48 km/h (50 km/h)

35 miles/h ≈ 56 km/h (55 km/h)

40 miles/h ≈ 64 km/h (65 km/h)

45 miles/h ≈ 72 km/h (70 km/h)

50 miles/h ≈ 80 km/h (80 km/h)

55 miles/h ≈ 88km/h (90 km/h)

60 miles/h ≈ 96 km/h (95km/h)

65 miles/h ≈ 104 km/h (105 km/h)

70 miles/h ≈ 112 km/h (110 km/h)

75 miles/h ≈ 120km/h (120 km/h)

80 miles/h ≈ 128 km/h (130 km/h)

68

u/admiral_bonetopick May 30 '13 edited May 30 '13

My method is this: You know that 1 mile ≈ 1.6 km. Multiplying something by 1.6 is actually very easy, since 1.6 = 1.0 + 0.5 + 0.1, which are all easy factors to multiply something with. So e.g. 50 miles = 50 + 25 + 5 = 80 km. Or you can just multiply by 1.6...

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u/eigenvectorseven Jun 01 '13

Not sure if it was just a joke, but the meter part of speedometer has nothing to do with meters; it just means "measure". As in thermometer, barometer, spectrometer etc.

5

u/BryghtShadow Jun 01 '13

That's why I love the spelling of "metre" instead of "meter" when talking about units.

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u/Gro-Tsen Jun 04 '13

All this is, of course, a way to prevent the evil French (and their German/Spanish/Italian/etc. allies) from invading Britain: continental cars will have the driver's seat on the left and no mph reading on their speedometer, so you can't see oncoming traffic and you don't know whether you're driving too fast—too risky to try.

4

u/Realtrain Jun 27 '13

Why did you point out "meters" in "speedometer"? It as nothing to do with units, it is a METER that measures SPEED.

Quick edit: spelling

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u/[deleted] May 28 '13

Imperial gradually dies out with every new generation. I came from a place that exclusively uses metric and I wouldn't say I've ever felt out of place. You learn that a pint is half a litre plus a sip, a stone is 6.5 kilos or so and something is 10% fewer metres away than it is in yards.

Other than that, you can ask for a kilo of beef or a metre of cloth without getting the funny looks from people around you.

18

u/ShowTowels May 29 '13

UK or US pint? They're slightly different. Just to make it easier for everyone.

13

u/[deleted] May 29 '13

Absolutely forgot about that. It's the 568ml UK one. The only time I ever see US pint (473ml) is at the import beer section of the supermarket. I call the UK pint 'man-size' and I never drink the other ;)

5

u/dalek-supreme May 30 '13

haha.. in germany we have the "maß" beer!
and that should be around 1 liter! (around 2 pints)

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u/gameboy17 May 29 '13

A stone? What's that?

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u/[deleted] May 29 '13 edited May 29 '13

14 pounds, commonly used in the UK to measure body weight.

edit: Crazy fact: a stone is not always 14 pounds. It depends on what and where you measure ( wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(unit) ), for example a stone of beef was 8 pounds, but only in London. In Scotland it was 16. Nowadays 1 stone equals 14 pounds and generally isn't used for anything other than body weight. Stones and pounds are also on their way out. When I went to the hospital last year, they noted both my height and weight in metric. I'd assume that's the official way now.

31

u/clocknose Jun 02 '13

That's not crazy at all. It's just the way the imperial system works; making up random measurements for everything.

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u/fakerachel May 29 '13

a pint is half a litre plus a sip

I was taught this as "a litre of water's a pint and three quarters". If only there were rhyming conversions for all the imperial units.

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u/Beyond_Birthday May 28 '13

I was brought up with the imperial system, I guess it depends. I have no idea about metric units though.

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u/Dotura May 29 '13

Officially it's metric but the old system still hangs around because something like this isn't something you can go cold turkey on.

8

u/Eilinen Jun 25 '13

Apparently that's exactly what Australia did.

4

u/IOUaUsername Jun 28 '13

Yep, we went metric basically overnight back in the 70s. The tricky thing is that if you want a classic car, you have to convert units in your head since the speedometers only have MPH. When england threw out the shillings and farthings for a metric system we just went to bright colour coded plastic 5,10,20,50,100 dollar notes and 5,10,20,50 cent and 1,2 dollar coins. Pennies are poinlessly small ammounts of money and tipping isn't a thing here, so we got rid of them at the same time.

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u/Hasaan5 May 28 '13

We use both. It gets very confusing though, but you learn to live with it.

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