Metric vs. Imperial brain

As you might know, Canada's official measurement system is metric. I was part of the generation that got caught between learning imperial and metric system when I was a kid and when Canada decided to switch from imperial to metric.

And to this very day, my brain naturally leans on the following measurement preferences:

long distance on road: metric (I have to anyway, it's by law with our road signage in Canada.)
less than 1 metre: I prefer envisioning and estimating in inches.... ie. doing fine artwork,crafts, where I have to cut and measure paper, fabric, etc.
cooking: imperial, but dear god, not ounces, more like cups, tblsp. tsp., etc.
room/home layout: imperial
weight: imperial

This of course drives my dearie nuts, who is more metric dedicated/converted. But then he knows some the alternate engineering measurements from centuries gone by, chains, rods, etc., given his engineering background. I know it's just my lazy brain.

I'm a scientist, I know what you are saying. I can never keep it straight. Miles is easy for me because of driving, but I can also do km, because of cycling :rolleyes:.
Weights are what throw me - since my work is so very much into units/kg or g/ml (1 ml~ 1 g if density ~1).
But, I wasted an entire hour at work a few weeks ago because of metric/imperial stupidity - My computer model of fetal growth was predicting a normal human fetus would be born at 3.4 - I kept thinking the model was wrong, a 3.4 lb baby just wasn't right. stupid stupid stupid - 3.5 kg baby is a little small, but fine. All of my friends having 9 lb babies just threw me off :(

Can imagine in your line of work the mistake ..could be serious.

Wonder if the bushel of apples has changed these days. It's been ages since I've seen bushels of apples sold.. It's all by weight these days, same for what was pints of blueberries and other berries.

I just realized when I buy liquids in the store, I do think/imagine metric, ie. 1 litre of milk vs. 2 litres of milk.
But if I use a recipe, I don't feel like getting into millitres. Henc, it's imperial.

Wonder if people who do alot of cycling, running/sprinting sports...makes the imperial folks living in imperial countries, more aware of metric as daily/everyday measurement in metric countries.

Or results in wierd mixed-up brains like mine. Really it works for me. I already mix together English and broken Chinese brainlessly and thoughtlessly, so I do it with systems of measurements. :p

I teach a physics class, so I'm using both every day. I tell my students that when I was their age I seem to remember a push to make the US completely metric in a certain time span. I don't remember what the time span was, but it was back in the 70s when the movement started. Now it's 2009 and we've got 2 liter bottles of coke! Maybe in another 40 years we will have kilometers instead of miles. We are a stubborn group of people.

I have foreign exchange students who really don't understand why we are using such complicated measurements. Imperial to metric....easy! Metric to Imperial system...nightmare!

I hear you on the difficulties caused by the USA living in an Imperial world! The Mars Climate Probe!!! Damn!

I come from a dedicatedly metric country (the land of Oz) and we went metric when I was in Grade 1, so my entire measuring life has been decidedly metric.

And yet, I am 5'3.5" tall! I weigh myself in kg. I buy fabric in metres and talk about things being 6 inches long, or two feet away! I buy diet coke by the litre and cook using cups of milk and tablespoons of butter! My baby was 8lb 12.5oz when she was born. But her length was measured in centimetres!

I am an engineer and design and build things in millimetres but there are still plans around my workplace which have chains and links to measure distance and use kips!! I have some feel for the size of a quarter acre block but measure things in hectares.

I think the 40 year frontier being suggested for adaptation is probably about right! because I'm not there yet!!!:p

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by pinkbikes

I hear you on the difficulties caused by the USA living in an Imperial world! The Mars Climate Probe!!! Damn!

---

Oh, I forgot about that one! I had an article about it pinned to my board for a long time. How embarrassing and EXPENSIVE!

Then can someone explain to me the engineer's use of 1/10 of a foot in the US? I can deal with metric, and I can deal with feet and inches, but the combination??:confused:

So when I worked as a research field grunt for fish or wildlife projects - all our measurements were in metric. Now I work as a biologist around engineers, and they use feet and tenths of feet. I just don't get it.

As a product of my times, I'm rather ambidextrous with units. Of course, as an American who did a lot of scientific work at small scale, internally I measure large distances in miles, but small things in mm or cm.

IEEE Spectrum (the trade magazine of electrical engineers--not super technical, kind of like a geekier Scientific American) decided several years back to remove all Imperial measurements from the magazine. Only one measurement bothered me....they wouldn't use miles/gallon when discussing hybrid automobiles (I don't even know what the measurement is--l/km?). I noticed this year that they list both metric and imperial for vehicle fuel consumption. Apparently I'm not the only one who couldn't make that leap.

I don't get measuring in yards...Metres i understand but yards? It seems so ancient.

Driving in miles/hr confused the sheepies out of me when we drove from Calgary to Seattle last year (longer route through Montana/Idaho). It required great concentration on our TomTom which made driving more frightening!!! Other side of road, miles, Miles/gallon, :eek: :confused: Good thing Ian is the smart cookie :)

I often have to sit with the online conversion chart when reading some of the threads on TE...:o

I have to switch back and forth at work all of the time. Medicines are administered in milligrams, but babies are weighed in pounds and then translated to kg.

