C to F, ml to tsp, km to mph, m to ft etc.

[MRG]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Meadbh I grew up in Ireland and metric was introduced there in the 1970s when we joined the EEC. I am most comfortable in metric. It's just so much simpler. I certainly did not miss pounds, shillings and pence! As a physician, everything I learnt in medical school was in metric. It is obviously much simpler to calculate drug doses in metric, a matter of some importance when your patients are children. When I went to the US for training, I was quite worried that I would be expected to calculate in imperial units; fortunately, that was not the case. I can guess the weight of a baby in Kg, but not in lb, and I have a mental image of how many litres of fuel I am putting in my tank. Gallons, I have no idea, because American gallons and British gallons are different. One thing I find awkward is the use of "cups" in recipes. Surely, the volume of an ingredient depends on how it is processed and packed, not on the amount of nutrients in it. So a cup of broccoli florets will have a lot less broccoli in it than a cup of finely chopped broccoli florets. The weight of a cup of flour can vary by 20% or more, depending on whether it has been sifted or not. This can make all the difference between a spongy cake and a hockey puck. Precision is particularly important for baking. So I have a digital scale and measure everything in grams.

I bought a digital food scale when I started logging all my meals. It's the most used item in the kitchen! How do people not have one? How did I manage?

For logging food the 100 gram USDA entries are the best. So easy to multiply and adjust.

I don't have many recipes in grams but it's easy to convert. [emoji4] It's easier when I do it frequently.

I graduated high school in '75 so we had some exposure to it. I have a few metric tools from working on Japanese bikes.

My first career as a hardwood lumber inspection would have been different. The whole system was based on 1/12 of a (board) foot.

[CRLLS]

Quote:

Originally Posted by easysurfer I never learned to convert. That's what a conversion app or website is for .

Some of us had to convert between systems before there were smart phones, or the Internet, before IBM invented the PC, and yes, even before scientific calculators were commonplace.

[SecondCor521]

Quote:

Originally Posted by exnavynuke I heard we failed to convert because the budget didn't support it. Personally, I wish we were on the metric system, but I use both at work since many of our engineering drawings and/or manuals are designed for either metric only or to be used anywhere (and thus contain both units).

I am not sure, but I think we failed to convert because we were only half-convinced - highway distances were listed in miles with kilometers tacked on to the right side, car speedometers had both, and so forth.

Same reason we don't adopt dollar coins - because dollar bills are still around and people are used to them.

If we really wanted to convert, we'd do it whole hog and burn the boats (sorry for the mixed metaphor). People are capable enough and could adapt.

In reading history, we almost adopted the metric system back in the late 1700's. I don't remember exactly the story, but one of our Founding Fathers wasn't *quite* convinced, so we didn't. I think it was maybe because the metric system was new at the time.

[HillCountry]

I was in metric system before I was 30 years old. So I am equally proficient in both.

[nuke_diver]

I was in Canada when we switched from imperial to metric in the 70's. I became perfectly comfortable with it. Then I moved to the US 1990 and had to covert back. Now I switch often depending on who I'm talking with. Temperature is really mostly just defining comfort ...25C is warm 25F is cold :P. If you are doing science it's all metric anyways. The only measure I never got comfortable with was litres/100 Km, that never made sense to me I always wanted distance/volume of fuel not the other way around.

Don't know why the US doesn't do what most of the rest of the world uses. It is simpler. But there are a lot of Luddites here so it will never happen...it will always be called too hard to change

[FIREmenow]

Constantly converting numbers *is* the problem. If you are going to switch, you have to go all-in - no converting allowed.

The only reason to do conversions is that if I hold 25g of something, I don't know (today) what that feels like. I can't hold up my fingers and show you 37mm.

It just comes down to familiarity. If I am "allowed" to convert it to something I am familiar with, I will never learn to hold up my fingers 37mm apart. If (somehow), I was not allowed to convert, I would quickly learn what a 100g bag of something feels like, or how far 0.75km is along the road. At that point, I would care less about converting numbers.

I think there is no real way to force people to NOT convert the numbers because of the immediacy of the need to know, and therefore we will never learn anything else fast enough to go "all-in".

[/ramble]

I was riding with a guy last year and we passed a sign on the road that said "Speed Checked by Meter". He said, "Oh, they must have switched to the metric system!"

