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.
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.
When someone asks your height, you answer in centimeters.
Howabout meters? 180cm = 1.8m
Centimetres are more commonly used to measure height (e.g., on official government issued IDs)
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
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.
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.
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.
Dunno in oz, but a US pint is 473mL, and a British pint is 568mL. Quite the difference TBH, and a bunch of bars in Vancouver got fined a few years ago due to shorting customers not providing a full pint when selling them. Some of them were even forced to buy new glasses because they weren’t big enough to fit a full pint.
This is a reoccurring problem with the imperial system, since the units just turns into words and no longer hold their meaning as measurements because they’re so arbitrary in the first place and are next to impossible to convert on the fly. Like a span is the width of a hand, but that’s useless when the difference in size is easily 50% to double just comparing between women and men. Or how you need to specify fluid or dry ounces, yet people often don’t bother and just confuse each other by not specifying. Or how complicated conversions and comparisons are to the degree that most people don’t do them in imperial and just force themselves to memorize what each arbitrary unit is in a vacuum.
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
When did Florida make their own standard oz?
Metric system is meant for clever people.
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.
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.
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).
You are welcome!
And what did Mulroney stop in the metrification of Canada?
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.
The articles first line starts with:
Body mass index (BMI) is an anthropometric index that is commonly used in the medical setting and is a factor in assessing various disease risks
If it’s good enough for doctors, it’s good enough for me. Wake me up when something else takes its place.
Body mass index (BMI) is an anthropometric index that is commonly used in the medical setting and is a factor in assessing various disease risks but its origins are unknown by many. More importantly, BMI does not properly assess body fat percentage and muscle mass or distinguish abdominal fat from gluteofemoral fat, which is important to note because abdominal fat is associated with insulin resistance, metabolic disease, and cardiovascular complications. Using a less accurate index to assess the relationship between weight and disease risk is conceptually invalid because the use of BMI ultimately trickles into patient treatment, preventive medicine, and overall health outcomes.
Completing the quote we find that there is a more important aspect to BMI than its common use.
You slim
Very slim, I’m 178cm and 100kg. About 24% bodyfat.
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?
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.
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
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.
Yup, let’s drop imperial for absolutely everything!
Let’s finally move to the ISO 216 standard for paper!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216
I was a little confused by the paper sizes when I moved to Japan, but it makes so much sense. I love it now.
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
OMG this.