I don't feel so bad when there are engineers and scientists here who prefer metric vs. imperial for certain types of measurements. :o For work purposes, I have done design layout and physical planning for several libraries. I went imperial because I really didn't want to make an error because it would be costly and later time-consuming, to the organization..and all standard bookshelves in libraries are normally are 3 feet long/36 inches. Never had any facility coordinator that I worked with, come back to me and demand metric.

Bmmcosland-I asked my partner about 1/10 imperial length measurement. He is not certain but he thinks it might originate from the scale of sizes that engineers (civil) worked with ages ago.


What dearie has noticed in the some U.S. city engineering drawings is that some are in metric now for an American audience. He does look at them, in his line of business right now for cycling facility design purposes.

Thorn- would be xxxliters / 100 kms. in discussing fuel efficiencies? But then, we don't look at car advertising or pay much attention since we are car-free.:p

As for car fuel in Canada, it should be in liters advertised anywhere. My partner managed national computerization for his employer, an oil company, for fuel distribution at gas terminals, in his career. He had to know this.

Another confused american here.

I really don't see the difference between a yard & a meter - they're both an arbitrary length of measurement even if a meter is the distance traveled by a ray of electromagnetic (EM) energy through a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 (3.33564095 x 10-9) of a second. 'cause seriously... how fast EM energy travels through a vacuum has no bearing in my life and it means nothing to me.

A yard might be an old term, but it's fairly easy to remember that it's the distance if you put your arms between them. A foot is about the length of a foot, and an inch is about what it is between your thumb knuckle & the first joint.

Now I will grant you that doing things on a base 10 scale as opposed to 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, is a lot easier to remember.

But I can approximate distances in yards, feet, inches fairly easily given those handy body part approximations.

Another scientist - so in the lab I'm completely used to nanoliters, microliters, etc. etc. and I'm definitely glad I never have to do that in nanoounces or something. And I probably couldn't if I tried - however, at home in the kitchen cooking, it's handy knowing, add a tablespoon of sugar and even if I don't have an actual measuring set, I can go grab a tablespoon or tea spoon or tea cup and get close enough to what the recipe is asking for. If a recipe asked for 300 mls of solution - other than with a pipette or graduated cylinder, I have no idea how much 300 mls is. Okay, a soda can is 355 ml, so I might be able to grab one of those and use it to measure.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by shootingstar

Thorn- would be xxxliters / 100 kms. in discussing fuel efficiencies? But then, we don't look at car advertising or pay much attention since we are car-free.:p

---

Yeah, that was it. In a sense, though, it makes more sense--you need x liters to go y distance. Much easier in-the-head arithmetic than miles/gallon.

Of course, if you don't have a car...that would be grams of carbs / 100 km? ;)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Thorn

Of course, if you don't have a car...that would be grams of carbs / 100 km? ;)

---

If we started doing that, it would be another weight loss obsession in precise measure. :rolleyes:

Then we have to calculate the cadence...cycling's unique measurement.

Roadiegal- You know it just occurred to me, most proud mothers of their newborns, at least for those who I personally have known over the years, including younger Canadian moms, talk about their newborn's weight in lbs.! Maybe it's to help mother talk with other mothers of all generations.

I have a harder time visualizing what a person might look like when it's expressed to me in kilograms.

when we got our first bike computer, my husband enlisted the help of an engineer to help him set it up. There was a metric measurement in there, and no matter what they did, they couldn't figure out why it wasn't coming out right.
My 14 year old son came up and said, "those are centimeters, not millimeters, that bike tire would be gigantic with the numbers you're using"

He was able to visualize it, we were not.

My british relatives that tell me how many stones they weigh confuse me.

Why would you want to multiply by 14 to get how many lbs?

I don't get how my Garmins report position as "X degrees, Y.YYY minutes."

Why not either "degrees, minutes, seconds" or "X.XXXX degrees"?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Catriona

My british relatives that tell me how many stones they weigh confuse me.

Why would you want to multiply by 14 to get how many lbs?

---

well, I know why you'd want to divide by 14 to get stones. I like my weight in stones just fine.

I'm an EE, and an RF one at that, so I live in two worlds. At work, everything is not only in metric, but it's tiny, tiny metric (pico, nano, etc) or super large metric (giga, tera, etc). At home, I deal with predominantly Imperial (being a stubborn American).

In my world, a meter is a VERY real measurement. ;)

Add to this my obsession with my weight - and I learned quickly to convert food scale weight into cups, tablespoons, etc. Then throw in the need to scale down most 'herd' recipes for our goats (we only have two)...so I need to be able to scale down from gallons and cups into tablespoons and teaspoons without error...and then back into ml and cc for the administering of the dosage.

Honestly, onlineconversion.com is my friend. :p

My brain does the same thing, and I always measured in metric in school! But I actually have no idea of my weight in kgs or height in cms, as most of my life I've heard those things in lbs and feet/inches, despite being in Canada. I also don't know my cooking measurements in ml (might be because everything I use from cook books is in tsp tbsp cups).

