The other strange thing I noticed in the UK is that whilst we might buy a 2 litre bottle of milk, their milk comes in 2.272 litre bottles (4 pints)! Stupid poms...
Interesting, I looked it up. Its half a UK gallon.
Which now asks the question, what happened when they sailed from UK to US? Did they loose their gallon buckets over the side and guessed when they arrived?
I'm sure there is also a interesting story behind beer glass sizes.
And for the non space buffs, Human's measure distance in space using light years (makes sense, for now) and distance between Sun and the Earth, called the AU (Astronomical Unit to remove any potential planetarian bias/racism by not referencing EARTH). I'm sure one day this will look as stupid as 4' 8.5" for track gauge.
Regards
Shane
'Which now asks the question, what happened when they sailed from UK to US? Did they loose their gallon buckets over the side and guessed when they arrived?'
Or were our American friends just being different in the use of US gallons, foolscap paper size, short tons and their retention of feet and inches. Thankfully, however, they retained SG railways - perhaps someone boobed in this regard!
Is there anywhere else in the world that still uses other than metric weights and measures? Apart from the Poms who don't deem to know which way to go that is. Perhaps they will go back to 'imperial measurements' when they exit the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system#/media/File:Metrication_by_year_map.svg
Different countries still use imperial in various ways.
UAE use sqr feet for apartment and house sizes. Until late 2000's they still sold petrol that way and you can see the distance meters on highway signs were at one stage converted from Imperial as they give 400m warning of something and remeber this country basically didn't exist 20 years ago apart from a small village.
India also does same
Anyway looks like Burma and some small rat hole in western Africa are also still imperial.
Conversion and calculation incidents[[color=#0b0080]edit][/color]
The dual usage of or confusion between metric and non-metric units has resulted in a number of serious incidents. These include:
and then theres the spelling issueVariations in spelling[edit]The SI symbols for the metric units are intended to be identical, regardless of the language used[6] but unit names are ordinary nouns and use the character set and follow the grammatical rules of the language concerned. For example, the SI unit symbol for kilometre is "km" everywhere in the world, even though the local language word for the unit name may vary. Language variants for the kilometre unit name include: chilometro (Italian), Kilometer (German),[Note 7] kilometer (Dutch), kilomètre (French), χιλιόμετρο (Greek), quilómetro/quilômetro (Portuguese), kilómetro (Spanish) and километр (Russian).[88][89]
Variations are also found with the spelling of unit names in countries using the same language, including differences in American English and British spelling. For example, meter and liter are used in the United States whereas metre and litre are used in other English-speaking countries. In addition, the official US spelling for the rarely used SI prefix for ten is deka. In American English the term metric ton is the normal usage whereas in other varieties of English tonne is common. Gram is also sometimes spelled gramme in English-speaking countries other than the United States, though this older usage is declining