You must log in or register to comment.
I find everyone uses time for long distances. I know it’s a 13 hour drive to Edmonton but damned if I know how many kilometres it is.
Yep, I can tell you Toronto is 17 hours away and the QC border is 7, but I have no clue how many KM those are.
You’re from Cape Breton. Final answer
Sorry, try again next week on Where Am I From? Right province, but I’m on the mainland.
Oh no! I’m late!
Halifax?
Lmao wasn’t expecting another answer this week. Yep.
I try to be true to my word. Glad I don’t have to come back next week.
Shit. Ok. I’ll be back next week
Damn, I have to tune in next week to get the answer? This show is crazy.
Yeah bro, don’t miss out!
Duplicate posted, I blame Connect.
I always convert using 100km/h. So a 13 hour drive is probably North of 1250km.
That being said I only measure distance in time as well.
My car tracks my average speed for some reason, and I believe it’s based on engine hours vs. distance. After 2½ years and ~70,000km it’s stayed pretty consistent at about 60km/h.
My driving is probably 90% highway by distance, or 60% by time.
100km/h is a good estimator, because you’re probably going 120km/h most of the way but you need to account for toilet breaks and lunch.
And city driving where you might spend 20 or thirty minutes getting to our from the actual highway.
This is what I came here to say. Even short distances.
Basically, any time you’re describing a trip to a destination, it’s in time, based on the mode of travel. Hell, I even describe our family hikes in time it takes our littles to walk it, then estimate how long it would take an adult.
My kids school is 3 minutes away or an 8 minute adult-pace bike ride. Fucked if I know how many km that is.
I wish this was all in metric
I feel like long distace should be time not metric or imperial.
This is true. I never really noticed this until I lived overseas for a year, and when I received directions, they were like, “go 750m this way…”, and it sounded so foreign. I was thinking, “like, 10 mins…? 12 mins?” Haha
Where I live its generally imperial for estimating something at a glance, and metric for actually measuring something.
We prefer metric mostly, but so much of our stuff comes from or is sold to the states, so we don’t have much choice but to use both systems.
Anoying af.
Does it help knowing NASA uses metric?
Hospitals in the US use mostly metric too.
While this is true, they still manage to use different metric units than the rest of the damn world (e.g. mg/dL instead of mmol/L)! Really messes up a lot of our reference material.
There’s also weird stuff how things like fuel consumption is measured. In the US we use “miles per gallon” which makes sense in a non-metric country. I was born in a metric country where we used “kilometers per liter” which also makes sense. But then cars have this setting for European countries where they show “liters per 100km”. WTF? Who in the hell measures things like that and why?
TL;DR it’s possible to do stupid things with any measuring system.
Canada here we always use Litres per 100km, because it shows fuel consumption per a static , rather than distance being the variable value. It seems odd, but when you are doing certain math on range and fuel usage it actually makes more sense. there are articles that can explain it better than I can
If I had a pool, I would probably hate if I had to set the temperature in black and white; so I would look for a pool that specifically uses Colour.
As a German I have to ask… why? It’s just sad at that point
A big issue is how connected certain trades are to the USA. A lot of our trades education or consumer products rely on their imperial system. Really wish the USA would stop prerending it is special and join the civilized world of logical units.
The funny thing is any blueprint you get will be in metric. But if you want to do something like bend a conduit, all the benders use imperial measurements.
The rule of thumb I used to use as a draughtman was that plans would be metric for zoning and permit approval, metric for steel-frame or concrete, and US standard measurement for lumber and wood-frame. this is because dimensional steel mostly comes from China, which is sold in metric lengths, while lumber is cut to US standards.
Basically everything mandated by the government is Metric, so any official labeling (like on roads or foods) and it’s what we are taught in school. But we are in a transitionary phase in terms of whats passed on through family and social interactions. And that period is extended by trade with the US leading to lots of things still having both imperial and metric measurements, or in the case of weather, I grew up on the border listening to Detroit news.
It’s not hard for us it’s just what we’re used to.
This is next level national fck up. 🤣
After 3y in UK I understood imperial system but I still hate it. When I watch a video when they mention imperial system I just don’t bother to finish it.
