On the map, Canada should be in yellow too. Oh, we are officially metric, but most of us think in inches, feet, miles, cups, pounds, bushels, etc. as much as centimetres, metres, kilograms, milligrams, and kilometres. We are accustomed to telling our temperatures in both official Celsius and Fahrenheit for our American neighbours and the older generation who remembers life before we went metric. We're bilingual in measurements as well as official languages.
Thanks to living abroad for so long now I'm *almost* fully bi, um, measurements? When in the rest of the world, I have no trouble understanding what ten kilometers mean or three hundred meters.
However, I still find celsius a little...challenging. I generally know what 15C means, but I also find Fahrenheit to better capture the actual temperature because it's more exact.
I was a teenager when that 'funny money' came to the UK. However, we all discovered that it was much easier to add it up, so it was adopted fairly quickly. But, I still think in imperial weights when baking, and measure distances in miles. My daughter once told me something was a meter and 3 inches!
If you need a rough guide to converting miles to kilometres, think Fibonacci, yet again! Golden ratio, whatever you want to call it...the lower number is miles and the next one will be reasonably close in kms.
So as a mixed up English person, I muddle through! 😂
This was great. I’m endlessly fascinated with concept of measuring as well as the units themselves. The picture you placed in the piece when talking about changing ‘rulers’, punning very cleverly, shows ‘rules’ as I was taught.
After nearly 7 decades of using both, I'm pretty much bilingual but tend to metric. Extreme temperatures in Farenheit need a bit of a mental conversion to C to be meaningful (although of course Kelvin is not that intuitive). And weights and forces in thousands of pounds - that's just bizarre. And really, the debate should not be about metric and imperial, but SI and imperial. So much of physics and engineering is just easier to understand (and learn) in SI units than imperial (have learnt in both). Yes, most bases for units are seemingly arbitrary, or based on the irrational constants of nature - but that's true in either system. Given SI exists it really does seem deliberately holding back common sense and progress to hang on to the old English measurements.
Interestingly (to me anyway) is that the US use acre-feet to measure large water volumes e.g. reservoir capacity. So the (arguably) most technologically sophisticated country in the world uses a unit of measurement based on the area a team of oxen could plough in a day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acre
… and a human foot. Of course it is also extremely practical if you know the area of a reservoir in acres then the change in water volume is simply reservoir area (acres) times change in depth (feet).
This was fascinating, thank you for putting it together. I like knowing there’s a more “human scale” understanding to imperial measurement, although being together with an architect and woodworker who grew up with metric I can assure you that from a purely mathematical perspective, measuring things and making calculations makes way more sense in metric. 1/32 of an inch is just ludicrous!
I could fuss with you about ketchup, but I will not. I will simply say, ketchup is not a vegetable (despite what any U.S. Republican president might say), nor made only with tomatoes. But tomato ketchup is the best, so here we are.
As for "dropping vowels"! It is spelled a-l-u-m-i-n-u-m. It's only the Brits that insist on inserting an extra "i" which doesn't exist, converting it to aloo-mini-um. This is silly. Also, wrong. But charming, so here we are.
I come at this from multiple directions. I went to school during the 1980s, by which time metric was mandatory in teaching, but imperial was still ubiquitous in society. So the latter stuck until relatively recently, which I increasingly found annoying because…
I married someone from Iceland, who only thought in metric (despite being aware of imperial). I attempted to shift my own thinking to match, which took some time. I was eventually largely successful with human weight and height (and has always preferred metric for things like cooking), but even today I have issues in thinking about room sizes in metric. And yet…
We moved to the UK around 25 years ago. My wife now quite often uses imperial colloquially. I recently asked why, and it was that physicality angle and ease of convenient measurements. She noted that talking about a couple of inches for moving a shelf or something was more natural than metric. But metric is the tool for _precision_.
It’ll be interesting to see how my kid fares. Her schooling has involved the odd lesson in imperial (is there’s an awareness of it), but she doesn’t really use such things at all within her life. Of course, that may change as she becomes more immersed in the wider world, where those old measurements cling on.
Ah, where to start. I will start with: delightful read -- thank you.
Next, I will second the comment about Canada needing to be yellow. As an American (boo!) who has spent a lot of time in Canada and the UK, I feel pretty solid with my notion that Canada is way more yellow than the UK. You hardly have to even think in metric to get by in Canada, except grams.
