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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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’m pissed we don’t use ISO 216 (A4, A5, B-series, etc.) paper. Almost changed in 1974 but lost our nerve.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
Saw this posted couple of days ago, but then it was "... Like a british person". What and WHEN is The Orginal?
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.
It's perfectly accurate for where i live in Québec.
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 use metric for everything but I use lbs for weight.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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