[scrabbler1]

When I was in middle school in 1975-1977, we learned the basic conversions between English and Metric in math and science classes. Rulers included inches and centimeters. Soda bottles weren't 1-liter and 2-liter amounts, yet. The C-F temperature conversion I learned back then and still remember today. It comes in handy when I email a friend from the UK and mention our weather. She isn't good at converting, so I make sure to tell her our temps in Celsius.


As long as I know the rough equivalents, I can convert from one to the other okay. A Km is about .6 Mile, a Meter is about 39 inches. A liter is a little more than a quart (forgot exactly how much). A Kg is about 2.2 pounds. And C x 9/5, then add 32 gives your temp in F.

[scrabbler1]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Meadbh Mixing imperial and metric measures may have drastic consequences, like running out of gas. https://www.damninteresting.com/the-gimli-glider/ "When airline mechanics finally arrived at the landing site, they found all three of the 767’s fuel tanks completely dry, with no evidence of a fuel leak. A review of the day’s events traced the problem back to the manual dripstick checks in Montreal and Ottawa. In order to maintain awareness of the overall weight of the aircraft, flight crews kept track of fuel quantity based on kilograms rather than the fuel company’s liter-based measurements. Pearson and Quintal had determined the fuel weight by multiplying the the number of dripsticked liters by 1.77, as indicated by the documentation. However, unbeknownst to the pilots and the fuel crew, this multiplier provided the weight in imperial pounds; the new, all-metric 767 was based on kilograms, and required a multiplier of 0.8. As a consequence of this documentation disconnect, Flight 143 had left Montreal with roughly half the necessary fuel."

I thought about this, too. They made a movie about this in 1995 title "Freefall: Flight 174."

Falling from the Sky: Flight 174 (TV Movie 1995) - IMDb

[EastWest Gal]

Pediatrician here. All our medication and fluid calculations are in metric. 28 ml gm is one oz of water. Roughly 30 gm or 30 ml works pretty darn close for cooking. Can do ounces, tsp, tbsp, cups in my head for cooking. I use 30 ml = one oz, and the food scale has a grams setting. Also temperature. I still use Fahrenheit for the weather, but in Rome in 2010 43 was too warm for a walking tour. Metric is way easier when it comes to body temperature. 37 is normal, 38 is lower level of a fever, easier to remember as an intern than 98.6 and 100.4. It became second nature over the years.

[braumeister]

Quote:

Originally Posted by EastWest Gal Metric is way easier when it comes to body temperature. 37 is normal, 38 is lower level of a fever, easier to remember as an intern than 98.6 and 100.4. It became second nature over the years.

IIRC, 37 degrees was initially set as "normal" body temperature, and worked fine, especially since Celsius degrees are bigger than Fahrenheit so there was a reasonable margin of error between 36 and 38.

Then someone decided to do an exact C-to-F conversion and came up with 98.6°F so we have been stuck with using the ridiculous tenths of a degree ever since.

I call it ridiculous because my own "normal" temp is generally 97.6°F (well within normal range when using C but a full degree out with F).

[Souschef]

My biggest conversion headache was some time ago. I wanted to make a special Xmas bread for my Czech DIL. My son sent me the recipe, but it was in Czech!
Here is what I had to do:
1. Translate from Czech to English
2. Convert from metric to English
3. Convert from weight measures to volume measures,e.g. convert ounces of flour to cups of flour.
4. Make the bread
After all that, it was supposed to look like braided bread, but it came out of the oven looking like a giant Milkbone

[travelover]

Quote:

Originally Posted by braumeister IIRC, 37 degrees was initially set as "normal" body temperature, and worked fine, especially since Celsius degrees are bigger than Fahrenheit so there was a reasonable margin of error between 36 and 38. Then someone decided to do an exact C-to-F conversion and came up with 98.6°F so we have been stuck with using the ridiculous tenths of a degree ever since. I call it ridiculous because my own "normal" temp is generally 97.6°F (well within normal range when using C but a full degree out with F).

The way I heard it, the Fahrenheit scale was set based on what he thought human blood temperature was.

Quote:

History Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit Fahrenheit proposed his temperature scale in 1724, basing it on two reference points of temperature. In his initial scale (which is not the final Fahrenheit scale), the zero point is determined by placing the thermometer in a mixture of ice, water, and ammonium chloride (salis Armoniaci [6]). This is a frigorific mixture which stabilizes its temperature automatically: that stable temperature was defined as 0 °F (−17.78 °C). The second point, 96 degrees, was approximately the human body's temperature (sanguine hominis sani, the blood of a healthy man).[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit

[tn3sport]

C to F: double it, add 20. (Not exact, but easy to do and remember)

Distances: Think track and field, which has converted in the US. A 5k run is 3.1 miles. A 10k run is 6.2 miles.