On that note, I will say that as much as I (as a scientist and someone who has spent a lot of time outside the US) cringe at "American" units (really the best way to name anymore), I never felt it was a genuine improvement. Except for grams. Grams are better than ounces, even setting aside the latter being awkwardly used for both volume and weight (already a bad alternative to mass). F is better than C, for sure, and it they are both equally arbitrary The rest are pretty indifferent.
You reminded me of the experience of reading/watching science fiction style stories where someone uses the phrase "metric tons". So often I cannot even motivate myself to laugh anymore. So they are saying that the advocates for 1 megagram to be the unit of measurement for masses in the range appx (truck, planetoid} won the battle but then chose to make the name the phrase the loser used to use for the unit?!!!!
Metric may be easy to calculate with but it's still arbitrary, and we old fogeys have trouble wrapping our heads around it. I go through this weird "a metre is about 39 inches so divide by 39 and multiply by 12" kind of math thing. When you grow up with a system, you get a feel for what a thing measures in inches or feet or whatever and it feels natural. I can look at something and know it's about 8" long but I can't estimate how many cms it is. It's like trying to read Russian. I can convert kilos to pounds and vice versa, but not grams to ounces or ounces to grams. I still ask for a quart of milk or a pound of hamburg at the butcher. I'm starting to get the hang of temperatures in Celcius, but instinctively use Fahrenheit. I'll be imperial till the day I die
Maybe it's because most of my childhood was metric I find the mixing of metric and imperial annoying. Most tools are imperial but others in metric. I think what's worse is the things like Sulfrous Sulfuric, ferrous, ferric, using C for Kilocalorie but then again we have a healthcare system that wants to be both for profit driven by the free market but thinking people shouldn't have to be thinking about their credit card number and balance when their organs are failing but maybe they should if their lungs are important they will know what their credit card number is. I also wish we would just have standard time and not switch our clocks twice a year. What can I say we're a land of contrasts. We have two football balls and sometimes even rugby in some places. Yes I wish we were just all metric. But it's more likely that enough of us will decide to turn in our guns instead of getting them pried from our cold dead hands. But what do I know soccer is a thing here now I guess.
On the map, Canada should be in yellow too. Oh, we are officially metric, but most of us think in inches, feet, miles, cups, pounds, bushels, etc. as much as centimetres, metres, kilograms, milligrams, and kilometres. We are accustomed to telling our temperatures in both official Celsius and Fahrenheit for our American neighbours and the older generation who remembers life before we went metric. We're bilingual in measurements as well as official languages.
Canada ! The only country in the world with 2 official languages that nobody speaks.
Thanks to living abroad for so long now I'm *almost* fully bi, um, measurements? When in the rest of the world, I have no trouble understanding what ten kilometers mean or three hundred meters.
However, I still find celsius a little...challenging. I generally know what 15C means, but I also find Fahrenheit to better capture the actual temperature because it's more exact.
I was a teenager when that 'funny money' came to the UK. However, we all discovered that it was much easier to add it up, so it was adopted fairly quickly. But, I still think in imperial weights when baking, and measure distances in miles. My daughter once told me something was a meter and 3 inches!
If you need a rough guide to converting miles to kilometres, think Fibonacci, yet again! Golden ratio, whatever you want to call it...the lower number is miles and the next one will be reasonably close in kms.
So as a mixed up English person, I muddle through! 😂
Absolutely fascinating. I’m in the US and “three football fields,” for example, is the only way I can envision 300 yards.
This was great. I’m endlessly fascinated with concept of measuring as well as the units themselves. The picture you placed in the piece when talking about changing ‘rulers’, punning very cleverly, shows ‘rules’ as I was taught.
The Canadians are so mixed someone developed a chart to explain it...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fcanadian-measurement-flowchart-v0-k1brffgbngk31.png%3Fwidth%3D681%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D5cffc5e18cbc679aac42804b7c55d8ad2f47ea32
After nearly 7 decades of using both, I'm pretty much bilingual but tend to metric. Extreme temperatures in Farenheit need a bit of a mental conversion to C to be meaningful (although of course Kelvin is not that intuitive). And weights and forces in thousands of pounds - that's just bizarre. And really, the debate should not be about metric and imperial, but SI and imperial. So much of physics and engineering is just easier to understand (and learn) in SI units than imperial (have learnt in both). Yes, most bases for units are seemingly arbitrary, or based on the irrational constants of nature - but that's true in either system. Given SI exists it really does seem deliberately holding back common sense and progress to hang on to the old English measurements.
Interestingly (to me anyway) is that the US use acre-feet to measure large water volumes e.g. reservoir capacity. So the (arguably) most technologically sophisticated country in the world uses a unit of measurement based on the area a team of oxen could plough in a day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acre
… and a human foot. Of course it is also extremely practical if you know the area of a reservoir in acres then the change in water volume is simply reservoir area (acres) times change in depth (feet).
