How to measure things like a Canadian?
How to measure things like a Canadian?
Saw this recently on a WAN Show (19:12). How true is this? It sounds wild.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not hard for us it's just what we're used to.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Objection! "Work" being imperial implies science isn't work. I'd feel better if it said "construction" or "industry".
A lot of these are more to do with age or products imported from the US than anything. For example with the temperature one, I would never give the temperature of anything in f, but my parents' hot tub only displays temperature in f. Also my parents follow a flowchart like this much more than I do because they grew up with a more mixed system. Like they will sometimes give distance in miles whereas I would only ever in km. However there are some of these that even I do. Like I would only ever give my height and weight on feet, inches, and pounds.
I work with a lot of French people (guess my city) and I had to memorize my height and weight in metric like some sort of crazy person!
That being said metric is truly superior and I use it in almost everything else other than air temp while baking or roasting.
Don't forget we also measure distance by travel time. I have to Google the KM distance from Ottawa to Toronto but I know it's around 4 hours and 20 minutes traffic allowing.
yep, driving somewhere is almost always expressed as a unit of time. Only time I check distances is planning a trip with the trailer to get an idea of when to stop for gas, especially going up north.
Not to mention if we say miles, we almost always mean kilometres.
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.
Myself, I measure water temp in Celsius (pools, aquariums, lakes, oceans...), but yeah pretty damn accurate.
I use metric for all distances, and celcius for all temperatures... except my oven, but if i could change that to C, I would.
Many ranges and ovens do have the option to do this hidden in the settings somewhere. It may be worth do a search for how to do it on your model. (Model and serial number are usually on a sticker that is visible when the lower drawer is opened.)
But then you have to convert all the recipes that only list Fahrenheit :(
Cooking flip flops the most..... Usually baking is Imperial ( ferenheit/cups/teaspoon/tablespoon/ounce (weight), fl oz (volume), etc)... But in a single recipe, I've turned on the oven to 350F, and mixed a teaspoon of one ingredient into 300 mL of another, then added 300g of a third with an 8oz can of another.
It's just completely random, even within a single recipe.
This chart has been around for a long time and is getting out of date. It should now be called: How Older Canadians Measure Things. Younger Canadians are getting a lot more metric.
For example none of the younger people at my office know their weight in imperial. The most they knew were some baby weights they had to convert to imperial for their parents.
The one that stands out for me, I've never used imperial to measure distance for work. All our "mileage" is done in km's.
As was stated by someone else, this should be "construction" specifically. All our lumber is shared with the US, so it's measured in inches/feet. I think most buildings have wall stud spacing measured in inches here to match lumber sizes like 2x4"
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.
No, you got that backwards. If it's a long distance: km. But small distances for work is feet and inches.
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!
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.
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.
When evenings dip below 20C we like to sit in our 101F hot tub.
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.
Not many people realize you can do this. Just the number of slices and say either thin, medium, or thick.
This is the way. One customer ever did this in my deli career and it was the easiest transaction.
If you're looking for some logic in this mess, it's that we generally use metric for things regulated by the government and imperial for more informal things.
So road signs and food package sizes are mandated to be in metric, so we're forced to learn kilometers and grams there. But measurements of people and cooking temperatures are mostly used casually so we've stuck to old habits.
This leads to some ridiculous situations. For instance, we understand distances and fuel volumes in metric, but for a long long time we'd only talk about fuel economy in miles per gallon. Anyone who wanted to calculate fuel economy had to memorize the formulas to convert km to miles and litres to gallons.
Around me, this has finally changed in recent years and mostly it's just old timers still using MPG. (Which is good, not just because metric is easier in this case, but because measuring economy as a ratio of fuel over distance is just plain superior to the other way around.)
Also, a lot of our recipes/cookbooks/ovens come from the states!
Pretty accurate and its due to trade with the USA.
For example I wanted small nuts and screws for a project. Got metric from Amazon and I needed M2 screw and nuts.
But when I tried to get it sourced by a local company in NS, they didn't have the metric nuts and the screws where expensive.