Because there are still huge numbers of people alive today that grew up and went to school before Canada officially switched to metric. Don’t forget that we’re trapped by the Americans. Where I live I can literally see the individual buildings in the city across the river which is upstate New York. There are several radio stations along the border that do their weather reports in both °C and °F. Personally… I’m 6ft tall, 235Lbs, every liquid is in litres and temperatures are in Celsius. My oven has both F and C. Driving in Canada is usually measured in time when speaking to people. I know that Toronto is about 4hrs away on a good day and it can be 7hrs on a bad day in the winter. Don’t get me started on accidents or construction. I have no idea how far it is in KM. I’m guessing maybe 400km since the speed limit is 100kph and it takes 4hrs to get there.
FWIW, I’m 45yrs old. So I’m really trapped in between the two systems. I prefer metric but my parents and many coworkers were born and raised pre-metrification.
Thanks for taking your time go give me that detailed answer. Really appreciate it. Don’t even know what to say know XD
I forgot to mention another thing about our timeline. “Metrication” in Canada only started officially at the government level in 1970. The scientific community used it long before that but definitely not the average citizen and not the government. It will take several generations to finally get rid of it here, if ever. Cuz ‘Murica next door.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Canada
If you really want to hear something sad… we buy butter in bricks of 453g which are actually just 1lb bricks that were relabeled. Same goes for jugs of certain liquids. There’s no such thing as a 4L jug of milk or juice or even motor oil. We have 1gal jugs that are labeled and contain 3.79L of product.
It’s interesting to see that Australia and New Zealand did just fine with metrification around the same time. Yet somehow, the UK and US absolutely bungled it and Canada has had to wait for generational change.
Here’s a little photographic evidence to backup my claims re. food. Here you will find extremely common products that are available in every supermarket/grocery/convenience store all across Canada. A Canadian pound of butter 454g (didn’t realise this brand still has imperial on the label), 2.5 cups of Gatorade 591ml, 3 cups or 1.5pints of Coca-Cola 710ml, 6 cups or 3 pints of flavoured coffee creamer 1.42L, and last but not least, 1 pint of salad dressing 475ml. Obviously it was orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to update the label than to change all the bottles and other various containers and manufacturing processes.
FWIW, I’m 45yrs old.
Metric or imperial?
45 metric years. I was born in QC and started out the right way. Never even heard of imperial till my family moved to ON. I’m also fluent in 24hr timekeeping, none of that AM/PM bullshit for me.
Inertia and things that are really, really inconvenient otherwise. Here in Saskatchewan, the “grid” roads serving rural Saskatchewan are actually laid out in a 1 mile by 1 mile grid, enclosing 1 section of land (640 acres). Even equipment without odometers can follow directions like “4 miles north and 3 miles west” by simply counting intersections.
By distance, Saskatchewan has approximately 1/3 of all the roads in Canada despite having only about 1/35 the population. Miles are not going anywhere, even if everyone gives total distance travelled and highway distances in kilometres (or approximate travel times).
A big reason is, at least for me, I’m one generation removed from someone who lived when Canada was on Imperial. It’ll take a few generations to get rid of it. You can even see it in the replies here, as people who are certainly younger than me are talking about how they’re using metric exclusively for things that I still swap between.
That’s the ONLY reason. I’m quite fond of metric.
People provide many excuses, but the reason there has been no further improvement is Canada stop it’s metrification program in 1985.
So what we successful converted in 15 years of metrification remains metric, the remainder is unlikely to change, and Imperial units are still taught.
This varies by province, due to the education component. For example, Québec is more metric than most.
Forgot about deli meet for the weight. It’s always “I want 300 grams of sliced black forest ham”, and not whatever that is in imperial. Do they use ounces for that?
I’ve started asking for a specific number of slices and thickness. 16 slices of shaved blackforest ham gives me 4 sandwiches worth. Oh baby.
This is the way. One customer ever did this in my deli career and it was the easiest transaction.
Not many people realize you can do this. Just the number of slices and say either thin, medium, or thick.
Speaking as a Canadian and a millenial, I would say this is completely true. For example, right now my AC reads 72F, whch is right where I like it in this 25-35C weather.