This was fascinating, thank you for putting it together. I like knowing there’s a more “human scale” understanding to imperial measurement, although being together with an architect and woodworker who grew up with metric I can assure you that from a purely mathematical perspective, measuring things and making calculations makes way more sense in metric. 1/32 of an inch is just ludicrous!
I could fuss with you about ketchup, but I will not. I will simply say, ketchup is not a vegetable (despite what any U.S. Republican president might say), nor made only with tomatoes. But tomato ketchup is the best, so here we are.
As for "dropping vowels"! It is spelled a-l-u-m-i-n-u-m. It's only the Brits that insist on inserting an extra "i" which doesn't exist, converting it to aloo-mini-um. This is silly. Also, wrong. But charming, so here we are.
I come at this from multiple directions. I went to school during the 1980s, by which time metric was mandatory in teaching, but imperial was still ubiquitous in society. So the latter stuck until relatively recently, which I increasingly found annoying because…
I married someone from Iceland, who only thought in metric (despite being aware of imperial). I attempted to shift my own thinking to match, which took some time. I was eventually largely successful with human weight and height (and has always preferred metric for things like cooking), but even today I have issues in thinking about room sizes in metric. And yet…
We moved to the UK around 25 years ago. My wife now quite often uses imperial colloquially. I recently asked why, and it was that physicality angle and ease of convenient measurements. She noted that talking about a couple of inches for moving a shelf or something was more natural than metric. But metric is the tool for _precision_.
It’ll be interesting to see how my kid fares. Her schooling has involved the odd lesson in imperial (is there’s an awareness of it), but she doesn’t really use such things at all within her life. Of course, that may change as she becomes more immersed in the wider world, where those old measurements cling on.
Ah, where to start. I will start with: delightful read -- thank you.
Next, I will second the comment about Canada needing to be yellow. As an American (boo!) who has spent a lot of time in Canada and the UK, I feel pretty solid with my notion that Canada is way more yellow than the UK. You hardly have to even think in metric to get by in Canada, except grams.
On that note, I will say that as much as I (as a scientist and someone who has spent a lot of time outside the US) cringe at "American" units (really the best way to name anymore), I never felt it was a genuine improvement. Except for grams. Grams are better than ounces, even setting aside the latter being awkwardly used for both volume and weight (already a bad alternative to mass). F is better than C, for sure, and it they are both equally arbitrary The rest are pretty indifferent.
You reminded me of the experience of reading/watching science fiction style stories where someone uses the phrase "metric tons". So often I cannot even motivate myself to laugh anymore. So they are saying that the advocates for 1 megagram to be the unit of measurement for masses in the range appx (truck, planetoid} won the battle but then chose to make the name the phrase the loser used to use for the unit?!!!!
Metric may be easy to calculate with but it's still arbitrary, and we old fogeys have trouble wrapping our heads around it. I go through this weird "a metre is about 39 inches so divide by 39 and multiply by 12" kind of math thing. When you grow up with a system, you get a feel for what a thing measures in inches or feet or whatever and it feels natural. I can look at something and know it's about 8" long but I can't estimate how many cms it is. It's like trying to read Russian. I can convert kilos to pounds and vice versa, but not grams to ounces or ounces to grams. I still ask for a quart of milk or a pound of hamburg at the butcher. I'm starting to get the hang of temperatures in Celcius, but instinctively use Fahrenheit. I'll be imperial till the day I die
I mean we Brits also like to measure things in:
Olympic swimming pools
double-decker buses
Nelson's columns
football fields
Wales
and I'm all for esoteric measurements, if I'm honest!
Maybe it's because most of my childhood was metric I find the mixing of metric and imperial annoying. Most tools are imperial but others in metric. I think what's worse is the things like Sulfrous Sulfuric, ferrous, ferric, using C for Kilocalorie but then again we have a healthcare system that wants to be both for profit driven by the free market but thinking people shouldn't have to be thinking about their credit card number and balance when their organs are failing but maybe they should if their lungs are important they will know what their credit card number is. I also wish we would just have standard time and not switch our clocks twice a year. What can I say we're a land of contrasts. We have two football balls and sometimes even rugby in some places. Yes I wish we were just all metric. But it's more likely that enough of us will decide to turn in our guns instead of getting them pried from our cold dead hands. But what do I know soccer is a thing here now I guess.
There is curry ketchup too!