I'm curious I'll have to ask my daughter what her perception is. I can remember in school being taught metric (in the 70's), but I fell into the 'imperial' habit in adulthood.
And when you guys get out the ruler.....wow! LOL.
Should Canada return to Imperial Measurements.
- Thread starter B00Mer
- Start date
I'm curious I'll have to ask my daughter what her perception is. I can remember in school being taught metric (in the 70's), but I fell into the 'imperial' habit in adulthood.
And when you guys get out the ruler.....wow! LOL.
I don't know how big a hectare is, all I know is that an acre is 208'X208', a quarter is 160 acres and a section is a square mile, or four quarters, (of course this is all approximate to accomodate rights of way and correction lines, but still close enough). The prairies were surveyed in miles. Do we now move all the grids to reflect metric?
Reminds me of the time my doofus neighbour wanted to put in a fence and had a surveyor come out. I confronted him and he told me he measured the frontage from the pin to 200m. I said our frontage was 660, says so in the title. Close enough? 200m is around 656', not a big deal unless you consider that is nearly 4' in width and in our case 5280' in depth; adds up to a wee bit of acreage. Try encroaching 4' onto a neighbour's yard in the city and see what happens.
Reminds me of the time my doofus neighbour wanted to put in a fence and had a surveyor come out. I confronted him and he told me he measured the frontage from the pin to 200m. I said our frontage was 660, says so in the title. Close enough? 200m is around 656', not a big deal unless you consider that is nearly 4' in width and in our case 5280' in depth; adds up to a wee bit of acreage. Try encroaching 4' onto a neighbour's yard in the city and see what happens.
Just like Sobey's likes to advertise lobster at $7.99/lb, sounds a helluvalot better than the the price per kg. And hey, its only $5/lb more than the fishermen are getting paid for them.
Of course this could be blamed on Trudeau. But the fact is that the 1970s was the last stand of the Imperial System except in the US (where, as has been pointed out the Americans had their own version of gallons and quarts). Australia and New Zealand went metric in the same decade. I was living in OZ at the time of its metrification and the Aussies did it right. There was no gradual change from Imperial to Metric with both systems in parallel. One day there was the Imperial System and the next day the S.I. took over. Aussies were forced to convert immediately. Hell, they even changed the yardage on football fields to meters and furlongs in horse racing to meters. BTW, horse racing is pretty much a sacred sport in Aussie-land.
There was, of course, a huge amount of bitching for the first year or so. But within a remarkably short time all Aussies seemed to become metric-conversant. Canada, with its decision to gradually bring in metric has ended up with a bastard system that pleases no one. It's time Canada completely eliminated a system used by no one else in the world except the Americans and the highly advanced nations of Liberia and Myanmar.
As for clocks and calendars, one has been changed. If you travel there is no four o'clock etc. Instead you have 16:00 hours. As for the months of the years and the days of the week and so on; that was changed once during the fanatical period of the French Revolution. It did not catch on as ten day weeks with the tenth day as a holiday were not nearly so popular as seven day weeks. Change might eventually come for the calendar, but having a logical length for months is not nearly as urgent as having a common system of measurement for other things. And let's face it. How do you get a nice even number of days in a month out of a year that lasts 365 and one-quarter days and has a moon that cycles through a 29.53 day cycle?
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