When evenings dip below 20C we like to sit in our 101F hot tub.
I’d argue it’s mostly true. I’ve never used Fahrenheit for a pool, the pools I’ve used in multiple cities around the west are all in Celsius. I’m as confused about 101f as a hot tub temperature as I am about knowing if 72f is a good room temp. Like most people I know, I switch my AC to Celsius immediately, because otherwise I have to do a mental conversion any time I want to set it. I think the only F a Canadian is almost certain to use is in oven temperatures…
And the “is it for work” adage for lengths only really applies to trades.
It depends where you are in Canada. Regions like Windsor Ontario use °F for air temp and AC, whereas Ottawa uses pretty much just °C. Unless your in a hotel for some reason.
My father hauls liquids in Canada. Never leaves the province. But on his reports he must note metric and imperial gallon.
I don’t have to watch the show to know it is true. When I was in middle school we had to learn conversions for all of these (except °C to °F, cause that’s too hard).
Okay, yeah that all seems correct to me lol. It sure does make us sound crazy though!
I’m pretty happy to have non-zero competency in all the systems lol. I’m a regular hobby crafter, and honestly some projects just work better in metric, some are better in imperial.
Yeah, basically. I think it kind of depends on your age though. I was almost 100% metric with the exception of baking until my teens or so (we never had a pool).
A lot of it comes from getting stuff from the US. Most of the cookbooks you find here come from the US so they use US measurement. Doing construction? The lumber’s cut to sell to the US market so you may as well use US measurement when you work with it. Steel lengths are usually available in metric so commercial construction is metric too. I’ve done a fair amount of construction and land surveying so I can do most length conversions like that in my head.
Temperature, though, I’m hopeless with Fahrenheit. Some older folk will still prefer °F to °C all the time but to me it’s just numbers. Most of my life is spent between -30°C and +30°C so it works out very conveniently as a nice symmetrical gauge between “cold winter day” and “hot summer day.”
The rest, well, it’s mostly just the unitary form of peer pressure. You just sort of pick it up. The really wild thing is that I might say something like “oh yeah, my cat weighs 5 lbs, so she’s like half the weight of one of those 5-kilo bags of flour” without irony.
I paint quite a bit for work. Funny trying to add up 5.5 ft and 2.75 ft and 17 ft to quote a job lol
Fahrenheit is Celsius - 32 then divided by 1.8 which is not an easy conversion luckily its also 9/5ths
The trick I found out was to subtract 32 from Fahrenheit then divide by 9 then multiply by 5.
The other trick, you subtract 10% from your Celsius times by 2, then add 32 but this one doesn’t reverse well because you have to add 1/9th
Yeah, I mean I can do the math and get work it out if I care enough, but I doubt I’ll ever grok Fahrenheit the way I do Celsius. It’s like saying “oh it’s 300K”. You can do the math and work out what temperature that is, but until you bring it into the frame of reference you’re familiar with it’s just a number.
I convert recipe measurements to millilitres because it’s way easier to scale a recipe up and down that way.
I use a set of laboratory graduated cylinders in the kitchen for measuring the ingredients.
I learned to convert common ingredients, liquid and dry, from volume to weight and just weigh them. A lot easier to mix things that way and don’t need to have a bunch of different measuring utensils.
It’s pretty accurate. Believe it or not, one of our most infamous aviation near-disasters in Canada (the Gimli Glider) happened because someone made a mistake converting fuel quantities between metric & imperial.
My favourite thing is when we get to use awful combinations of both systems, like measuring out 15g of coffee for 12oz of water. Or having 26" bike wheels inflated to 30psi but attached to the bike with a 10mm axle. I especially love kcals and mmHg.
Or even wood that is 2’ by 3’ by 3mm.
I’ve never needed to use imperial for long distances for work? Not sure what that’s about.
And don’t get me started on woodworking or the construction industry. Plywood panels are length and width in imperial but thickness in metric or imperial.
I think it’s because when you do a claim it’s still called mileage, even though you log Kms.
Same when buying cars, number if Kms is still referred to as the cars mileage.
I was thinking the same thing!
No, you got that backwards. If it’s a long distance: km. But small distances for work is feet and inches.
