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Showing posts from January, 2009

The absurdity of the use of kph

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  First and foremost I apologise (yet again) for such a long gap in between blog posts. The return of freedom over the past year has kept me away from screens. They say it takes 66 days to develop a new habit. Running is a habit I developed over lockdown, but the return to the office (and I intend to never work from home again) and frequenting the pub has reduced frequency of this.  It is, however, not completely bleak for my physical well-being. Cramming a number of social events in after work has led to me doing a lot more walking around central London. I don’t have an Apple Watch, (other brands of smart watch exist), but my iPhone records my steps and a lot of really interesting data on my walking and running. As would be no surprise, I’ve configured everything in metric units. Thankfully, gone are the days where Apple would dictate to you , based on your location, the units of measurement you use. You have a chose whether to specify distances in miles or kilometres....
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Imperial street signs are liars!

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Looking at the image below, you see that the distance between each "200 yard" sign is actually 200m, so this means that the signs are obviously inaccurate. What's stupid is that the DfT mandates that signs be placed in distances that are specified in metric units (usually m or mm), however the content of the sign is imperial, and therefore innacurate! 200m is 218.72 yards, therefore, why not just write 200m on the signs? If people don't understand the metre, let them learn! We really don't need to 'dumb down' metric units for people, or there'll never be any progress in relation to full metrication! The best way to learn something is by full immersion. (image taken from the UKMA website)
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Stupidity

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This morning, i was surfing the web, and came upon this ad... what Rubbish! Now, BMI is calculated using ones weight (actually mass) in kilograms, and height in metres. This, however asks for height in feet and inches, and weight in stones and pounds, now this is a recipe for disaster... a) Accuracy.. height in feet and inches is not as accurate as height in cm or(metres to two decimal places.) Also, weight in kg is more accurate because you can say,for example 72.3kg, but with stones and pounds, the smallest unit you can use is the pound. b) Conversion.. how are we sure that they're converting to the most accurate degree? .. you can't. The UKMA's blog Metric Views has a rather interesting article about the problem of using imperial weights. http://www.metricviews.org.uk/2008/11/04/dual-unit-weighing-scales-can-be-harmful-to-health-official/
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