In the spirit of rapprochement with Europe and reorientation away from the United States, it’s time to complete the Metrication process in Canada that was stopped prematurely by the Mulroney government.
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Metric system is meant for clever people.
The system is made for those who create and those who don’t know which way to hold an hammer. and it works, that’s the beauty of it.
Imperial is just made for peasants in 870s and people who are on still on that level of education.
Not really, the system itself is clever but it’s made for everyone, very simple to use.
If they bother to understand it that is. Base 10 is so simple for metric don’t know why we haven’t adopted it everywhere, I say that knowing weight in pounds and height in feet / inches, cause who wants to convert everything? But still, would have been better to understand that way from school teachings and used Canada wide.
Can we also double down on getting information only from Canadian Owned and Operated media?
The linked article is from the CBC…
The post title is: “Time to double down on the metric system”.
At the same time, I also think it’s a good idea to:
double down on getting information only from Canadian Owned and Operated media
I agree we should be refraining from using US owned media, but it’s a little confusing to comment about it on discussions about something else.
The post body:
In the spirit of …reorientation away from the United States
My comments are exactly in line with the discussion, to move away from US media.
No, it still felt pretty non sequitur.
You are welcome!
When someone asks your height, you answer in centimeters.
Honestly it’s just easier for me anyway, because I’m like a quarter short of an inch. If I round down people get confused since they’re used to the numbers being padded on top of everything, and if I round up I’m padding the numbers myself.
I mean, I can without hesitating. We all should be able to.
Howabout meters? 180cm = 1.8m
1.8 * 102 cm
Yes, obsessing over centimetres is unhealthy.
I know what you’re getting at 😆
Centimetres are more commonly used to measure height (e.g., on official government issued IDs)
And honestly the accuracy doesn’t hurt here. 170cm vs. 180 is a pretty big difference in how tall someone seems.
I’m 178cm and 65kg
Fuck you trump
Congrats on the healthy BMI, and on using the correct scale!
By my book, you’re now an EU citizen.
BMI was made by an statistician who never intended it to be used as a means of medical assessment.
What? BMI > 30 is the literal definition of obesity.
It’s a tool, and it serves a purpose.
Basically just because it’s easier to measure. In reality, visceral fat is the thing they worry about, but you can’t run everyone through an MRI just for that.
That being said, having a really high BMI is definitely bad. Saying that you’re healthy at 50 is taking a
milekilometer when given a centimeter.
Fun fact, you are exactly 10 bananas tall…
http://bananaforscale.info/#!/convert/length/10/bananas/centimeters
Coming from the USA, yeah fuck the orange shitstain and his oligarch cronies.
After using bananas as a form of measurement, I don’t think you need to clarify that you’re from the USA.
You guys have used football fields, washing machines, and bicycles as units of measurement haha
I find the whole imperial/metric thing funny.
Like hell, even here in the USA, it’s always the 10 millimeter socket (or in my case the 15 millimeter socket) that somehow disappears.
A pendulum of one meter length swings at a rate of once per second.
Where things get weird in the USA is one mile = 5280 feet. Like, who the fuck pulled that number out of their ass?
Where things get weird in the USA is one mile = 5280 feet. Like, who the fuck pulled that number out of their ass?
The romans divided the mile into 5,000 feet. But the British perfered using ‘furlong’, thus the mile became 8 furlongs, and a furlong is 660 feet.
Time for a historical metrology search!
That’s the imperial system for ya. Imagine using a dude’s feet as a form of measurement. That’s weirder than having it be your fetish
Even weirder when that foot was defined based on the body of a former king of England. But, centuries later, the country that formed in a rebellion against England still keeps using that measurement, whereas England has made a lot more progress going metric.
It wasn’t so weird back when people lived in relative isolation without any kind of standards, and had to come up with some sort of reference that was widely familiar and commonly available.
You know, back in the Neolithic Age.
It even makes sense why that familiar set of references would get standardized and then survive up until the beginning of the Industrial Age. Beyond that point it’s all driven by American exceptionalism, a.k.a. willful ignorance. What I don’t understand is what happened to the cubit. Feet make sense for distance, but as a craftsman I don’t want to be foot-fondling my work pieces.
Huh, that’s interesting. Of all things to choose metric, why sockets?
I think the only thing where imperial is common here in (continental) Europe is screen sizes, which you always see in inches, and it’s weird because people have absolutely no feel for how long 55" or whatever is. The other is pipes, though in plumbing is usual to have the equivalent in mm.
The auto industry, mostly. Asian and European cars are metric, and imported into America in large numbers, and even domestic manufacturers have been going to metric fasteners in a lot of cases. The oil drain plug on my S10 is 14mm, for example.
I bet if you took a look at common lumber sizes you’d see they’re given in millimeters, but weird millimeters. Like why 19mm instead of 20? Because 19mm is very close to 3/4".