Car indicates 50 k/h, you're going 31 m/h.
Car indicates 100 k/h, you're going 62 m/h.
But, who really cares, if there's someone in your rearview mirror, you're not going fast enough...

Metric conversion is easy. Trying to figure out how much volume is in a 55 gallon drum is much more difficult... Could be 42 gallons, could be 46 gallons depending on country of origin. The things hold over 56 gallons....

[urn2bfree]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nuke_diver The only measure I never got comfortable with was litres/100 Km, that never made sense to me I always wanted distance/volume of fuel not the other way around.

Actually volume per distance is probably a better measuring stick. This problem illustrates why.
Which change saves more assuming you will drive the same amount?
Change from a 10mpg car to a 20mpg car, or
From a 20mpg car to a 50 mpg car?

Most people choose the 20->50 change based on the 30 mpg gap in the second choice. But wait. If you instead look at gallons per 100 miles it becomes as follows:

From 10 gal/100 miles to 5 gal/100 miles
Or from 5 gal/100 miles to 2 gal/100 miles?

Now it is obvious that a 5 gallon savings is better than a 3 gallons savings per 100 miles.

Substitute km and liters as needed. The point is that distance per volume is not the best "metric."

[Major Tom]

Growing up in England in the 70's, I learned to juggle both systems, with helpful reminders such as,


"Two and quarter pounds of jam, weigh about a kilogram" and

"A litre of water's a pint* and three quarters".


(*Imperial pint)

[Music Lover]

I switched over in grade school, so I'm equally proficient in both Imperial and metric and never have to convert. It doesn't matter if the thermometer says 28C or 82F, I'm perfectly comfortable either way. The same goes for gallons/pints/liters, pounds/kilos, or miles per gallon/liters per 100k.

[kcowan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nuke_diver I was in Canada when we switched from imperial to metric in the 70's. I became perfectly comfortable with it.

Even more dramatic, I was in Edmonton, and they did the cold turkey conversion.

Cooking and building never quite made it. But wine comes in .75 and 1.5 ltr bottles. Liquor is 1.75 ltr.

2x4s never were but they are still the same size. Same with sheets of plywood/drywall. Wrenches come in both sizes now.

During our stay in Mexico, all measures are familiar. 28 is fine and 36 is hot. Local vodka is 48 p/l. Chilean wine is 95 p/l. Gas is 139 p/l (in Vancouver, it is C$1.39/l).

[braumeister]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Major Tom "Two and quarter pounds of jam, weigh about a kilogram" and "A litre of water's a pint* and three quarters".

A pint's a pound, the world around.

[mpeirce]

To me the least compelling units in SI (i.e. the metric system) are temperature units.

The Fahrenheit scale has a few real niceties.

1. 10° bands (the 50's, the 80's, etc) work out nicely to describe human comfort bands. °C doesn't have this really.

2. 0° F is "quite cold" and 100° F is "quite hot!"

3. They really didn't need to mess with Fahrenheit to fit it into the decimal based SI system.

If we were going to change from °F why not go all the way to K? Kelvins are the same size units as °C, but introduce the concept of absolute zero temperature at 0K. No "less informed" folks saying things like "the temperature doubled today" when it goes from 30 to 60.

[audreyh1]

Quote:

Originally Posted by imoldernu Metric Conversion Act of 1975. We almost made it. Now, the question is why didn't it happen. This tired old brain still goes into shock when, like this morning, the medicine bottle said that the recommended dose was 30ml. So the question is, did you adapt? Would an 80km speed limit mean 50, 60 or 65MPH? How many 1/2 lb hamburgers would you get from 3kg of meat? Would 50L of gas fill a 17 gallon tank? Did you learn conversion from school, from living in different countries, or like me, never learned it at all. Thank goodness for the internet and conversion tables, else some of us may not even be here today. Would you support new school requirements to teach metrics?... maybe in place of the lost art of cursive writing.

With medicine, everything is in liters and grams, so I'm used to it.

Same with wine, LOL!

Temps are tough. I have a vague sense in °C as I spend time in Europe each year: Below 10 wrap up, 10-15 is fresh and cool, 20-25 quite pleasant, 30 getting a bit warm, and 40s are only seen at home were I live!!!