Hey what ever happened to Metrification?

[Win32]

I was in England for four months. Milk and water were sold by the liter, which took some getting used to. I think speed limits were still in miles per hour, but as I obviously didn't drive, I don't remember with any certainty. (You know what's a real affront to social harmony? The British drive on the wrong side of the road.)

It is interesting that no one advocates stamping out languages for the sake of uniformity, though many of the arguments advanced for metrication would apply a fortiori to the spoken and written word. Likewise, I have yet to hear anyone argue that we phase out the minute, hour, day, week, etc. on the ground that they involve arbitrary conversion factors.

The Achilles' heel of the metric system was its adoption of the meter as the basic unit of length. That, when combined with a decimal system for derivative units, makes the metric system positively painful to use when estimating lengths of about 1 to 10 feet—which is to say, the very things we are more likely to estimate than to measure.

The metric system should have been based on some variant of the foot, which has been in use since ancient times. The Roman foot (pes) differs from ours by only about a third of an inch.

[Win32]

What's so painful about estimates of 3 to 30 decimeters?

The units just force too precise an estimate, at least for my less-than-stellar spatial intelligence. (Sure, you can always just take your feet estimate and multiply by 3. But the very fact that you might have to do that is a testament to the greater utility of the foot.)

[Win32]

I was in England for four months. Milk and water were sold by the liter, which took some getting used to. I think speed limits were still in miles per hour, but as I obviously didn't drive, I don't remember with any certainty. (You know what's a real affront to social harmony? The British drive on the wrong side of the road.)

Milk sold by the litre? I don't think I've ever seen that before?

I'm pretty sure it's by pints, unless it depends on the brand of milk you buy.

Hmm, I thought it was in mL. But maybe I misremember, as this was almost a year ago. I was just shopping at Tesco and Sainsbury's, so it wasn't anything exotic.

All I know for sure is that the jugs did not look like the familiar (U.S.) sizes.