So I found a closes size I could get in imperial, #2-56. They didn't just have them, but they were pennies per unit.
The consumer hardware store in Australia sells a full range of both. Takes up a lot of space. The metric nuts & bolts are definitely cheaper than the imperial ones though.
Saw this posted couple of days ago, but then it was "... Like a british person". What and WHEN is The Orginal?
Around here (rural southern Saskatchewan), imperial still has a stronghold because of our roads, farming, and other factors. Our roads are laid out on a 1 mile grid (some places it's 2 miles north-south) and a square mile is 1 section of land (640 acres).
Even the kids who've never learned any imperial measures still use at least miles for distance when driving the grids. (And that's what we call them: grid roads, not gravel roads or any other designation.) Even equipment without odometers can follow a set of directions like "4 miles north and 3 miles west" because you just count intersections.
Even our legal land locations are given using these ancient units. So I live at NW 19-20-10 W3 and every emergency service and business who needs to knows how to find me.
Fun fact: there are very few flat-earthers around here because of something called a "correction line." The square grid doesn't fit the curved surface, so the roads that (approximately) follow the meridians (lines of longitude) need to be offset every so often to keep them parallel. The roads that intersect those offsets are called "correction line roads" and are used as landmarks when giving directions.
I don't know about pool temperature, but water temperature in the lake and indoor temperature are imperial with outdoor temperature in Celsius. Usually. :)
I think you mean that all of your roads are laid out in a 1.609km grid.
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 perfectly accurate for where i live in Québec.
For weight, they forgot to add: if it's for advertising a price, it's in $/lbs (though you will be charged in $/kg). The butcher knows damn well that steaks advertised at $15/lbs sell better than steaks at $33/kg.
what? I always see it listed as $/kg or $/100g
I see a mixture, but the conversion is usually listed on the same tag.
It's easy, because of the proximity to the States and the fact that we still have generations in Canada that were alive PRIOR to metric who have handed it down, we're more or less raised with it. I can't speak for others, but I can pretty freely convert between the two (at least very close, I can't completely convert Celsius and Fahrenheit in my head).
But yeah, that's pretty accurate as to how everyday measurements go here. I'm trying to think of others, but I think this covers most/all of them.
A fairly accurate way to convert temperature from C to F is C×2+30. The actual formula is C×(9/5)+32.
American ex-pat/Canadian permanent resident here. This is all pretty accurate in my experience, though I can't speak on using Imperial for work-related measurements or pool temperature. Just this morning I had to describe our current bout of cool weather in Ferenheit to my friends back home, and was reminded all over again how ridiculous it is that the US still isn't on metric. This rings especially true whenever I call my mom. Seems like I have to "Hey Google" conversions in every conversation we have. Before my dad died he would keep his weather app on Celcius to report the weather to me in metric. I honestly love that he felt compelled to do that.
It was a little weird getting used to the metric system initially, but I honestly prefer it at this point. I used to argue that you could be more precise with Farenheit, as the scale was broader. However, I've since come to realize that no one cares whether it was 74° or 76°.
Yup pretty accurate (quebec)
I use metric for everything but I use lbs for weight.
Where I live its generally imperial for estimating something at a glance, and metric for actually measuring something.
It’s only true if you are over 55-60.
I’m 50, and almost never use Imperial. Especially temperature - like, who TF uses Fahrenheit? It makes absolutely no sense in almost every context.
I mean the chart says it's only used for cooking and pools, which is pretty accurate imo. Most recipes are in Fahrenheit and I've never heard anyone taking about pool temperatures in Celsius.
I'm 53, and I think we started being taught metric in grades 3 and 4. For me, the chart is very accurate.
The only time it comes up is when I follow a recipe. That and my stove is only in F.
What’s the dial on your stove say? Because I have never used let alone seen a stove in Canada that had C on it. Been that way since I can recall.
I think most food packages also list temps in F (or add C as well but never omit F).
The only time it comes up is when I follow a recipe. That and my stove is only in F.
Even back in the 80s, the first electronic stoves could be switched from Fahrenheit to Celsius. My mom had one, because all her recipes that she brought over from the old country were in Celsius.
