Bear in mind that the gallon we use is different from the US gallon, too:

• a UK gallon is eight (imperial) pints of 20 fluid ounces, so 4.54 litres
• a US gallon is 231 cubic inches, so 3.79 litres

The reason that I thought American car fuel economy was so terrible as a child is partly because UK mpg is +20% on US mpg for the same car on the same fuel. But also, because American car fuel economy is so terrible.

Canada has a similar chart, with some fun modifications. For example, distance could be feet/inches, millimeters/meters/kilometers, or minutes/hours, depending on what you are measuring.

Thank you for posting this. So sick and tired of people saying that GB switched to Metric.

It's because we're stuck with a bunch of twats who can't let go of the past. They'll stick with Imperial measurements, mostly because the word looks like "Imperialist" and that's the side they want to be on. Jacob Rees-Mogg is a wrought-iron dildo.

According to this chart, goat milk is vegan 🤔

A similar chart could be made for the US, proving that it does use metric: soda and wine bottles, medicine doses, eye-glasses measurements (in fact most medical things).

I think that both systems are used in schools now.

But then I see cooking instructions for a "cup of chicken strips" and a recipe having 1/4 cup of butter, and I wonder why anyone thought that volume was a good idea there.

The only part I disagree with is stone/pounds for people's weight. Although we use stone, I've never heard someone use pounds... Maybe if you're in Weight Watchers or something, but otherwise it'd be rounded to the nearest half a stone (e.g. 9 and a half stone)

The US system month/day/year is pretty bad, but honestly, so is day/month/year. Pretty much everything else is written from largest to smallest unit. Regular numbers: 123, here 1 is the 100s, 2 is the 10s and 3 is the 1s. In money, when a currency also have smaller units, you always say the largest first. "3 dollars, 50 cents." A digital clock displays the numbers ordered from largest to smallest - 10:45:31. So why are people so proud of the european date format? Writing out a full timestamp would switch from increasing to decreasing units.

ISO-8601 is the only sensible choice.

I've seen people (ie USers) say that imperial makes more sense because it's easily divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6 so it's more intuitive. Yet I've never seen any of these people campaign to ditch their base 100 currency for a more "intuitive" £ s d style system. You already use decimal currency and find it easier than a system where 240¢ makes $1.

For the Time units - in terms of organizing by a list of numbers, I find year, month, day the best because it organizes itself.

• 20241210 today
• 20241211 tomorrow
• 20241217 a week from now

If these were folders in a computer, they'd be in numerical order automatically.

It’s 14 lb. Definitely a contender for the dumbest unit in common use.

They'll also list height in meters and centimeters, but list driving distance in miles.

stone is my favorite stupid measure

The US does it too, the other way around. They use fractions for a lot of things (3/8", half a foot, etc.) and then switch in decimals (like "2.5 inches") when they think you're not looking. Except for bullets for some reason which are in mm.

I end up doing a lot of lazy maths, and remembering rough numbers.

45MPG? That's about 10 miles per litre.
8 inches? Eh, 20cm.

Anything remotely technical, I convert everything to metric (and actually take the time do accurately).
Having the inch-fractions to mm table on the back of a ruler is very useful when using old drill bits and spanners.

apparently its short for association football

True dat. You wouldn't believe the crazy, flavourful food we eat behind closed doors. We save the bland beige-on-toast for when foreigners are around.

Nah, we have already reached the point of being a mix depending on tradition. We have been bottling soda in 20oz bottles and 2 liter bottles for decades and changing all the speed limit signs would cost too much to gain any traction. Just a confusing mix of whatever!

That’s fine, it’s the insistence that “cups” is a measurement that pisses me off.

Especially when you have oz, fl oz and cups in one recipe. Sort it the fuck out and just use grams.

There were some polls asking why people voted for Brexit. Not only where there respondents wanting imperial measurements, there was even a small but significant group that wanted the return of pre-decimal currency, which was abolished in 1971.

For those not familiar with the UK’s old currency, it used to be 12 pence in a shilling, and 20 shillings in a pound, and with a variety of coins representing odd combinations of those.

Imperial is slightly different. We use US customary measures.