The absurdity of the use of kph

-
Image
  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....
Post a Comment

The importance of specifying units (and getting them right)

-

I came across theet of sign, which, although completely metric, bothered me ever so slightly. 


Firstly, the use of 'T' rather than 't' for tonnes. Something that needs to be corrected on UK weight limit signs in general. 

The lower sign, however, gives a figure of 4425, which we can only reasonable assume to be millimetres. (You can't be sure because the units aren't specified. Maybe it's just a random number?)

Such signs give an impression that metric units are complicated when, in fact,  they are much simpler than the alternative. 

But the use of the appropriate scale is paramount. 4.4 m would be a much more appropriate for this sign.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the stupidity of the AA

-
I've just read the article that the AA published about their little "survey" on whether the British population prefer miles and rubbish versus kilometres and sense, and i noticed the fact that whoever wrote that article is a blithering idiot. First sample from their article: " Distances in kms rather than miles" - all sensible people should know by now that you never write kms. what crap is that? km! full stop... but it gets worse... Sample # 2 "Speed limits in Kph rather than Mph" - Kph? Are you telling me that the Automobile Association are that incompetent that they don't know how to properly write kilometres per hour... km/h ? [nobody cares how miles/h mph Mph M.P.H... or whatever you want to put is written] But this one is the KILLER! "Fuel consumption in Km/100litres"- the minor thing wrong with this is that it's km not Km obviously.. but I'm appauled bu the fact that the AA are saying that metric fuel consumption is...
Read more

Fuel consumption/ fuel effinciency

-
Miles per gallon, it's the "standard measure" of fuel consumption in the UK although the kilometre is much more widely used than the gallon. (making a metric measure more sensible!) But I don't care about miles per gallon... So, in civilised terms, fuel consumption is measured in litres per 100 kilometres. (L/100km) is this really practical? Most British car adverts show fuel consumption in L/100km (unfortunately most times in brackets and in small print). but why not kilometres per litre? (km/L) personally, I think km/L is simpler to get to grips with, and more practical because you know that you'll drive y km using x L of petrol at a given fuel consumption. ( y / x km/L). eg. 6 km on 2 litres of petrol at 3km/L! using L/100km is not as practical! so why make life more difficult? sure many people would rather switch to km/L rather than L/100km! why not use km/L ? ...they do in Latin America and Japan!
Read more