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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Birmingham's Waterways

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Before my most recent trip to Birmingham, I was told that it is an architecturally uninspiring and characterless city. However, it seems that the city is highly undersold. Admittedly, there are parts of the city which are dingy, but it is evident that a lot of investment has gone into the city in recent years.

Shiny new buildings dot the skyline and complement the historic baroque buildings, to some extent even allowing one to overlook some of the less attractive edifices from the 60s. One of my favourite things about the city is how car-friendly it is in comparison to London. With wide roads and lots of affordable parking, it's a stark contrast to London's narrow and winding streets, but it still maintains pedestrian-friendliness.

As I'm not an employee of visitbirmingham.com, I'll get to the point of this blog post: signs on the canal.

Upon descending from broad street to the canal, I was met by a sign showing all of the landmarks from that point specified in metres and kilometres (see the photo). You'll also notice that these are not, by any means modern signs. I am by no means an expert on the history of Birmingham, so if anyone knows how old these signs are, I'd appreciate if you let me know.

All the signs that I saw along the canal were specified in metric units, unlike the mish-mash of metric and imperial units on the waterways of London. Even my friend (who is not as favourable of the metric system as I am), appreciated the consistency of the signage and got to grips with them quite quickly. My friend even said that it's so much easier to work in metric because you can compare a distance in metres to one in kilometres so much more easily than one in fractions of miles to yards.

This just goes to show, metric signs make sense and it defies the argument that imperial units are 'natural'. They are dated and belong in the past.








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