Room Sizes Only in Metres

giraffe69

To show the difficulty in changing many years ago (when Celsius was less usual than it is now and also more commonly known as Centigrade) I checked the marking on an exam paper for Central Heating Engineers. A worrying number of them thought that comfortable room temperature for a system was 68 degrees C!

BillJones

REDDDRAGGON wrote: »

They get confused as soon as I start talking micrometers or centimeters, they only understand "milli"!

Everyone should be able to handle SI units these days.

Surely centimetres aren't SI, though...

PasturesNew

AdrianC wrote: »

Surely the easiest conversion for a die-hard Imperialist is one metre = one yard (roughly)...?

Not when it comes to room dimensions.... how big/small is a room that's not in round metres??



I remember at school, when metres first came out that it's 39.4", so that's almost (but not quite) 10% bigger!

jjlandlord

Just remember that 1 metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.
Everything else follows naturally.

BillJones

jjlandlord wrote: »

Just remember that 1 metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.
Everything else follows naturally.

As an approximation, I also use one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator.

AdrianC

PasturesNew wrote: »

Not when it comes to room dimensions.... how big/small is a room that's not in round metres??

They're normally measured in square metres.

I remember at school, when metres first came out

Blimey, you're old.
Was that in 1668, when John Wilkins (with Christopher Wren) first set the basic standard?
Or 1793 when the French first adopted it as the standard unit of measure and basis of the SI system?

I wonder how many like the OP would be less suspicious of it if they knew it was an English idea a century before being adopted by the French?

Leon_W

I use centigrade in the winter as it's easy to visualise a cold day at say -2 or -3 the path is going to be icy.


In the summer I use Fahrenheit. 70's is comfortable. 80's is hot and 90's are boiling.

dodger1

!!!!!! wrote: »

Since the EU has given up trying to get the UK to go fully metric, why don't we go back to Imperial?

Because metric is so much easier to learn.

katejo

westv wrote: »

Am I the only one that finds it very annoying when EAs only show room measurements in metres and are too lazy to show feet and inches too?

I sympathise. Some measurements I know better in metric and others in imperial! I still prefer room measurements in imperial. I grew up learning metric at school in the 70's but using imperial at home.

jjlandlord

AdrianC wrote: »

I wonder how many like the OP would be less suspicious of it if they knew it was an English idea a century before being adopted by the French?

I think that the idea was floating around and being proposed but lacked real traction until the French Revolution allowed to make it happen somewhere.

In fact, apparently in 1790 the French proposed John Wilkins' idea and the UK and the (young) US supported it, which is ironic considering the current situation.

I guess that once the French adopted it and the war broke out, there was a point of politics and pride NOT to adopt it this side of the channel.

The same goes for driving on the right.