Google has a great function for this. Just open a google search window, type in the amount you have, and it comes up with the equivalent in the most likely form. Ex. if I typed in "84 inches" it gives me an "84 inches = 2.1336 meters". Click the more about calculator and it shows you how to do other conversion options too.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Catriona

My british relatives that tell me how many stones they weigh confuse me.

Why would you want to multiply by 14 to get how many lbs?

---

So I understand there was previous older stone measurement, where 1 stone used to be 16 lbs.

Oh, well I'd much prefer to multiply by 16.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by OakLeaf

I don't get how my Garmins report position as "X degrees, Y.YYY minutes."

Why not either "degrees, minutes, seconds" or "X.XXXX degrees"?

---

That's why I leave my "Varmint" set to UTM grids. At least then it measures in meters, which are a constant length, rather than a degree (which gets bigger as you get closer to the equator).

When I lived in Germany several years ago, I got used to doing everything in meters, liters, and kilograms, but it was still nice to be able to stroll into the little local grocery store and ask for "ein halb Pfunde" of something, and the lady behind the counter still knew just what I was talking about. ;-)

Tom

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by shootingstar

So I understand there was previous older stone measurement, where 1 stone used to be 16 lbs.

---

I think that was up in the north end of the Old Country, where the rocks were a lot bigger... ;-)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by PscyclePath

When I lived in Germany several years ago, I got used to doing everything in meters, liters, and kilograms, but it was still nice to be able to stroll into the little local grocery store and ask for "ein halb Pfunde" of something, and the lady behind the counter still knew just what I was talking about. ;-)

---

funde = 500 grams. A unique German measure which is not quite the imperial lb. Supposedly an older German measure.

So you asked for 250 grams. Must have been chocolates or smoked salmon you asked for. :D

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by shootingstar

funde = 500 grams. A unique German measure which is not quite the imperial lb. Supposedly an older German measure.

So you asked for 250 grams. Must have been chocolates or smoked salmon you asked for. :D

---

Half a kilo, and since a kilo is roughly 2.24 pounds, it's close enough for me, at least ;-)

And it was cold cuts, usually... or Wurst. Chocolates, I usually got the Lindt bars down at the train station. or the little chocolate covered jellies, typically bananas, oranges, or lemons. "twas good stuff, back then.

Tom

Another science nerd here. I find that my brain handles kilograms and celcius just fine at work. The instant I walk out the door, it flips back to lbs and F.

The boyfriend is Canadian; he flips between km and miles like it's nothing, whereas I have difficulty with kilometers father than I can bike. When he told me something was 300k away, I squinted for a second and admitted "ok, one more time in real numbers...?"

I still think of everything pressure in PSI, though. 3 bar doesn't sound like a lot, but eeeesh.

-- gnat!

The Quinoa recipe I just cooked made me chuckle & wonder...I thought it was funny, odd & strange...

Why is it that an American recipe would state you require a quart of liquid & then a cup of a non liquid item? Would it not make sense to use one measurement(ie: a cup) for both liquid & non liquid materials??



Interesting....

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by crazycanuck

The Quinoa recipe I just cooked made me chuckle & wonder...I thought it was funny, odd & strange...

Why is it that an American recipe would state you require a quart of liquid & then a cup of a non liquid item? Would it not make sense to use one measurement(ie: a cup) for both liquid & non liquid materials??



Interesting....

---

Those aren't different systems, just different increments in the same system of volume measurement - a quart is four cups, a pint is two cups, a gallon is four quarts, a tablespoon is three teaspoons, four tablespoons is 1/4 cup.

Where it DOES get confusing is in "ounces," which is both a unit of weight (1/16 pound) and of volume (1/8 cup or two tablespoons). So you have to specify "fluid ounces" or "ounces avoirdupois." :rolleyes:

The one I can't understand is that several years ago the scientific journals I publish in insisted that we no long use millibars as a unit of atmospheric pressure, but hectopascals (ie. 100 pascals), which are exactly the same thing. Now you find people who read "850 hPa" as "850 millibars", as if millibars just has a new abbreviation. Very odd that hecto-anything is considered a standard unit.

I can generally deal with both English and metric units, but I absolutely cannot abide the Rankin scale.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by DebW

The one I can't understand is that several years ago the scientific journals I publish in insisted that we no long use millibars as a unit of atmospheric pressure, but hectopascals (ie. 100 pascals), which are exactly the same thing. Now you find people who read "850 hPa" as "850 millibars", as if millibars just has a new abbreviation. Very odd that hecto-anything is considered a standard unit.

---

I'm a graduate student in audiology, and we express middle ear pressure in daPa (decaPascals). Go figure.

I've lived in the US my entire life, but I try to think in meters because I seem to make more mistakes when I'm having to deal with things like eighths of an inch than when everything is just base 10--metric is so much easier! I do tend to think inches when sewing, though, since all of my good rulers and cutting mats only have inches marked. The interstate I take to my parents' house is marked in kilometers because it only exists between Tucson and the border with Mexico, and I still have no concept of how long a km is... I just know it goes by faster than a mile does. :rolleyes: