Comment by goodcanadian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goodcanadian | Hacker News Reader

Only vaguely relevant, but I grew up in a rural area in Canada which caused me to learn a strange set of units. For me, highway distances are measured in kilometres, but country roads are measured in miles. Groceries are priced per kilogram, but my weight is in pounds. I readily swap inches and centimetres for measuring small sizes and distances (sometimes on the same project). I am more comfortable with Celsius, but the thermostat in my parents' house was in Fahrenheit.

Just to throw an additional wrench into things, prior to official metrification (which technically predates my birth), Canada used "imperial" (i.e. British) units, not "standard" (i.e. U.S.) units. Because of this and the close proximity to the U.S., one had to be careful about just which gallon or pint you were talking about.

People younger and/or more urban than me seem to be 100% metric. I am starting to learn my weight in kilograms, but I still have no idea what my height is in cm without converting.

In my neck of the Canadian woods, the default unit of measurement for road distances was the time it took to travel that distance.

"How far is it into town? Oh, about twenty minutes."

People could deal with kilometers just fine, but you'd have to ask for them explicitly. Often they'd give you a rough guess by converting from minutes, and that's how you could back your way into the unofficial local speed limit (as opposed to what the signs said).

At first I assumed this was universal, or at least universal to rural areas, but they don't seem to do it much down here in Texas.

Canada also has so-called weak metric measurements: 454g of butter (1 lb), 354 ml of pop (12 oz) and so on.

Yes, though I think this is largely due to trade with the U.S.. It probably helps keep some standard units alive in Canada.

Indeed in country fully converted to metric, the old unit are converted to their closest sane metric equivalent.

For example, my grand-mother still talks about buying a pound of stuff. However a pound is now understood as meaning 0.5 kg, we even learn it that way in school.

This appears to be the situation in the UK, too.

I would hazard a guess that we're roughly the same age because I grew up with the same mixture of units but I think it's less to do with growing up in a rural area than the fact that your parents and grandparents were educated on imperial units and even though metric was standard by the time you were born, the imperial system was still ingrained in your elders and some of that nomenclature was passed on to you. When I talk to anyone over 50 I have to be careful to remember when they say it got to -70 a few years ago they are most likely saying it was -70F and not -70*C.

I grew up in Australia with metric, with parents and grandparents who grew up with imperial units. Though it seems things happened differently in Australia as my parents (and possibly grandparents too) converted to thinking in metric at least most of the time. That said, it's still reasonably common to hear people quoting their personal height in feet and inches. Even then, most people born post-metrification don't really have a grasp of imperial units (the exception tends to be people who have spent time in the US).

Person heights and baby weights are the only things I ever hear in imperial in Australia, end even then only half the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com