Longest serving MP defeated

[Foggy]

Jul 13, 2017 7:48:58 GMT John Chanin said:

Jul 12, 2017 21:53:59 GMT finsobruce said:

He was 5' 11" or 1.8m as the interfering bureaucrats in Brussels would have us believe.

1.80 metres please. We need to have the correct number of decimals (sorry to get a bit Foggy )

I have no problem with expressing that height as 1.8m? 

[J.G.Harston]

Jul 13, 2017 9:13:30 GMT Foggy said:

Jul 13, 2017 7:48:58 GMT John Chanin said:

1.80 metres please. We need to have the correct number of decimals (sorry to get a bit Foggy )

I have no problem with expressing that height as 1.8m? 

1.8m explies some unknown quantity between 1.75m and 1.85m. If you are happy with that sort of imprecision, go ahead, it's the same as saying "about six feet".

[Deleted]

Jul 13, 2017 14:23:29 GMT J.G.Harston said:

Jul 13, 2017 9:13:30 GMT Foggy said:

I have no problem with expressing that height as 1.8m? 

1.8m explies some unknown quantity between 1.75m and 1.85m. If you are happy with that sort of imprecision, go ahead, it's the same as saying "about six feet".

Its interesting that you use decimals when writing height in the metric system. With the exception of 2 metres height is written in centimeters in most countries using the metric system (incl. France). You may say "he is one eighty" (implying you think he is between ca. 177.5 and 182.5, otherwise its "one seventy five" and "one eighty five" respectively), but using decimals in writing seems odd. You either give the exact number in centimeters or round to the nearest 5 centimeters, using 10 cm intervals is too imprecise. 

[Foggy]

Jul 13, 2017 14:23:29 GMT J.G.Harston said:

Jul 13, 2017 9:13:30 GMT Foggy said:

I have no problem with expressing that height as 1.8m? 

1.8m explies some unknown quantity between 1.75m and 1.85m. If you are happy with that sort of imprecision, go ahead, it's the same as saying "about six feet".

We learnt about upper and lower bounds in Key Stage 3 maths, but only for about a week because the concept was so basic. Unless it's clear that you're working in those terms, I don't see how you can assume someone's rounding up or down. If we were talking about the sports day high jump, long jump or shotput competition then I'd want more precision in terms of distance, but I have no trouble with 1.8m when it comes to height.

I suppose it all depends on how you phrase it too. If expressed as "one metre eighty" in speech then I'd automatically tend towards writing that out as 1m80, but when expressed as "one point eight metres", the 'point' part makes me think in terms of decimal rules, in which case writing 1.8m seems perfectly acceptable to me. 

That said, what I cannot abide is when the figure after the point is clearly not a decimal unit, such as old TV guides which used '6.2' for 6:20pm, or '17.3' overs in cricket meaning 17 and a half overs!

Jul 13, 2017 19:10:36 GMT @odo said:

Jul 13, 2017 14:23:29 GMT J.G.Harston said:

1.8m explies some unknown quantity between 1.75m and 1.85m. If you are happy with that sort of imprecision, go ahead, it's the same as saying "about six feet".

Its interesting that you use decimals when writing height in the metric system. With the exception of 2 metres height is written in centimeters in most countries using the metric system (incl. France). You may say "he is one eighty" (implying you think he is between ca. 177.5 and 182.5, otherwise its "one seventy five" and "one eighty five" respectively), but using decimals in writing seems odd. You either give the exact number in centimeters or round to the nearest 5 centimeters, using 10 cm intervals is too imprecise. 

I wasn't using an interval. The height given was equivalent to 1.8m (exactly, or at least to the nearest centimetre if you really want to split hairs). Of course when approximating – which is what most people do with heights – 10cm intervals would be too large.

Sadly we haven't yet properly embraced most metric measurements in this country, but when we do we're not taking any lessons from the continentals in how to write or express them. You lot do maths wrong by mixing up the usage of dots and commas, for starters!

[middyman]

Back garden fences were usually 6ft. This became 1.8m. I still think in feet and inches; the height of fences is my one point of reference between the two.

[Deleted]

Jul 13, 2017 20:43:57 GMT Foggy said:

Jul 13, 2017 14:23:29 GMT J.G.Harston said:

1.8m explies some unknown quantity between 1.75m and 1.85m. If you are happy with that sort of imprecision, go ahead, it's the same as saying "about six feet".

We learnt about upper and lower bounds in Key Stage 3 maths, but only for about a week because the concept was so basic. Unless it's clear that you're working in those terms, I don't see how you can assume someone's rounding up or down. If we were talking about the sports day high jump, long jump or shotput competition then I'd want more precision in terms of distance, but I have no trouble with 1.8m when it comes to height.

