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Sun may never set on British Empire’s pint | The Register
A victory for common sense above all else - although one of the things that makes us British is our quirky attitude towards the metric system!
Although I’m in my (early!) thirties and was born after the supposed metrication of Great Britain I still use imperial measurements often during every day life - I’m 5′10″ tall, milk (and more importantly beer!) comes in pints, my commute to the office is eight miles and bags of sugar are one pound in weight. There are some oddities - I weigh about 80 kilos, although my recently born nephew (congratulations to Mark and Louise, by the way!) weighed 7lb 9oz at birth and we buy fuel in litres (I was too young to drive when gallons were used to sell fuel and this creates the interesting situation where economy is calculated as miles per litre). This probably seems to strange to everyone in those countries who use one system or the other exclusively, but I (and most of my countrymen, I suspect) don’t care.
The most important point about the ruling is that it doesn’t actually matter what the unit of sale is - if someone wants to label a bag of onions as 1lb and 454g in weight then it suits everyone - someone who works in metric only will understand the quantity and those who work in imperial measures will also understand and be comfortable with it. Sure, the quantities may not be rounded to some arbitrary number, but that seems to be the conjecture of the people who want to force systems upon us. Just because a system is based upon the number ten it doesn’t mean that everything has to fit into nice rounded numbers of ten, 100 or 1000! At least our traditional units actually mean something (or did in the past!) instead of being arbitrary.
Rant over 
On this day..
- SAP and MaXware - 2007
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