How to measure things like a Canadian
(midwest.social)
(midwest.social)
European variant:
[ is it displays? ] -yes-> [ inches ]
↓ no
[ is it screws? ] -yes-> [ inches ]
↓ no
[ metric ]
Well, screws are more complicated. We mostly use M sizes which are metric. But when it comes to plumbing and compressed air thread sizes you get into imperial terretory fast.
"Time" haha, no no no! You mean "Conventional Sexagesimal Time".
Everyone loves the metric system until you bring up metric time, go ahead, go find your biggest metric fanboy/girl and ask them how they measure the passage of time, I'll wait.
As a Canadian-American living in Japan.
Height/Distance: metric
Cooking: metric (ml for volume, but I normally translate all recipes into weights and just throw things into a bowl on the scale) for both amounts and temperatures
Weight: metric
Speed: metric (m/s for wind, kph for basically anything else not science-y enough for other units)
Certain products: bicycle tires (maybe frames?), screen sizes, and more I'm forgetting.: inches but not called inches and almost always with the size in mm/cm written next to it. I have never met a Japanese person who knows what an inch actually represents unless they lived in the US or work closely with the US in certain industries (e-commerce is one for unit conversions)
Property sizes: In my own usages, metric (square metres). Dealing with Japanese real estate, home centers, etc: 帖 (jou the counter for tatami mats) and 坪 (tsubo the counter for area).
Consuming:
This is ignoring all of the counters Japanese has (一枚 one flat object like a sheet of paper, 一本 one cylnindrical object like a pencil/cigarette/whatever, and dozens more). Bonus: they're not all the same between Japanese and Chinese which feels weird. I don't know about Korean on that part since I think the counters are mostly written in hanguel anyway.
We’d need several versions of this in the UK with a decision tree required to select the relevant decision tree. It would need to take age and where you were brought up into account.
I think that the most complicated is distance. For me it is imperial for a person’s height, metric for short distances that I measure, imperial for short distances that I estimate (that one’s weird), miles for ground travel distances and time for air travel distances.
It's a bit out of date, and definitely varies by individual, but broadly, yes.
Like I'll weigh myself in kg and give height in cm but most people won't understand it outside a medical context.
And most cooking is in grams or Celsius, except my oven, which is F.
You must be younger, because this diagram is spot on for me
Is it for agriculture?
Imperial. Sorta.
I literally use units like mL per acre for something like boron application with fertilizer.
Canadians are surprisingly confusing with their measurements when they're so easy to understand about most other things.
Doubly colonized. Very porous border with supplies all engineered in ‘freedum units’.
Some industries have been extra slow to convert, usually due to supply chain dependencies. Also generations have to die before giving up key habits drilled into them as kids. I distinctly remember grandparents talking about mass in stones, yet canadian-born.
Settler states can sometimes ~~be stuck in~~ preserve old ways while imperial centers move on. Metis fiddlers sent a delegation to Scotland (? or thereabouts) to reteach them forgotten reels from a few hundred years ago.
Speed I'm bilingual in, I'm old enough to remember when we changed from miles to km and watching the road signs gradually get replaced. Manitoba also runs a grid pattern on roads throughout a lot of the southern province, having at least a gravel/dirt road nearly every mile, so you kinda grow up with that burned into your brain.
Temp wise, C all the way. Fahrenheit totally screws me up. I know 70 is around room temp but beyond that I need to convert it for my simple brain to understand.
F
It is easier for me to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. The actual equation is (9/5)C+32. I usually just double the Celsius, add 32, then subtract a few. Gets it close enough.
Add and then subtract an indefinite amount is what gets me
100 is body temp so you can use that one to convert the highs. No idea what freezing would be in F
I wonder if this will change thanks to the current and likely long-term antagonism between the USA & Canada.
more like cagaydians

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