Why trundle at 186 when you can whizz along at 300?

The age of high speed rail finally reaches London on November 14th, when the final section of High Speed 1 – or HS1 to its friends – opens, to complete the link from London to Paris and Brussels. This will cut the travel time to just two and a quarter hours, and even less to Brussels, by allowing high speed operation on the final 39 km of route from near Gravesend in Kent into London. But why have the media missed the opportunity to use even more impressive big numbers?

Continue reading “Why trundle at 186 when you can whizz along at 300?”

Would lined beer glasses solve the pint problem?

It is sometimes claimed by opponents of the metric system that any interference with “the British working man’s pint” would spell political death for any party that dared to touch it. Leaving aside the sexist assumptions behind the claim, let us examine whether there is a practical solution that need not be controversial.

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Boeing’s Dreamliner – grounded by US units of measurement?

The delay in Boeing’s “787 Dreamliner project” has been widely reported. Now an article in The Seattle Times has given rise to speculation about a link between Boeing’s problems and the units of measurement used in the US.

Continue reading “Boeing’s Dreamliner – grounded by US units of measurement?”

Driver location signs – possibly coming to a motorway near you

Martin Vlietstra, a regular contributor to Metric Views, draws our attention to a trial of driver location signs, to be conducted by the Highways Agency. Martin notes that these signs are metric, and draws attention to the explanation for this. 

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Are imperial units natural? (and some useful rules of thumb)

One of the claims sometimes made by defenders of imperial weights and measures is that they are “natural”. The metric system (they may say) is all very well for science and technical matters, but for everyday life imperial units like the foot conform to the human scale and are more “natural”,  unlike the arbitrary metric unit, the metre. We examine this argument.

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How to convert fuel consumption figures (if you must)

UKMA discourages conversion between metric and imperial units. Much better to understand and use metric only – and forget about imperial. Occasionally, however, it is necessary – e.g. when trying to understand historical data or American stories. The following technical advice is offered by Martin Vlietstra.

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Britain’s new Highway Code. Updated but outdated – a victim of the measurement muddle

The new Highway Code is an example of the consequences of the Britain’s measurement system muddle. Its mixture of units from the imperial and metric systems brings confusion, when clarity should be a foremost requirement. The UK Metric Association (UKMA) has looked forward to the completion of the metric changeover, and produced a simplified, metric version of the Highway Code to illustrate the clarity that one system makes possible. (Press release issued on 27 September 2007.) Continue reading “Britain’s new Highway Code. Updated but outdated – a victim of the measurement muddle”

The Four Thirds system

In response to a misconception voiced in another article, https://metricviews.uk/2007/08/28/photo-paper-sizes/#comment-312, it may surprise some readers to learn that the image sensors in Four Thirds digital cameras do not have a diagonal size of four thirds of an inch.

[Article by Martin Ward]

The naming of the Four Thirds camera system is a good example of a practice that is often used when a manufacturer wants to hide the true size of a product from the consumer. Namely, an obscure or deceptive imperial measuring convention is used instead of the original metric design size. The image sensors in Four Thirds cameras are actually 18 mm x 13.5 mm (22.5 mm diagonal), with an imaging area of 17.3 mm x 13.0 mm (21.6 mm diagonal) – quite a lot smaller than a diagonal size of four-thirds of an inch (33.9 mm), and significantly smaller than the 22.5 x 15.0 mm and 23.6 mm x 15.8 mm sensors used in the equivalent cameras of competitors Canon and Nikon.

The practice of describing image sensors in this deceptive manner continues from the days when all image sensors consisted of vacuum tubes and were described by the physical diameter of the glass tube, which was always larger than the “diameter” of the image sensor inside. Thus the imaging area of a Four Thirds camera sensor (17.3 mm x 13 mm) is the same as the imaging area of a hypothetical vacuum image-sensing tube of 4/3 inch diameter.

As with LCD and plasma TVs, technology has changed beyond the point where it makes any sense to continue using the old measuring conventions. It would be far more useful to modern consumers to describe the sizes of TV screens and camera image sensors in terms of width x height in standard metric units, than in terms of the diameters of hypothetical vacuum tubes, especially when these products now come in different aspect ratios. But, as is often the case, the needs of consumers do not always coincide with those of the marketing departments of manufacturers.

Further information on the Four Thirds system can be found at https://www.four-thirds.org/en/

Metric and the decline of UK manufacturing industry

Metric Views’ attention has been drawn to an article recently posted on the “Weekly Gripe”. This links the decline in the 1980’s of the UK’s engineering and manufacturing industries to their failure to embrace metrication in the decade before.

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