Coming from Finland, I’ve been very fortunate of being privileged to live first 21 years of my life in a fully metric environment. Excluding the odd situation when buying a screen or a TV. (Must be noted that some places in Germany sell even screen in metrics.)
The beauty of metric system is in the way everything relates to each other. 1 centimetre times 100 is one meter. ‘centi’ in the beginning of centimetre means 1/100. 1000 times 1 meter is kilometre. A cube with 10 cm sides occupies the space of 1 litre. 1 litre of water weights 1 kilogram. Again, kilo meaning ‘thousands’, 1 gram of water takes the space of 1 cubic centimetre. So how heavy is cubic meter, 1000 litres, of water. Yes, it’s one metric ton.
Same in ‘imperialics’:
1 yard is 3 feet. 1 foot is 12 inches. 1 Stone is 14 pounds. 1 pound is 16 ounces.
Ok, so it doesn’t really rely on multiples of ten but I – and I trust everybody else, too – can count beyond their ten fingers. The problems is that after this it brakes down. 1 mile is 1760 yards. 1 stone is 224 ounces. one ton is 2000 pounds. And so on.
To makes things even more complicated, the UK is in between measuring systems. Not on it’s way from one to another, just in between. Example: It’s illegal to sell i.e. fruits just in imperial measurements, you have to have at least kilograms on the price tag. But then again milk is sold inconsistently in both pints and litres (you can imagine that I do whatever is in my power to buy my milk in metric measurements, I call it ‘Metric Milk’) Beer, in pubs, has to be sold in pints, you can’t sell it in litres. Beer in stores is most often sold in half litre cans. Roads are in miles. Body weight is in stones and pounds. Luckily they got rid of the shillings back in the 1971. That made their money fully compliant with the metric system.
There’s one more thing that makes me like the metric system even more. In Europe, we use the An paper standard, ISO 216. The most common size is A4. This is 21 cm wide and 29.7 cm high. Quite arbitrary? Well no. Put two of these together and you’ll get A3, which is 29.7 by 42 cm. Two of those give you an A2, then A1 and finally A0 (you can continue beyond this). A0 is 84.1 cm wide and 118.9 cm high, making it’s area precisely 1 square meter. Beautiful, Isn’t it?
If you want to continue reading on this subject, check out:
Wikipedia entry on Metric System
Wikipedia entry on Imperial Unit (this is quite funny, actually, you’ll find such length measurements as ‘pole’, ‘furlong’ and ‘league’)
Markus Kuhn’s very comprehensive ‘International standard paper sizes’
Have a good day you all,
–kristian
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