The rest of the world has moved on to the metric system. Even NASA did.

UK should not hold us back with their shenanigans.

BoxOfRain 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

To be fair, who actually has a mental model of what 20,779 square kilometres or 8,023 square miles (the area of Wales expressed as a number) actually looks like? Doesn't matter if you're using imperial or metric, it's not very intuitive beyond the human scale.

If you're trying to communicate 'this much rainforest disappeared' or 'look how large this landmass-sized Antarctic iceberg is' to a wide audience a well-known area is a reasonable way to do it. In Britain basically everyone knows roughly what the size of Wales is relative to the other countries of the UK, even if they don't know its exact size.

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lenerdenator an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The UK is arguably worse than the US in this regard. The US has mainly stayed with a system that sticks to one measurement across use cases. If I burn fuel at a rate of x miles per y gallons, I purchase it at the pump in gallons. If Tommy Atkins burns fuel at a rate of x miles per y gallon, he purchases it at the pump in liters; there's an extra step for conversion.

	▲	BoxOfRain 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Agree on that front. Miles per litre or litres per 100 miles are perfectly comprehensible units of measurement but we've kept miles per gallon for consistency even though barely anyone uses gallons in the UK these days outside of certain trades. In real life mixed units like this show up all the time, I once ordered 30' of 8 mm line for example. I get that no government is keen to spend money on sending someone with a marker pen and a calculator around the country changing all the road signs, I wouldn't support that in this economy either. There's an economic argument for keeping miles, but it makes no sense to keep gallons in this context in my opinion.