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How to measure things like a Canadian?
(lemmy.zip)
Saw this recently on a WAN Show (19:12). How true is this? It sounds wild.
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.