I’m not sure about the rest of the world, but automotive wheel and tire sizes in the US are my second favorite mixed measurement. A tire’s size is given in rim width in millimeters bead to bead, sidewall height as a percentage of said width, and rim diameter in inches. A 275/75R-15 fits a 275mm wide, 15 inch diameter wheel and is 206.25mm tall bead to tread.
Here in the us, sockets come in both imperial and metric. Foreign products are made with metric bolts, but some domestic made or designed stuff will use imperial. Working on things like cars is real fun because both standards are used on the same vehicle.
Yep, pretty much.
When I’m working on vehicles or bicycles, it’s almost always metric wrenches and sockets, until that one random bolt or nut that’s for whatever dumb reason in imperial, like the random 1/2", or the fairly universal 5/8" spark plug socket.
Why? Hell if I know, but some of those things probably track all the way back to Henry Ford, and possibly even before him.
In many cases like that, where an otherwise metric apparatus has an inexplicable SAE component, it’s because that component became a commodity part in Britain or America before the rest of the world industrialized.
Give an example made in Austria: Rotax 9-series aircraft engines are metric, they’re held together with metric fasteners, cylinder bores are given in millimeters, etc. It was designed in metric. The prop flange is designed to take three different bolt patterns, 75mm, 80mm, and 4 inch. Because a lot of Rotax engines were going to be sold in America, the land of McCauley, Sensenich and Hartzel. We’ve been tooled up for 4 inch prop flanges for a century now.
You slim
Very slim, I’m 178cm and 100kg. About 24% bodyfat.
Yup, let’s drop imperial for absolutely everything!
Japan is almost entirely metric (with a couple old units used in parallel). We buy TVs, monitors, and bicycle tires in inches (which, while fine for me, is just gibberish to japanese). I’d love for that to stop
I went to the states a couple years back. Went to a tavern and was deciding on a beer. Bartender overhears I’m Canadian and tells me the size of the pints in decilitres 🙄
For what it’s worth, I’m pretty comfortable with FL oz from reading soda cans and stuff. I just find it crazy how unintuitive metric is to some.
I appreciated his effort, I just thought it was funny
That’s just ridiculous. The pint is a measurement unit in itself. The fact that the bartender didn’t seem to be aware of that fact is a failure of the imperial system in itself, though not really a surprise since the system relies entirely on memorizing arbitrary values that have no connection with other units.
Though admittedly, the US pint is smaller than the British pint, so there is justification of pointing that out.
A pint in the U.S. is 16oz. What’s a British pint?
For us it is 2 cups in a pint 2 pints in a quart 4 quarts in a gallon. (People seem to struggle with remembering that until you tell them quart as in quarter, or 4 in a dollar etc)
Weights are fucked, but I usually just remember 16oz is a pound. Only drug users and chemists remember 28 grams in an ounce. So an 8 ball (1/8th is 3.5 grams). And depending on where you are ranges from 110-240 dollars. So you go to the store and buy a bottle of liquor (sold in metric units, and the store owner will stupidly call it a half gallon) but it’s 1.75L, 1L or 750ml for $20-30. And you’ll pass out 2 days later super dehydrated upset you wasted all your money.
28g to an ounce is a good thing for homebrewers to know, too! I measure hops in grams, and recipes are often given in ounces.
Recipes are just food chemistry i suppose.
Touche
That would be the correct way to do it. Just one or two digits for most common sizes, from shots to full glasses. I’d say a very large percentage of European beers, wines, etc. measure that way, and the remainder use mL.
Seems to be a cultural thing. Here in Canada I see mL and L most often for drinks.
One quirk of metric I have taken a liking to recently, is in Japan, apparently they measure their object dimensions in mm. ‘The size of one sheet of Letter paper in mm is 279.4mm x 215.9mm.’ I don’t know why, but for some reason I like this.
Decilitre is actually the common unit for drinks in Hungary (and possibly in other countries). Hungarians also use dekagramm, which is 10 grams. But the cool thing about metric is that to convert, you just move the decimal around!
A lot of my European beer glasses have dL on them. Offhand I can think of duchesse (Belgium), and Delirium Tremens (also Belgium). Okay, maybe it’s just beers from Belgium, I’d have to take a look.
“I’d have to take a look.”
Sounds like you have booked a special evening in the pub: “Can I try the next beer please?”
Haha. It’s for purely scientific research.
I hate fucking fl.oz. I understand cups, teaspoons and tablespoons, but then there’s the odd recipe that uses ‘fl.oz.’ and I always have to go look it up.
8 fl.oz. to a cup. Also every Pyrex measuring cup I’ve ever seen has fluid ounces alongside cups, and usually a scale on the other side for mL.
Sure, but if the recipe calls for X fl. oz. of canned tomatoes, and my canned tomatoes doesn’t show fl. oz. I have no idea how many cans to use.
