Saw this recently on a WAN Show (19:12). How true is this? It sounds wild.

You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments
9 points

If you’re looking for some logic in this mess, it’s that we generally use metric for things regulated by the government and imperial for more informal things.

So road signs and food package sizes are mandated to be in metric, so we’re forced to learn kilometers and grams there. But measurements of people and cooking temperatures are mostly used casually so we’ve stuck to old habits.

This leads to some ridiculous situations. For instance, we understand distances and fuel volumes in metric, but for a long long time we’d only talk about fuel economy in miles per gallon. Anyone who wanted to calculate fuel economy had to memorize the formulas to convert km to miles and litres to gallons.

Around me, this has finally changed in recent years and mostly it’s just old timers still using MPG. (Which is good, not just because metric is easier in this case, but because measuring economy as a ratio of fuel over distance is just plain superior to the other way around.)

permalink
report
reply
8 points

Also, a lot of our recipes/cookbooks/ovens come from the states!

permalink
report
parent
reply

Canada

!canada@lemmy.ca

Create post

What’s going on Canada?



Communities


🍁 Meta

🗺️ Provinces / Territories

🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

🏒 Sports

Hockey

Football (NFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Football (CFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


💻 Universities

💵 Finance / Shopping

🗣️ Politics

🍁 Social and Culture

Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:

https://lemmy.ca


Community stats

  • 2.8K

    Monthly active users

  • 5.8K

    Posts

  • 54K

    Comments

Community moderators