I suppose it all depends on how you phrase it too. If expressed as "one metre eighty" in speech then I'd automatically tend towards writing that out as 1m80, but when expressed as "one point eight metres", the 'point' part makes me think in terms of decimal rules, in which case writing 1.8m seems perfectly acceptable to me. 

That said, what I cannot abide is when the figure after the point is clearly not a decimal unit, such as old TV guides which used '6.2' for 6:20pm, or '17.3' overs in cricket meaning 17 and a half overs!

Jul 13, 2017 19:10:36 GMT @odo said:

Its interesting that you use decimals when writing height in the metric system. With the exception of 2 metres height is written in centimeters in most countries using the metric system (incl. France). You may say "he is one eighty" (implying you think he is between ca. 177.5 and 182.5, otherwise its "one seventy five" and "one eighty five" respectively), but using decimals in writing seems odd. You either give the exact number in centimeters or round to the nearest 5 centimeters, using 10 cm intervals is too imprecise. 

I wasn't using an interval. The height given was equivalent to 1.8m (exactly, or at least to the nearest centimetre if you really want to split hairs). Of course when approximating – which is what most people do with heights – 10cm intervals would be too large.

Sadly we haven't yet properly embraced most metric measurements in this country, but when we do we're not taking any lessons from the continentals in how to write or express them. You lot do maths wrong by mixing up the usage of dots and commas, for starters!

Well, the metric system is much too good for you lot to spoil it, so hopefully you never will. I wasn't commenting on anything you wrote btw. 

[Foggy]

Jul 13, 2017 20:51:13 GMT @odo said:

Jul 13, 2017 20:43:57 GMT Foggy said:

You may have directly quoted J G Harston, but he had quoted me, and if you follow the conversation back it relates to finsobruce mentioning George Michael's height (when he was alive, at any rate). Personally I see no need to add a superfluous zero to that height when writing it down in metres. Your kilométrage may vary.

[Deleted]

Jul 13, 2017 20:59:06 GMT Foggy said:

Jul 13, 2017 20:51:13 GMT @odo said:

You may have directly quoted J G Harston, but he had quoted me, and if you follow the conversation back it relates to finsobruce mentioning George Michael's height (when he was alive, at any rate). Personally I see no need to add a superfluous zero to that height when writing it down in metres. Your kilométrage may vary.

The point is you shouldn't write it in metres, but in centimeters. Metres are for measuring the height of mountains, not humans. 

[Foggy]

Jul 13, 2017 21:08:02 GMT @odo said:

Jul 13, 2017 20:59:06 GMT Foggy said:

You may have directly quoted J G Harston, but he had quoted me, and if you follow the conversation back it relates to finsobruce mentioning George Michael's height (when he was alive, at any rate). Personally I see no need to add a superfluous zero to that height when writing it down in metres. Your kilométrage may vary.

The point is you shouldn't write it in metres, but in centimeters. Metres are for measuring the height of mountains, not humans. 

Ah, you've introduced a third way of expressing the same height now! "One hundred and eighty centimetres" obviously does require a zero when written as a number, but talking about a hundred anything just sounds positively alien to us when talking about the heights of humans. (Horses' heights, incidentally, are still measured in hands.)

Even in the imperial system there's no consensus on which units should be used for what. When in the USA, I've noticed signs for distances in feet which would invariably be expressed in terms of yards over here. It's all a matter of perception and a cultural matter. So, when we do adopt metric properly, I think you'll forgive us for not taking any lessons from the Danes.

[John Chanin]

Jul 13, 2017 20:59:06 GMT Foggy said:

Jul 13, 2017 20:51:13 GMT @odo said:

You may have directly quoted J G Harston, but he had quoted me, and if you follow the conversation back it relates to finsobruce mentioning George Michael's height (when he was alive, at any rate). Personally I see no need to add a superfluous zero to that height when writing it down in metres. Your kilométrage may vary.

My point, since I guess I started this, is that 1.8 is wrong because it is insufficiently precise.  As others have pointed out it implies a height between 1.75 and 1.85 metres.  Height is more precise than this, and the equivalent to 5 ft 11 in is therefore 1.80m.  The ending zero is very much not superfluous.   

This would be clearer, if we used centimetres, as @odo says is generally done in Europe.  I can therefore see the logic to this, but Britain came at metric neasures via the SI system of scientific measurement, for which centimetres are a bastard child which doesn't exist.  SI uses metres and millimetres only.  So we get rainfall quoted in millimetres rather than more user friendly centimetres. 

