"One of the joys of reading the American papers online is not having to reach for a metric converter" - only if you don't care about precision. Using recipes involving pints or cups which may be US or may be imperial is a royal pain. When a car gets 40 miles to the gallon, what does it mean? Depends how long your mile is, and how big the gallon.

Norman, Anstruther, UK

Andy, 36,000 kg is 36 tonnes or 35.36 tons! David, surely only large areas are measured in Wales. Ordinary areas are measured in football pitches.

Roy, Chinnor,

Paragraph 35 of the Magna Carta stipulated that one system of units should be used throughout the kingdom. Britain signed up to go metric in 1875 as did the USA, long before the EU was invented.
The US metric conversion act of 1975 states that traditional units shall be confined to non-business activities.
The rest of the world use metric because it is a coherent system.
Can the British media please, please, abide by the British Magna Carta of 1215 and use SI metric only.

Mike Oxley, Farnham Common, England

The correct unit for weight is the double-decker bus. Height is measured in Nelson's columns and surface area is denoted in Waleses. Now, can everyone get outside a bit more.

David Masu, Zürich,

Did the Eu not recently rule that we could keep out pounds and stones but should display metric beside it. Either way, who cares?

I'm off for a pint.

Ian Glasgow, Glasgow,

Folks seem to have forgotten what happened to that Mars explorer, lost because some suppliers refused to use consistent figures. 36,000 Kg is 36 tons - please don't confuse people by using units abandoned by most of us before I left school!

Andy Dyer, London, UK,

Jasper -

To give you a rough conversion, 16 metres in length and 36,000 kilos = flipping enormous! You'd soon know about it if one landed on your canoe....

Andy, London,

Angad: I would add that nautical measures of speed and distance are still based on imperial measures: a knot is one nautical mile per hour. A nautical mile is 10 cables, a cable is 10 fathoms, and a fathom is six feet, which is two yards. This is why the regulation regarding whales is given in yards.

Mariners retain this usage because of the system of latitude and longitude: a vessel traveling at 1 knot along a meridian covers one sixtieth of a degree geographic latitude in one hour.

Imperial really hasn't died off in the UK; there is a lot of strong feeling about it, and it was one of the things that really undermined the country's emotional engagement with the European project. It's a 'British versus French' thing. There was so much ill feeling about it, in fact, that on 9 May 2007, it was announced that the European Union had dropped its plans to enforce the abolition of Imperial units...

Jenny Keates, London, UK

Fantastic pictures, but why be lazy and say there are only two kayakers? Pic 1 is clearly of different people (in a different boat) to Pics 2 and 3. Which presumably means the whale came up more than once, as each boat appears to be alone with the mammal.....

helen, London, UK

Metric measurements don't mean much to me, what I don't understand is why you mix the measurements in a single article. why not stick to imperial?

John Ledbury, Kings Lynn, England

Why do you insist on using a system of measurement that has all but died off now?

Note: Data indicates UK was metric in the 1960s - they made a decision to go metric in the 1960s and made a legal commitment to do so in 1973 as part of its conditions for membership in the EEC (now the EU), but then did little about the decision. The UK now uses metric however, and it is illegal to sell products weighed only in imperial measurements; imperial measurements have not been taught in schools since the 1970s either. This is similar to the situation occurring in the US, where metric is the 'official' system for lengths and weights, though its metrication process has been very slow due to public pressure and lack of funding.

Angad Deengar, Toronto,, Canada

To the best of my recollection, Britain has never officially adopted the metric system. Until it does, could English newspapers use the imperial system, so that those of us who grew up here can understand your articles? One of the joys of reading the American papers online is not having to reach for a metric converter the whole bloody time.

Jasper Reed-Spencer, London, England

No fibre required for these guys.....

James, Glasgow,