Weird old posts from 2000s lol

[JackGulley]

Sometimes I forget Canada uses metric

 

[Lateral Line]

There are only VERY few places on the planet that do not use modern, metric measures.

 

[JackGulley]

There are only VERY few places on the planet that do not use modern, metric measures.

I know. When I think about it I can remember, but my first association with metric is Europe, not Canada, so I don’t immediately think about it

 

[GaryE]

A lot of older Canadians forget we use metric too. You're in good company.

 

[Lateral Line]

Are there any efforts in place to get the US to metricate?

 

[MaloK]

We use a scramble of both systems and it's why nothing fits.

 

[WhistlingBadger]

 

[TwoTankAmin]

https://www.fishforums.net/threads/does-anyone-keep-wild-varieties-of-livebearers.69486/#post-588818

TwoTankAmin​

Fish Connoisseur​

Joined Dec 31, 2004 Messages 6,113 Reaction score 2,366 Location USA- NY
Dec 31, 2004

I am new to FF but I do keep 3 different strains of montezuma sword- mottled ivory, blue/green and Rascon. All are purebred from wild caughts and all were obtained from the same source.

The ivories breed like mad. The blue/green are notorious fry eaters and will stop breeding at times. the Rascons were acquired as young juvies about 3 months ago and have been growing out. Of the original 7, I have four left- just lost the first one to show a tail stub this past week.

I was drawn to swords when I set up my first tank. After learning about being overrun by fry and trading out my common ones, I discovered Xiph. Center and fell in love with montys. It took me a long time to find them, but I am glad I did.

 

[Seisage]

Are there any efforts in place to get the US to metricate?

We're already fairly metricated, actually. All of our science, medicine, and a lot of our industry uses the metric system and has for a long time. It's just that the day-to-day products and services which still use US Customary (grocery items, gasoline, baking and cooking items) are more visible to those overseas than our scientific and industrial institutions are. But even in groceries, for example, weights and volumes are always listed on packaging in metric alongside US Customary here.

That said, I don't think the US will ever fully switch to metric use. One advantage of US Customary is that a base-12 system makes it really easy to divide things in half, thirds, and quarters without getting into the decimal weeds. Not so easy for a base-10 system. Carpentry and machining come to mind as examples of industries where this fact is often useful. Of course, carpenters in metric countries do just fine, but sometimes it's nice to be able to say 1/16th instead of 0.0625. Anyway, people here will always use US Customary/Imperial in their personal lives. I don't think that's ever going away. Even in Britain, I know a lot of people still use pounds, inches, miles, etc. in casual conversation.

 

[Essjay]

Even in the UK, there are non-metric everyday things. We buy milk and beer in pints, though it is possible to buy litre bottles of milk; our road signs give distances in miles not kilometres.

 

[GaryE]

We've had this discussion before. For me, it works like this:
pounds for weight, unless it's medical. Then kilos. Grams for smaller weights.
inches and feet for height, but metres for distances, and cm for fish. I can translate there.
Miles are for old blues songs. Kilometres make sense to me. When I drive in the US, with the car switched to miles, it seems to take forever to get places. Miles are long slow things.
Temperatures are celsius. It's been a long time since I had my last metal US made aquarium thermometer, and with digital, it allowed a full transition. The one exception is fevers, which my brain still processes in fahrenheit.
Litres, although gallons for aquariums only.
Pints are glasses of beer, not units of measurement. The same for quarts. My brain processes them as nice old words.
A stone is a piece of rock.
As someone from a small country beside a very populated one, we used to get all our aquarium gear in US measurements. I had this weird aquariums only non metric corner of my brain. Now everything is Chinese made, so even that's less important.

The transition was slow. My kids don't use the old measurements, but if they worked in the trades, they'd probably have to, given the US influence. Wood is in inches and feet, and construction materials are in pounds. I made an aquarium stand last week, and I measured it in inches. An 8 foot 2x4 is what it is when you have to divide it into pieces.

 

[gwand]

In my lab and on the hospital wards it was metric. Everywhere else…..not so much. A bit schizoid!

 

[WhistlingBadger]

How many smidgens are modicum, and how many modicums are in a plethora?

Take a moment to watch the SNL skit I posted above, please. I think it explains everything.

 

[JackGulley]

Yeah I think most Americans can at least visualize metric measurements even if they aren’t the standard. The go-to for small lengths is still the inch, but I hear “millimeters” probably more often than fractions of an inch. Meters are easy cause they’re about the same as a yard, which is just 3 feet. And kilos are (very VERY roughly) half the equivalent in pounds in my mind (avg man might be 150 pounds or 70 kilos). The only ones that the average person is really lost on are milliliters for cooking (I will never get used to visualizing that) and Celsius (imo the larger steps make it less convenient to visualize; with Fahrenheit you can say 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and those are all a different kind of weather, but in Celsius “20s” corresponds to everything from 68 f to 86 f.

 

[Seisage]

As a scientist, my brain also operates in the half-metric/half-US way. Millimeters are unmatched for small length measurements—I couldn't imagine measuring the diameter of a snail shell in inches. But I use inches when I'm measuring distances for DIY projects (except for the times my brain decides to unexpectedly switch to cm).
As with Gary, aquariums are always inches/gallons to me
I will never let go of fahrenheit in my everyday, but sometimes I'll end up giving people the ocean temperature in celsius
For some reason, kilometers and liters are the most troublesome for me—probably just because I don't use them often (but milliliters make perfect sense).

Probably the strangest mish-mash in my life is in SCUBA diving. I dive primarily for scientific reasons, so when we're doing our surveys underwater, everything related to the science is in metric. But all of our US-made gear communicates to us in feet, psi, etc. So the effect is that when I'm underwater, distances in front of me I can only comprehend in meters, but vertical distances (depth) I can only ever make sense of in feet. It's very odd.