As someone involved in performance monitoring for a good chunk of my life, training staff in using the right level of precision was one of the constant tasks.  It works the other way too, when people quote decimal points for example in survey data, which is equally wrong.  In that case Excel takes much of the blame for defaulting to 2 decimal places, when more often than not this is inappropriate precision.  However for height this is exactly what is required.

[carlton43]

Jul 14, 2017 6:10:51 GMT John Chanin said:

Jul 13, 2017 20:59:06 GMT Foggy said:

You may have directly quoted J G Harston, but he had quoted me, and if you follow the conversation back it relates to finsobruce mentioning George Michael's height (when he was alive, at any rate). Personally I see no need to add a superfluous zero to that height when writing it down in metres. Your kilométrage may vary.

My point, since I guess I started this, is that 1.8 is wrong because it is insufficiently precise.  As others have pointed out it implies a height between 1.75 and 1.85 metres.  Height is more precise than this, and the equivalent to 5 ft 11 in is therefore 1.80m.  The ending zero is very much not superfluous.   

This would be clearer, if we used centimetres, as @odo says is generally done in Europe.  I can therefore see the logic to this, but Britain came at metric neasures via the SI system of scientific measurement, for which centimetres are a bastard child which doesn't exist.  SI uses metres and millimetres only.  So we get rainfall quoted in millimetres rather than more user friendly centimetres. 

As someone involved in performance monitoring for a good chunk of my life, training staff in using the right level of precision was one of the constant tasks.  It works the other way too, when people quote decimal points for example in survey data, which is equally wrong.  In that case Excel takes much of the blame for defaulting to 2 decimal places, when more often than not this is inappropriate precision.  However for height this is exactly what is required.

Well!   Not 'exactly' what is required.

[Foggy]

Jul 14, 2017 6:10:51 GMT John Chanin said:

Jul 13, 2017 20:59:06 GMT Foggy said:

You may have directly quoted J G Harston, but he had quoted me, and if you follow the conversation back it relates to finsobruce mentioning George Michael's height (when he was alive, at any rate). Personally I see no need to add a superfluous zero to that height when writing it down in metres. Your kilométrage may vary.

My point, since I guess I started this, is that 1.8 is wrong because it is insufficiently precise.  As others have pointed out it implies a height between 1.75 and 1.85 metres.  Height is more precise than this, and the equivalent to 5 ft 11 in is therefore 1.80m.  The ending zero is very much not superfluous.   

This would be clearer, if we used centimetres, as @odo says is generally done in Europe.  I can therefore see the logic to this, but Britain came at metric neasures via the SI system of scientific measurement, for which centimetres are a bastard child which doesn't exist.  SI uses metres and millimetres only.  So we get rainfall quoted in millimetres rather than more user friendly centimetres. 

As someone involved in performance monitoring for a good chunk of my life, training staff in using the right level of precision was one of the constant tasks.  It works the other way too, when people quote decimal points for example in survey data, which is equally wrong.  In that case Excel takes much of the blame for defaulting to 2 decimal places, when more often than not this is inappropriate precision.  However for height this is exactly what is required.

Whether it's due to your former profession or to the way you were taught arithmetic I'm not sure, but you are not the sole arbiter of which form of notation is correct. I struggle to believe that most people would see '1.8' and take it to mean 'anywhere between 1.75 and 1.85', unless they were engaged in a very specific and mundane exercise about upper and lower bounds, which in my case accounts for 3 or 4 lessons when I was 14. I appreciate that your experience might have differed, but nonetheless find it bizarre. I have always treated the zero as superfluous in situations like the one we are discussing, and got as far as A-level maths without ever being pulled up as 'wrong' for that. Those of us who know that '1.8' is perfectly acceptable are totally relaxed about it if someone decides to add another nought to that. It's a pity those who are insisting on '1.80' can't be so easygoing about those who with choose not to expend time and energy adding an extra 0 all over the place and suffer no loss of clarity, meaning or intent as a consequence.

Yes, the way SI units were half-adopted in this country was flawed, and Excel's default is annoying a lot of the time. We are not in total disagreement. That said, using centimetres for height will never come naturally to us because we're not accustomed to bringing 'hundreds' into play when discussing that particular aspect of human measurement. Most people's height in feet will begin with a 5 or 6, so it's not as much of a shock to the system to hear them begin with a 1 or a 2 in metres, as opposed to (at least in speech) a "one hundred" or "two hundred" in terms of centimetres.

