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Any tricks to thinking in meters than feet

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Being English, I use both.

Metric at work for engineering drawings, etc. and Imperial at home for larger construction projects, etc.

Our shops generally sell things in Kg as they were banned from using Imperial a few years ago although that is now allowed again.

All road signs are in miles and yards - I think there is a law which states that they must be.

We also use feet and inches to express our height and unlike the US which just uses pounds for personal weight measurement, we use stones and pounds. So an American who weighs 171 pounds would be 12 stone and 3 pounds here.


Steve.
 
When are they going to come out with a camera lens with focusing measurements in Smoots? :laugh:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot

Interestingly enough, the Oliver R. Smoot referenced in the above article was president of the International Standards Organization (ISO), so why cant a Smoot be a standard unit of measure? :cool:
 
ME Super said:
When are they going to come out with a camera lens with focusing measurements in Smoots? :laugh:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot

Interestingly enough, the Oliver R. Smoot referenced in the above article was president of the International Standards Organization (ISO), so why cant a Smoot be a standard unit of measure? :cool:
Click to expand...

I have quite a few lenses with no focussing scale at all.:tongue:
 
ME Super said:
When are they going to come out with a camera lens with focusing measurements in Smoots? :laugh:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot

Interestingly enough, the Oliver R. Smoot referenced in the above article was president of the International Standards Organization (ISO), so why cant a Smoot be a standard unit of measure? :cool:
Click to expand...

Haaa! Never knew of a smoot, since Google recognizes it I don't see why not?

Google Calculator also incorporates smoots, which it reckons at exactly 67*inches (1.7018 meters).[1] Google also uses the smoot as an optional unit of measurement in their Google Earth software.
Click to expand...
 
I guestimate yards with the assumption my accuracy is within the few inches difference between yards and meters, then try to avoid a wide open aperture! I did finally acquire one of those shoe mount rangefinders, but that's yet another fiddly thing to mess with. (I wanted one of the Voigtländer jobbies, but they seem to sell for about twice what I was willing to pay.) I've screwed up the distance occasionally, but not often enough to get excited about it.
 
I used to play a bit of golf so yardage is pretty easy for me. Guesstimate and accommodate for those few inches and stop down.
 
Newt_on_Swings said:
I used to play a bit of golf so yardage is pretty easy for me. Guesstimate and accommodate for those few inches and stop down.
Click to expand...

As a target shooter for 40~ years, yards are ingrained in my brain for any distance over 12 1/2 or so fathoms.
 
Steve Smith said:
But has it [the metric system] ever been used?
Click to expand...
Of course. It's used every day throughout the country.

Drugs are sold by the cc or the kilo. High-dollar commodities. :D
------
Modern machine tools can work in either metric or imperial interchangeably, at the press of a button.

Modern mechanical drawings normally have dimensions in both systems for the convenience of the reader.
One system is stated as being the nominal, with the other being informational.

- Leigh
 
To answer the original question...

Just figure one meter = three feet. Close enough, and within the tolerance of any lens distance scale.

That approximation is only short by 10%, so add 1 foot for every 10 feet.

- Leigh
 
The international definition of the inch is exactly 25.4 milimeters.
Therefore, by extension, if you are measuring in inches, you are still using milimeters. It's only a conversion factor that sets the two apart.

Even in countries that have supposedly standardized on one system or another, they still use measurements interchangeably. In Canada, you buy gasoline by the liter but you buy milk by the gallon. You might quote the air temperature in degrees Celsius but, when you bake a cake it will be in degrees Fahrenheit.
 
Worker 11811 said:
Even in countries that have supposedly standardized on one system or another, they still use measurements interchangeably. In Canada, you buy gasoline by the liter but you buy milk by the gallon. You might quote the air temperature in degrees Celsius but, when you bake a cake it will be in degrees Fahrenheit.
Click to expand...

We buy milk by the litre. I haven't seen half gallons of milk in Canada for decades. Besides, our gallons were different from yours (4.3L Imperial versus 3.8L US).

Ovens are still in Fahrenheit, but mostly because American companies are too lazy to make them dual-scale. :smile:
 
Sometimes meters are in feet.


Well, foot-candles.
Which always gives me an amusing visual.
 
Worker 11811 said:
The international definition of the inch is exactly 25.4 milimeters.
Therefore, by extension, if you are measuring in inches, you are still using milimeters.
Click to expand...

It's the other way round. Inches existed before millimetres. It is the inch which defines the millimetre by stating that 25.4 of them will fit into one inch.


Steve.
 
Steve Smith said:
It's the other way round. Inches existed before millimetres. It is the inch which defines the millimetre by stating that 25.4 of them will fit into one inch.
Click to expand...

Yes, the inch existed before the meter but it's not the same inch we use today. In 1959, the US joined in an international treaty which defined the inch for use in international trade, etc. That treaty defined the inch as 25.4 mm, exactly.

The meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance between the north pole of the earth and the equator, as measured at sea level. However, in 1983, the meter was redefined as the distance traveled by a photon of light emitted from a krypton atom in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

So, therefore, ever since 1983, the inch has been defined as 0.0254 * the distance light travels in 0.000000003335641 seconds.
 
I feel privileged in a way that Australia and New Zealand adopted the metric system when I had been using the Imperial one for 40 years or so. I could use both, choosing which was best for the time.

For whole metres I just take "giant steps" one of each being close enough to a yard=a metre, which reflects the charming Imperial measurement derivations, so many of which were based on human anatomy.

It's interesting to see the standards which never made it to metric: in my film industry days feet persisted, it would have sounded crazy to say at a rough cut screening "That shot needs just another 30.48 centimetres" rather than " a foot" The processing labs did charge by the metre, though.
 
Worker 11811 said:
Yes, the inch existed before the meter but it's not the same inch we use today. In 1959, the US joined in an international treaty which defined the inch for use in international trade, etc. That treaty defined the inch as 25.4 mm, exactly.
Click to expand...

That's because before WWII your inch wasn't the same size as the Imperial inch.


Steve.
 
I rounded up also. :tongue:

Fractions are never used in metric to my knowledge.

- Leigh
 
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