What kind of mental illness brings this?!
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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me_irl
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Being stuck on the same continent as the US
I hate this.
Hate that it is true?
Yes. Its bad enough to be stuck in imperial but to mix two systems is a war crime.
Well the Brits mix both and then throw in some extras just to make it extra difficult.
I have enough hate to split it up for other offenders.
Instant to see the British version.
Liquids come in pints AND liters.
Something like this:
(I've probably missed something, and also I don't think that lbs for weight is correct, should be stone)
Yeah, weight still talked about in stone and lbs. But now the kids talk about theirs in kg, so there’s a need for a decision about age for metric/st’lbs”
I'm very much not a kid but I don't understand stones at all, so my weight, which I rarely bother to measure anyway, I do in kgs.
I do mine in lbs just to be awkward. Things at work are in kilos, people in conversations are stones. I track my weight in lbs. That’s just the way it is.
I'm very much not a kid
This implies young people in general. But even so, imperial is still used within times - its just that both systems are used interchangeably.
Thanks, great artstyle
Travel distance should be measured in hours/minutes.
Even walking distance is measured by time.
Are Canadians really good at converting units in their heads? C to F etc.
No lol.
I know 21 °C is confortable for a room, no idea if it is even survivable in a pool.
I know I bake cookies at 350 °F, don't even know if it boils water.
As with most things, blame the Conservative government who stopped metrification a while ago.
Not at all, but due to the chart it "doesn't matter". We don't actually need to relate the temperature of the oven to the temperature of the house. Sure they're both temperatures of a volume of air, but they're not related temperatures. One is essentially just an abstract number you set an oven to without thinking about it. 350 for "cold", 400 for "medium", 425 for "hot", and the rest are whatever the box or recipe says.
I remember one day being like "wait, if 212 is boiling in American, what temperature is 350?" and being surprised that ovens get way less hot than I intuitively thought they did, but it didn't really matter, because it's just a number on the oven and nothing else.
Or, like, yeah I know my height in feet and inches, but given that I don't typically measure distances by laying down and using myself as a guide, it doesn't really matter that this isn't how I'd measure a room. Or I know my weight in pounds, but that doesn't help me weigh butter.
I'm not justifying it, I think it would be better if we switched more fully, but it's not as detrimental as you might think. Most people don't use the temperature of their pool, their own weight, and the length of a sheet of paper in the same formula very often.
As a Brit; take away thirty, divide by two. Really you'd only hear Fahrenheit temperatures on film or on TV programmes, so the accuracy loss is unimportant, and which can be mapped as:
- under 60 - coat weather
- 70s - t-shirt weather
- 80s - t-shirt and shorts weather
- 90s - dangerous heatwave that will make the news, have lots of fruity newspaper articles with pictures of people in their swims outside in the rivers, etc.
Over the last few years, I (an American) have gotten into hobbies (3d printing, coffee brewing, sciencey things, etc.) that pretty much require you to use metric over imperial because the community as a whole uses metric and it is straight up better for scaling. I have been enjoying that I can roughly convert between the two "languages" quickly and I have found I use a pattern that is essentially this meme, but not for a lack of reason; it's based on whether the thing I'm dealing with has to do with me as a human or not.
Things that directly affect me like temperature, weight, height, and descriptions/estimates in an abstract sense relative to me (how far something is from me, about me, with me, on me) is far easier to relate to in imperial. Room temp is 21C, but thinking of it has 72F feels more intuitive because 0 is fukkin cold and 100 is fukkin hot. And yeah F keeps going in both directions but idc if it's 100F out or 120F out, at a certain point hot is hot and cold is cold. 32F/0C is freezing for water, but not to me; I'm chilly, (maybe? That's t shirt weather after winter sometimes lol) but I'm not avoiding the outside until it really approaches 0F/-18C. The scale of /human/ feels better in imperial.
Most other things that I need measurements for is going to be in metric. Big things (SPACE), scalability for recipes, measuring tiny things for printing/modeling these things just feel so much more precise using metric. Yes, precision is there in imperial too, we build houses pretty damn accurately, but I would argue that follows my affects me logic.
Cooking is weird, idk these aren't RULES.
Imperial is just more of an approximation that feels very relatable and natural to my human monkey brain. That's probably because it was the first thing I learned and then I specifically taught myself metric, but that's the vibe I use and the fact that I can understand and convert pretty well between the two is what I assume knowing how to speak a second language feels. Which I cannot do. Because American education system. And I keep forgetting my Duolingo.
is far easier to relate to in imperial. Room temp is 21C, but thinking of it has 72F feels more intuitive because 0 is fukkin cold and 100 is fukkin hot.
No, it's easier because you're more familiar with it. Regardless, I agree that 0 is somewhat cold and 100 is fucking hot.
I was taught metric basically alongside imperial. I remember a depiction of a ruler with inches and centimeters in my first grade math book. In high school, I would go outside in the morning and build a house in inches, then I'd go inside and do chemistry labs in milligrams.
In flight school...some of this I'd like to wring some necks over...altitude and runway length is given in feet, temperature in centigrade, humidity as dewpoint in centigrade, pressures in inches of mercury, visibility in statute miles, overland distance in nautical miles, speed in knots, weight in pounds, gasoline volume in gallons. Oh, gasoline is sold by the gallon, jet-A is sold by the pound.
One of the most famous Canadian aviation accidents ("Gimli Glider"), was partly caused by confusion between pounds and kilograms.
What about area?
Depends on what you’re measuring. For housing we use square feet, for land we use acres and sometimes square km depending on context, most other things in my experience we just use dimensions instead (eg. 11x13 or something). If you have specific areas in mind I may be able to more precisely answer your question.
No, you answered well. I wanted the flow chart. :)
Well, in America, we use football fields, so I presume Canada uses hockey rinks.
i don’t see area being discussed very often but when it is, it’s usually in hectares
To be fair even in europe we use cups and spoons while cooking, tho they are standardized to millilitres. Its mainly because when measuring from 1-10ml it would be really hard to give weight.
As a European, I rarely see "cups" or other imperial measurement except in recipes that were originally from the UK or the US. Spoons are common, yes, especially for the small volumes you refer to. But the overwhelming majority of measurements are a mix of 1) metric, 2) spoons, and 3) absolute quantities like "zest of 1 lemon" and don't include any imperial measurements.
To be fair even in europe we use cups and spoons while cooking
You find those in grandma's recipes. They aren't actually used by anyone cooking seriously.
What exactly do you mean by "seriously"? For me it is easy to remember how many spoons or cups i need to cook something, if the recipe does not require specific or precise amount of ingridients.
Okay but i dont think people cooking seriously use it in the us or canada either. Also depends on what serious is. I think this mainly refers to people cooking just in general and in that case many recipies are gonna contain cups and spoons. Especially here in sweden for example.
In ukraine, cups and spoons are not standartized. I have like 10 sets of small and medium spoons, and each has different volume. But at least i have a measurement cups and spoons specifically for cooking.
I figured that's what they meant when they said "cups and spoons" as in the measurement of "cup" and "tablespoon/teaspoon" measurements. Not that literally all cups and spoons are the same size.
You can definitively simplify this flowchart further. Like on distance for example, what matters is only if it is height or related to work to be imperial and otherwise metric.
The chart skips the more frequent unit of distance used in Canada. Time. So could add that in instead.
Impressive, they found an even worse way of using imperial units.
Da fuckj?