Time to double down on the metric system
Time to double down on the metric system
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.
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.
OMG this.
Oh please let's
But, hear me out.... PC LOAD A4 just doesn't have the same ring to it.
I've put every 4 I can find I'm, but it just doesn't work! It seemed especially angry at the fridge magnet ones.
When someone asks your height, you answer in centimeters.
I mean, I can without hesitating. We all should be able to.
Honestly it's just easier for me anyway, because I'm like a quarter short of an inch. If I round down people get confused since they're used to the numbers being padded on top of everything, and if I round up I'm padding the numbers myself.
Can we also double down on getting information only from Canadian Owned and Operated media?
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!
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.
The states has this funny thing where when they do use metric, like in medicine, they often still use weird-ass nonstandard metric options, like decilitres. I imagine if they eventually switch their unit of weight is going to be something like "well, one fornoy is exactly how much a litre of crude oil weighs"
There is such a unit as a metric teaspoon and metric tablespoon. Used by the American medicine industry to give dosages. Actual moon landing unit tea- and tablespoons work out to something like 4.9 and 14.7mL, which are rounded to an even 5 and 15mL respectively for dosing liquid medicine. Because if you're ordinary American citizens giving your child some Dimetapp at 3 in the morning, maybe you don't have a vessel to meter out milliliters but you can probably lay your hands on your kitchen measuring spoons.
I hate fucking fl.oz. I understand cups, teaspoons and tablespoons, but then there's the odd recipe that uses 'fl.oz.' and I always have to go look it up.
When did Florida make their own standard oz?
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.
That would be the correct way to do it. Just one or two digits for most common sizes, from shots to full glasses. I'd say a very large percentage of European beers, wines, etc. measure that way, and the remainder use mL.
Seems to be a cultural thing. Here in Canada I see mL and L most often for drinks.
One quirk of metric I have taken a liking to recently, is in Japan, apparently they measure their object dimensions in mm. 'The size of one sheet of Letter paper in mm is 279.4mm x 215.9mm.' I don't know why, but for some reason I like this.
Let's move to metric time!
1000 milliseconds in a second
100 seconds in a minute
100 minutes in an hour
100 hours in a day
100 days in a month
100 months in a year.We'd be so young!
[EDIT] Guys, I thought it was obvious I was saying this in jest... My b
Starting from 1 year being 365 days
1 month would be the equivalent of 3.65 days
1 day would be 52.5 minutes
1 hour would be 31.5 seconds
1 minute would be 0.3 seconds
1 second would be 3 milliseconds
1 millisecond would be 3 nanosecondsThe French actually tried it, here's the Wikipedia article.
A more reasonable thing to do is something like Swatch Internet Time, you get 1000 ".beats" in a day with no time zones. Beyond a day it might not be too helpful to keep decimal, there will be 365+fraction days a year no matter how you measure it.
Seconds are already an SI unit. We'd have to redo every textbook, and overcome centuries of work.
One day is a Dec, 10 Decs in a Wec, 10 Wecs in a Mec and 100 Mecs in a Yec. Your days are split into Ceti-decs and Micro-decs!
It's so unhinged, I love it. Need to write a calendar app and clock for it.
Lemmy is serious business!
Didn't downvote but TPO my dude
[French revolution intensifies]
Unfortunately with dates you also want to incorporate the natural cycles of the earth and sun, which not only aren't decimal but usually incommensurable, so it's a hard thing to do. The French just had a block of their calendar that didn't count as "real" days IIRC.
If we start seriously going to space, doing everything by Unix epoch (count of seconds since the 60's ended) would make sense, and planning your day might well go by kiloseconds. Someone on here suggested giving up on standardised time zones and just doing everything long-distance that way even on Earth, which grew on me as an idea.
Oh man, you just reminded me of the incoming Epochalypse... A tangent to what you're talking about but something that I feel isn't being taken seriously enough.
I suppose we still have just over 13.5 years, but we have so much more computerized stuff now than we did in the 90s, and how many things do we own with clocks that can't be updated? Interesting times ahead.
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).
Other than miles most of our stuff is metric anyway, at least legally. Like yeah, we use stones and feet for 'human' measurements in speech etc but if you go to the doctors it would be in kilos and metres. There are a few oddities like milk bottles being in pints and beer in pubs but even then you find things like plant milks and bottles/canned beer in litres. The one that really makes no sense is car fuel efficiency. We sell fuel by the litre but measure it in miles per (imperial) gallon - so it doesnt even tie up with American figures.
I agree with fully adopting metric, but what budget benefit would driving on the right bring?
I can't think of much. Changing isn't unprecedented, but you're also far from alone driving on the left. Off the top of my head: the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, India, Pakistan, much of Southern Africa.....
Places that have changed within the last 100 years: Sweden, Newfoundland, the rest of Canada ('cept Ontario and Quebec) switched just over 100 years ago.
You are welcome!
And what did Mulroney stop in the metrification of Canada?
Yeah, he was late enough the effect has been limited. We still use pounds and feet for measuring people, mostly, and fahrenheit for cooking, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head.