Yeah, what the hell is a florida ounce anyway?
An ounce of fentanyl
The cool thing is, it’s still an easy conversion to bring it back to a familiar unit!
To be fair, pints in the US are 95 mL smaller than pints in Canada, so it’s at least a good reminder.
The states has this funny thing where when they do use metric, like in medicine, they often still use weird-ass nonstandard metric options, like decilitres. I imagine if they eventually switch their unit of weight is going to be something like “well, one fornoy is exactly how much a litre of crude oil weighs”
There is such a unit as a metric teaspoon and metric tablespoon. Used by the American medicine industry to give dosages. Actual moon landing unit tea- and tablespoons work out to something like 4.9 and 14.7mL, which are rounded to an even 5 and 15mL respectively for dosing liquid medicine. Because if you’re ordinary American citizens giving your child some Dimetapp at 3 in the morning, maybe you don’t have a vessel to meter out milliliters but you can probably lay your hands on your kitchen measuring spoons.
When did Florida make their own standard oz?
Let’s finally move to the ISO 216 standard for paper!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216
Oh please, yes!
When I moved to Mexico I was always annoyed with the weird ass paper formats, then when I moved to Canada I had hoped that over here they would have sane formats but alas…
Seriously, the entire world got upgrade after upgrade everywhere and the US constantly was like "nope, we will keep our feet and miles and inches because those “make sense” keeping a large part of developed nations in the dark ages
But, hear me out… PC LOAD A4 just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
I’ve put every 4 I can find I’m, but it just doesn’t work! It seemed especially angry at the fridge magnet ones.
OMG this.
Oh please let’s
Can we get the UK on board with this as well? (Maybe when they rejoin the EU? And let’s drive on the same site of the road as 98% of the planet while we’re on it).
Other than miles most of our stuff is metric anyway, at least legally. Like yeah, we use stones and feet for ‘human’ measurements in speech etc but if you go to the doctors it would be in kilos and metres. There are a few oddities like milk bottles being in pints and beer in pubs but even then you find things like plant milks and bottles/canned beer in litres. The one that really makes no sense is car fuel efficiency. We sell fuel by the litre but measure it in miles per (imperial) gallon - so it doesnt even tie up with American figures.
I agree with fully adopting metric, but what budget benefit would driving on the right bring?
I can’t think of much. Changing isn’t unprecedented, but you’re also far from alone driving on the left. Off the top of my head: the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, India, Pakistan, much of Southern Africa…
Places that have changed within the last 100 years: Sweden, Newfoundland, the rest of Canada ('cept Ontario and Quebec) switched just over 100 years ago.
And what did Mulroney stop in the metrification of Canada?
Yeah, he was late enough the effect has been limited. We still use pounds and feet for measuring people, mostly, and fahrenheit for cooking, but that’s all I can think of off the top of my head.
Let’s move to metric time!
1000 milliseconds in a second
100 seconds in a minute
100 minutes in an hour
100 hours in a day
100 days in a month
100 months in a year.We’d be so young!
[EDIT] Guys, I thought it was obvious I was saying this in jest… My b
[French revolution intensifies]
Unfortunately with dates you also want to incorporate the natural cycles of the earth and sun, which not only aren’t decimal but usually incommensurable, so it’s a hard thing to do. The French just had a block of their calendar that didn’t count as “real” days IIRC.
If we start seriously going to space, doing everything by Unix epoch (count of seconds since the 60’s ended) would make sense, and planning your day might well go by kiloseconds. Someone on here suggested giving up on standardised time zones and just doing everything long-distance that way even on Earth, which grew on me as an idea.
Oh man, you just reminded me of the incoming Epochalypse… A tangent to what you’re talking about but something that I feel isn’t being taken seriously enough.
I suppose we still have just over 13.5 years, but we have so much more computerized stuff now than we did in the 90s, and how many things do we own with clocks that can’t be updated? Interesting times ahead.
One day is a Dec, 10 Decs in a Wec, 10 Wecs in a Mec and 100 Mecs in a Yec. Your days are split into Ceti-decs and Micro-decs!
It’s so unhinged, I love it. Need to write a calendar app and clock for it.
The French actually tried it, here’s the Wikipedia article.
A more reasonable thing to do is something like Swatch Internet Time, you get 1000 “.beats” in a day with no time zones. Beyond a day it might not be too helpful to keep decimal, there will be 365+fraction days a year no matter how you measure it.
Yeah, unfortunately for time we’re tied to space-stuff. A day will always be useful, so will a year. A lunar month is not as useful as it once was, probably not necessary as a primary unit.
Well, if you’re on Earth, anyway.
I think this is what Phantasy Star Online used back in the day!
Seconds are already an SI unit. We’d have to redo every textbook, and overcome centuries of work.
Lemmy is serious business!
Didn’t downvote but TPO my dude
