When I was living in the GTA, I found that store clerks didn’t understand “half a kilogram” whenever I tried to order. I was embarassed for them. It didn’t occur to me that I could have done the conversion for them and ask for 500 grams; it’s just that as a Merkin we’re completely accustomed to order in fractional units. (I’ll point out that here in Mexico – a metric country – they use fractional units a lot, too). In any case, as soon as I started ordering meats and cheeses in pounds, suddenly the store clerks started understanding me!
Oh, lots of road-side stands still advertise their prices in quarts and pounds in Ontario.
Finally, all of the plant safety regulations seem to use English units only.
I’m totally metric: celsius, meters, grams and liters for me! But then again I’m from europe, so most people here are (with the exception of the backward islanders to the north west ;)).
I think the only thing that works with a different standard is the weight of newborn babies, which is given in pounds, altough I’m not sure they use the actual impirial pound measure or just round of to a pound being 500 grams…
also lately tv’s and monitors (and laptop screens) are given in inches, but I always have to check the small print to see what it is in cm to get any idea of how big 42 inches is. This is btw something that has only started with the flatscreens, before it was just in cm.
Totally Metric, I have no intuitive understanding of Imperial (even any fantasy RP games I DM will use made-up units that scale to Kg-Litre-Km units, not Lb-Qt-Mile)
I like metric. I want to be metric. However, this crazy mixed-up country I live in has been stuck in a hideous between state for over a generation!
Milk is in litres. I buy meat at the deli across the road in grams–but this seems to be relatively-uncommon. Perhaps it’s because of the high immigrant population from Eastern Europe in this neighbourhood. My weight is usually in pouinds, as are the weights at the gym. My height is in feet and inches. On my driver’s licence, they are in kilograms and centimetres.
Distances on the roads are in metres and kilometres; house dimensions in feet and square feet. Public documents relating to the Georgetown railway underpass construction are in metric. Plywood is 4 feet by 8 feet but 6mm thick. Normal typing paper is 8.5 x 11 inches. A small stick of butter is 250 grams, but a large one is 454 grams (one pound), rather than 500. And since I am increasingly involved in construction, I am being forcibly and complainingly dragged backward into the world of feet and inches.
Arrgh! If you could choose the worst result of an attempt at metrication, this would be it!
I’m US, but work in science and engineering. I can do linear dimensions in either, and convert easily. Volumes are harder – I don’t often convert liters to gallons, or vice-versa.
At home, everythings in inches, pounds, and teaspoons, cups, and quarts. we use Fahrenheit at home, Celsius or Kelvin in the lab. But over the range of human interest the rule “Double and add thirty” works to within 2 degrees, and is a heckuva lot easier than “9/5 plus 32” to do in your head. When I drive in Canada it’s easy to approximately convert mi/hr to km/hr or vice-versa be assuming 60 miles = 100 km and taking fractions.
So I’m only metric at work, and not even completely there.
I do most of my measuring in metric, though being in the US I have to shop and often cook in Imperial. For example, I buy burger at a price/pound, because that’s the way it’s advertised, but when I get it home I subdivide it into flat packages of 200 or 100 g that can be frozen and thawed quickly in the quantity I need. If a recipe calls for a pound, I pull out 500 g worth.
I grew up not resisting a world of Imperial units, but I never really had a feel for what a lot of these units meant. But since I decided to go metric, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how big things are in metric. So while my mind will still churn up a quantity like “fifty pounds” I don’t really have a subjective sense of how much mass that is. If I want a sense of it, I divide by two and imagine that many liters of water.
All my thermometers and my thermostat are in Celsius. People often report that this is difficult to get used to, but my wife and I have played a game for over a year where we both try to cite the temperature by feel before we get in the car and see what the car’s thermometer says. Now I don’t know what to make of it when somebody tells me the temperature in Fahrenheit.
Israel: Completely metric, except for the interesting example already noted of TV / computer screens. And horsepower for car engines.
I’m actually rather unusual in that I have some intuitive concept of Anglo (imperial/standard/whatever) units, as well – most people here wouldn’t know a degree F, an inch, a pint or a pound if it came up to them on the street and said hello…
Obligatory disclaimer: Imperial units and US units are not the same! This is a problem in Canada, because we’re never quite sure whether we’re getting Imperial fluid ounces or US fluid ounces, for example, since both systems aren’t officially used.
Yeah, good catch – although our latest car (interestingly, a Chevy) has internal sensors that give me current tire pressures… In Pascals. So maybe PSIs are on the way out, too.
Definitely – I’ve heard more than one conversation at an electronics store going along the lines of “Well, this is a 37” TV, so that means that the screen is about 95 cm diagonally."
I was going on 40 when the switch happened in Canada and I still think in Imperial for most things. I am fully bilingual in air termperature (but not in body temp; I don’t think anyone is). But if I want to say it’s a hot day, I will say it is the 90s. Still I think of 28 as a pleasnt summer day without translating it. Height and weight, forget it. I cannot relate to the metric measures. And TVs are sized only in inches.
But here is a surprising story. I guess European countries have been using metric for at least a century and a half. But a friend of mine, an American who grew up in a Norwegian-speaking town in northern Minnesota was spending two years in Norway. He needed a 2 by 4 and went to the lumber yard and asked–in Norwegian–for a piece of wood that was 5 by 10 cm. He was astonished to hear the clerk call to the back room for a 2 by 4! In Switzerland, where I have spent quite a bit of time, you will still see produce priced in pounds (Pfunde, livres), but it always means 500 g.