Any modern oven can have its display switched to Celsius.
Because of its scale, Fahrenheit works better for describing the temperature as it relates to people and how comfortable or dangerous it is. Celsius obviously works better for science and engineering. Both systems are arbitrary and either will work once your used to them obviously. Fahrenheit is anthrocentric. Celsius is centered around the phase changes of water at a standard (arbitrary) pressure. The only temperature scale that approaches universality and attempts to not be arbitrary is the Kelvin.
Fahrenheit is my preferred scale when dealing with weather and heating/cooling my home because with Fahrenheit, you can describe almost the entire range of normal human experience from freezing to death to burning to death with (almost always) only two digits and no sign change. If you see an extra digit or a negative sign on the Fahrenheit scale you know shit just got real. And as for the numbers in between 0-100, you can conceptualize them as a simple decimal range like we do for lots of other statistical things like movie ratings, school/exam grading brackets, political polls on TV, percentages, etc.
...Are you saying that the rest of the world have not a single idea, which temperature is burning hot and which temperature is freezing cold?
All of that is just a matter of habits/familiarity. If you are used to Celcius, you know 0℃ is freezing cold, like literally. Anything beyond 40℃ is "shit just got real" territory.
If you want to call out "but 40 is not an intuitive number!!" then I would briefly mention that 212℉ is not an intuitive number for the boiling point of water either.
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.
This is highly inaccurate. Human height is done in cm.
Only medical records. Amongst the general populace it's feet/inches.
Medical and government. It was also just one example
Ontario checking in, 100% accurate. Actually I would add home temperature (like the thermostat) under F, but body temperature (like checking if you have a fever) under C. Also we're so used Americans using miles for distance/speed we'll sometimes use it in idioms ("They ran out of here at 100 miles per hour!”). I never realized this change between measuring systems wasn't the norm until I started chatting with Europeans.
Air temperature is strictly in celcius in Québec. I have no idea what it means to set the thermostat to 70F. Is it hot, is it cold, who knows 🤷
Same in the maritimes.
So here (and maybe it's just my family?) I've always seen the home thermostat set in F, while the weather outside is strictly C. So like my house is set at 70f but if I were talking about outside I'd use C. Which is funny because the thermostat in F also means nothing to me, I just notch it up or down a few degrees depending on how cold I am in the winter 😂😅
I am in Ontario and all me thermostats have been metric. Thankfully too as it's always confusing when it's in imperial.
That's interesting, I know the one I have now can go between the two and is just defaulted to F, but growing up the one in my childhood home only showed F. I never really understood the numbers in relation to the temp either, I just would notch it up or down a few degrees depending on how cold I was 😂
Many things make sense now
My head hurts.
the fun thing is that this graph is more-or-less accurate (I don't have a pool so I can't judge that one) for me despite being an American with no connection to Canada.
Australia we still use some legacy units such as psi instead of kPa or Bar in common parlance. This stems from our parents using this. Kids nowadays will probably adopt kPa, as it's in all the door jams of cars.
They missed an important one. If it's distance related to COVID, it's measured in hockey sticks.
I have a better idea: just use metric.
I try to fully metrify my workplace and my teammates are receptive because everyone knows imperial units suck.
But then whenever you're making anything with wood you need to convert everything. Or looking up any recipes online you'll need to convert. I almost feel like the mash up is easier than fully metric.
I came in here hoping to understand how to measure a Canadian. Height or circumference at least…
This is extremely accurate, as far as I've seen in western Canada.
I only use fare height when forced through the means of technology that for some reason hasn't been legislated to provide sane units mandatorily when sold in Canada
The exceptions to this would be lumber. Then occasionally I get pissed off at any Canadian company (or even government form) that refuses to follow our own standards. For instance federally, its recemmoneded to use YYYY-MM-DD unless you're writing out the month with three letters or more in which case you can use the insane states method. Yet consistently in forms I input the date wrong cause they do whatever that other format is
I always use milliliters and grams for cooking, unless it’s measuring volume of something solid.
I also use time for long distances.
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.