I think this is the longest title I've had for a blog post!
And yet the post should be relatively short.
I came across this video about the history of the microfloppy disk, the 720kB / 800kB, 1.4MB removable disk format that lives on in the shape of the Save Icon and the classic (but only marginally funny) joke about a kid thinking that one is a 3-D print of the Save Icon.
[https://youtu.be/djsyVgTGaRk?si=Kd0Z1nrqXfmUG15c]
It's an intriguing history, mostly because there was a fairly rapid transition from 8" floppy disks to 5.25" floppy disks in the 1970s, but then, despite Sony's microfloppy arriving in at the very beginning of the 1980s, and being so superior, it took about 5 to 7 years before it started to dominate (hint: the IBM PC standard held it back).
But one fact really blew my mind: it turns out the 3.5" microfloppy doesn't exist. Let's say that again - the 3.5" microfloppy doesn't exist.
In reality it's 9cm, not 3.5". I've used them since the mid 1980s and in all those 40 years, I've never known this - I was duped by some Cultural Imperialism!
In retrospect, it should be pretty obvious that the 3.5" microfloppy is unlikely to have a specification in inches, simply because it was made by Sony, a Japanese company. Japan uses metric. CDs, for example are 12cm - they were designed in Europe and Japan. 3.5 inches is 8.89cm, making it just over 1mm less than the correct size for a microfloppy disk, but that 1mm matters.
We can prove this to ourselves by measuring it (which I did) and then taking a photo. The trick though is to compensate for the parallax, since if you're looking at the disk from the centre, then the width could indeed look about 1mm shorter depending on the thickness of the ruler you use. In this photo, I did it by using a panoramic shot. That way I can measure 0cm (actually 20cm) directly above the left-hand side of the disk and 9cm (actually 29cm) directly above the right-hand side of the disk and you can see that I didn't move the ruler, or cheat by some other mechanism (though vertically, you can see it isn't straight).
Why is cultural imperialism important? The answer is that metric versus imperial measurements is a practical issue, blocked by political games. Namely, metric measurements are objectively better, but many people in power have an agenda to maintain historical measurement systems.
Why would they do that? The reason is because Imperial measurements are more complex and that makes it easier to manipulate people, to pull the wool over their eyes. And this happens because different types of units aren't easily comparable (e.g. weight, mass, volume, lengths and time) and different scales for the same kind of unit use different bases (e.g. 12 inches per foot, 3 feet per yard, and almost no-one knows how many yards there are in a mile).
This presents a barrier of understanding which reduces people's ability to process units down to just comparing values from the same kind of unit. It has an actual impact on maths attainment in the UK [@todo MetricViewsLink].
For example, someone sells 7oz of cherries for 2 crowns and 1lb of cherries for £1.5s.6d. Which is better value? To know that you need to know there are 16 ounces in a pound; 5 shillings in a crown; 20 shillings in a pound (money) and 12 pennies in a shilling. Then you convert everything into ounces and shillings (or maybe pennies) leading to 7oz for 10 shillings and 16oz for 25.5 shillings. Now you know that the 7oz price is cheaper (just).
That's how it was in the UK before February 1971 when we switched from £sd on decimal day. It took well over a century, from the mid-1800s to the mid-1960s before the UK finally managed to agree. At the time, people were worried that decimalisation would cause traders to con customers, yet they never considered that it was much easier to con people using £sd money.
Nobody alive in the UK would consider shifting back to that awful system, yet we, who are generally in favour of metric measurements are quite happy to let Imperialists force us to use non-metric units. And, that's because there is effectively a deliberate attempt by them to switch everyone back: they convert metric to imperial units and then delete references to the metric units, and when questioned they appeal to ‘patriotism’ or your compassion for their stubbornness.
A case in point is the 2022 UK government consultation on Imperial measurements, billed as allowing us to use imperial measurements. But it was a lie, since we can already use imperial measurements in the UK, we just have to include metric measurements and make them at least as prominent. What the government wanted to do instead was to be able to omit metric measurements; and to further that aim, they rigged the consultation so that it wasn't possible to let the government know you preferred metric. All the questions were along the lines of “Do you want things to remain as they are, or allow metric to be omitted?” Therefore the balance of responses had to tilt in favour of eliminating metric.
In the end, over 100,000 responses were submitted and respondents, including myself found ways of being able to assert their preference for metric (via the occasional "other comments" boxes). Because the consultation didn't go the way the government wanted, they didn't publish the findings within the 12 week period they promised, but waited a year.
We found out the results on December 27th. Over 98.7% as clearly as possible said they preferred the current rules or only metric, so the government... introduced imperial measurements to bottles of wine “as a first step” towards more Imperialism, which no-one wanted, supermarkets already are saying they won't sell and are impossible to sell on a global market either.
It's all covered in the pro-metric UK society, metric views.uk. How to respond to the survey; mistakes & bias in the consultation; how the survey could have been fixed; government ignores complaints about the survey; why no response after a year; and finally government confirms 99% don't want more Imperialism.
In conclusion, imperial measurements are embarrassing in the 21st century, but coercion is being used to perpetuate them. What we need is #MoreMetric.