Off-topic, but on the top of a small mountain near Zuerich, there is a display that gives the altitude in metres, as well as in English feet, in French feet and in German feet, all three somewhat different. That alone is a good reason to metricize. Imagine the EU without it.
Like pretty much every other Canadian around, people are pounds and feet/inches.
Everything else, aside from a few colloquialisms (and TVs/monitors, which inexplicably are still sold by diagonal inches), is metric. Temperature (well, cooking can go either way, depending on when the instructions I’m going on were written, how old the stove is, or how worn the numbers on the dial), distance, size of anything that’s not a person or TV, volumes of liquids…all that’s metric.
I can’t convert properly between them, either…I can approximate between inches and centimetres, or yards and metres, but, obviously, that’s going to go wonky after a bit. Pounds and kilograms, I invariably have to check which one’s smaller (kilo)…after that I can approximately convert.
Grew up and live in Australia so yes, I think in metres, kilograms and degrees celsius. As a kid I had no grasp on Imperial units but now I sometimes use feet and inches, but not miles. I can understand pounds (multiply by two and add a little) and Fahrenheit (uh, 90 is hot… 100 is also hot) a little but I’m not that comfortable with them. And I have no idea how much a stone is.
I am British and was born in 1970 and I still use a combination of the two.
In general everyday terms metric governs. Temperature is always in Celsius Farenheit is a complete mystery to me.
But I can switch between metric and imperial for most other measurements.
My height and weight I know in both sets of units although I prefer to feet/inches and stones/pounds to m and kg.
Long distances I always measure in miles, just because that’s the way our road signs measure them. Similarly car speed mph not kmph, simply because if I used kmph I would only have to recalculate into mph anyway.
I still order a pint in the pub, not a fraction of a litre.
At work it’s all metric as I use SI units everyday.
What makes temperature for me easy is that I don’t have a good idea of what the ambient temperature is in either centrigrade nor Fahrenheit. What’s comfortable changes depending on where I’m at and how acclimatized I am, and so there’s not really a stable reference. Typically, 25 centigrade or 73 Fahrenheit both feel pretty comfortable to me. If it’s over 40 centigrade, it’s hot as all hell, unless I’ve been living in the Sonoran desert for several months and then it’s just kind of “knowing” that it’s hot but doesn’t really feel all that hot any more.
When talking about massive quantities of units, then the units become meaningless to me. I know that 1 million gallons is roughly 3.8 times the quantity of 1 million liters, but they’re both incomprehensively large that I don’t even really care any more.
For ballpark measurements, any unit as fine with me, and I can give rough approximations of anything under a mile. If I have to be precise, then I’ll use a unit converter or just do the math in my head.
For cooking, I prefer US units, because all of my kitchen gear and equipment and recipes are in English units. Other than that, I don’t care; it’s not rocket science to convert between US units, even if it’s not as easy as in SI units. Consider what I mentioned in an earlier post: the Canadian deli clerks were unable to understand what half a kilogram was. So much for being easy.
At work everything we do is 100% SI, except (for some odd reason) pressure and force on the manufacturing tools. Yeah, even when we install them into metric countries.
Indeed. But there really isn’t a good alternative term that seems to take. I like fps for foot-pound-second, but nobody knows what the hell I’m talking about when I say it. So, I use either US Units or Imperial Units and inevitably somebody points out the problem with that terminology, but at least people know what I mean. You can’t win.
I have read elsewhere that in Germany they will say “metric pound” (or whatever the German actually is) and mean by that 500 grams. The same source said that a “metric inch” is 25 mm. If we could get everybody on that system, that’d make the transition easier. People get flummoxed when you ask them to give you centimeters for inches, but I don’t know many people who can’t give you dimes for quarters.
That’s certainly not any harder than metric. The range is from 36.1 to 37.8 °C, with 37 as the average, which if you do the conversion math is the same as temperature as the 98.6 we all remember in America. Fahrenheit 100.4 is the temperature we’re told to look out for when babies are sick, and that works out to a round 38 °C. That 104 you hear tossed around as the start of a brain-damaging fever is 40 °C. It’s not an accident that these weird numbers in Fahrenheit turn out to be round numbers in Celsius – the limits were defined with Celsius in mind. Body temperature is actually easier to deal with in metric.
As another poster mentioned in a previous thread on the metric system, there is a handy rhyme for remembering the temperature ranges:
The Metric system was foisted on us in Canada, back in 74/75 and my dad had to put these little stickers on the speedometer roughly where 65 klicks and so forth, overlaid over the standard mph.
Today , we basically have a bastardized hybrid system where people will often quote both systems in the same sentence, for example talking about driving. The distance may or may not be quoted in metric or standard, but the speed to get there will probably be quoted as doing a buck twenty all the way.
Fuel economy is still quoted in miles per gallon ,rather than liters per what ever and as noted up thread, air pressure is still quoted mainly as PSI rather than pascals per what ever the fuck.
Alcohol is sold in metric quantities, but refered to as mickeys, 26’ers, forty pounders, and finally texas mickeys. Individual drinks are normally brown pops , wobblies , tall boys, singles , doubles or triples for mixed drinks. Interestingly enough, the liqueor store will sell in metric quantity, but the cops quote standard portions rather than metric for DUI purposes.
Temperatures are normally quoted in both standards due to the amount of tourists and business people. Older generations think F and the younger Generations tend to think in C.
Overall, I’d say that Metric has seeped in to some niches and standard american has held on in other areas, in between there is a hybridization.