I find it interesting that you bring up rainfall. Have you ever listened to a Spanish weather forecast? Over there, rain tends to be measured by how many litres of it fall from the sky per square metre, rather than how many millimetres above the ground in rises when collected. Even within both the imperial and decimal systems, then, we can observe how measurement can often be a relative case of perception, historical habitual practice and cultural norms. I'm afraid that perhaps you misunderstand your own country if you think a majority of Brits read '1.8' in the way you do.

[albion]

I do not wish to take sides in metric notation disputes but I must take issue with the idea of equating 1.8m (or 1.80) to 'about six feet'. For those of us who high jumped in the 70s, we all knew that 6ft was 1.83m and the extra 3cm was critical - as it was taken as the starting point for national standard for seniors (this was the 70s - today it would be 2.00m). It may be a small point - but not for some of us.

[John Chanin]

1.8 metres is "about 6 feet". 1.80 metres is 5ft 11 in.

Basically some people are numerate and some aren't.

[No Offence Alan]

What annoys me is when a book or website uses extra false precision after an obvious conversion e.g. "about 48.28 km".

[Foggy]

Jul 14, 2017 9:22:32 GMT John Chanin said:

1.8 metres is "about 6 feet". 1.80 metres is 5ft 11 in.

Basically some people are numerate and some aren't.

Indeed. Not sure what albion was getting at there.

To whom are you referring as innumerate?

[J.G.Harston]

Jul 13, 2017 20:43:57 GMT Foggy said:

Unless it's clear that you're working in those terms, I don't see how you can assume someone's rounding up or down.

That's the whole point, you explicitly *don't* know if somebody is rounding up or down, 1.8 *explicitly* means "an unknown value between 1.75 and 1.85 (but not 1.85)". It could be 1.77 rounded up to 1.8. It could be 1.83 rounded down to 1.8. It could, yes, even be 1.80 rounded to 1.8. By specifying 1 decimal place you are explicitly stating that you do not know the 2nd decimal place, and the 1st decimal place is the nearest decimal place to that unknown 2nd decimal place.

Jul 14, 2017 8:30:34 GMT albion said:

I do not wish to take sides in metric notation disputes but I must take issue with the idea of equating 1.8m (or 1.80) to 'about six feet'.

I wasn't saying that 1.8m equated to about six feet, I was equating the imprecision of "1.8m" to the imprecision of "about six feet" - which would generally be, say, any value between, say, 5'10" and 6'2".

[johnloony]

How tall is David Winnick? #topicdrift

[albion]

Jul 15, 2017 4:01:16 GMT J.G.Harston said:

Jul 13, 2017 20:43:57 GMT Foggy said:

Unless it's clear that you're working in those terms, I don't see how you can assume someone's rounding up or down.

That's the whole point, you explicitly *don't* know if somebody is rounding up or down, 1.8 *explicitly* means "an unknown value between 1.75 and 1.85 (but not 1.85)". It could be 1.77 rounded up to 1.8. It could be 1.83 rounded down to 1.8. It could, yes, even be 1.80 rounded to 1.8. By specifying 1 decimal place you are explicitly stating that you do not know the 2nd decimal place, and the 1st decimal place is the nearest decimal place to that unknown 2nd decimal place.

Jul 14, 2017 8:30:34 GMT albion said:

I do not wish to take sides in metric notation disputes but I must take issue with the idea of equating 1.8m (or 1.80) to 'about six feet'.

I wasn't saying that 1.8m equated to about six feet, I was equating the imprecision of "1.8m" to the imprecision of "about six feet" - which would generally be, say, any value between, say, 5'10" and 6'2".

I had middymans post about fences in mind.

[greatkingrat]

Jul 15, 2017 4:01:16 GMT J.G.Harston said:

Jul 13, 2017 20:43:57 GMT Foggy said:

Unless it's clear that you're working in those terms, I don't see how you can assume someone's rounding up or down.

That's the whole point, you explicitly *don't* know if somebody is rounding up or down, 1.8 *explicitly* means "an unknown value between 1.75 and 1.85 (but not 1.85)". It could be 1.77 rounded up to 1.8. It could be 1.83 rounded down to 1.8. It could, yes, even be 1.80 rounded to 1.8. By specifying 1 decimal place you are explicitly stating that you do not know the 2nd decimal place, and the 1st decimal place is the nearest decimal place to that unknown 2nd decimal place.

But it can also mean that you know more decimal places, but choose not to use them because you do not think them necessary. I might say that the Conservative Party got 42.3% of the vote in the 2017 General Election. Actually it was more like 42.34452333319494533%, but it is legitimate to decide that the extra precision is not necessary for the context in which you are writing.