5 ms·
I will cheer every launch but I must admit, after watching so many SpaceX launches, I twiched when I heard "feet per second" and all the other imperial units :p
by rurounijones 12y ago
I will cheer every launch but I must admit, after watching so many SpaceX launches, I twiched when I heard "feet per second" and all the other imperial units :p
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- EliRivers 12y agoMakes it easier for every country in the entire world, barring the US. Liberia and Myanmar switched over.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoEverybody pretends to have switched. But even Canadians translate back to Fahrenheit in their heads (ask one).
- robertfw 12y agoI wouldn't say so for celsius but I do find myself changing between feet / meters for certain things, like my height.
- lfuller 12y agoNot true in my experience. I've lived in five different provinces and I've never met a Canadian who uses Farenheit. I've never met anyone under 40 who knows much more than >100F = hot either.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoMust be age-related, as you say. In fact, since they changed over in the 70's, 40yrold is about the right cutoff!
- SquareWheel 12y agoQuite the opposite for me. Fahrenheit makes no sense to me, it always sounds absurdly hot.
- netcan 12y agoIn Ireland we use a mix. Miles for casual talk, KMs for speeding tickets. Pounds when cooking, stones for people & kgs for everything else. Inches in carpentry and horsepower for cars. In a lot of places metric is a lingua franca kind of like latin. It's used in international, formal or academic settings (like a space launch) but the average farmer speaks a local dialect more natively.
- RyanMcGreal 12y agoIt's similar in Canada. The country formally converted from imperial to metric between 1970 and 1983 for temperature measurements, road signs and speed limits, consumer goods packaging (volume and weight), and so on. However, due to our physical and cultural proximity to the US, many consumer goods are sold in "soft-metric" quantities: 454 grams of butter, 273 milliletres of pop and so on. Food recipes are still mostly imperial - cups, teaspoons, tablespoons and so on - though recipes by weight (e.g. for baking) come in either or both formats. Similarly, body weights are still mainly imperial (pounds but not stone) unless you're at the doctor's office, in which case your weight is taken in kilograms. Realistically, most Canadians know both systems and routinely convert between them. For weather, we tend to use whichever measure sounds more dramatic: Fahrenheit for hot summer days (109 degrees with the Humidex!) but Celsius for cold winter days (minus 30 with the wind chill!).
- raverbashing 12y agoAnd rental places being advertised by sq.ft. (or pi.ca. in French)
- RyanMcGreal 12y agoYes, and for larger areas, it's a toss-up whether it will be expressed in acres or hectares.
- dredmorbius 12y agoWhat is pi.ca. ?
- aunty_helen 12y agoU havin' a giggle m8?
- _sword 12y agoOuter space is a volume of infinite freedom, therefore it uses the standardized freedom units we in the US hold so dear
- happyscrappy 12y agoIf the comet lander was powered by EU smugness we would be getting great data now.
- lotsofmangos 12y agoI thought a standardized freedom unit was your allotted standing area in one of those free-speech-zones.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- cmsmith 12y agoI agree. We definitely need to get rid of this arcane base 60 unit of time and express our speeds in meters per microyear.