Re: The price of cheese
 

I'm 34, UK educated except for final year, and it was centimetres/metres (but not kilometres) for maths, everything else was imperial.

We were still taught inches/feet/yards in other classes - such as geography: height of mountains, sewing (!): how many yards of material, etc.

Re: The price of cheese
 

Yes, my children were educated in Canada (7 and 11 years old) and they have no comprehension of imperial other than their height and weight. The depth of the lake at Crater Lake of 1900 something feet didn't register until we told them how many metres deep it was, how cold is was in centigrade etc. IIRC, imperial hasn't been taught in schools in Canada since the late 70's/early 80's.

Re: The price of cheese
 

I'm 30, I must have been during the changeover period, as I couldn't tell you anything about yards, very little about inches and feet. Bit of a mess really how some things are imperial and some metric!

Re: The price of cheese
 

Nonethless one would expect an anglophone Canadian child to know imperial measures as that's what's used on the television.

As an adult it would be something of a handicap not to be able to communicate about the weather or distances or to be able to use recipe book so, if the schools are failing the children, the parents must teach imperial measures (as it seems you are doing).

Re: The price of cheese
 

I seem to have become something of a hybrid.

I now consider temperatures in celsius and can only relate to farenheit when it's very hot.

Height is in feet; distances are in km, as is speed; abstract distances are in miles.

Weight is in pounds. Size is in inches.

Fluid ounces are a mystery to me. "Pint" is a moveable feast, as it relates to beer glasses of varying sizes and no apparent Canadian version of the weights and measures act.

Re: The price of cheese
 

A curious development is that my ex, originally a metric person, has evolved through being able to use both systems (like most people here) to more commonly using imperial. One child used to favour metric, one used either system equally. Now that they're adults they both use imperial first and translate if required which I suppose is why their mother has moved away from metric.

Re: The price of cheese
 

My use of inches is relatively new and linked entirely to DIY. I buy a lot of wood. I can tell between 1/2" and 5/8" at 20 metres. Sad, I know.

Re: The price of cheese
 

I'm exactly the same.


I measure and calculate in metric and then buy in imperial.
The computer program for my work takes imperial measurements as default but for, say, 6' 9" you have to input 6.75'. Spot on, eh

Re: The price of cheese
 

By television if you are referring to the 'big 4 (ABC,NBC,CBS,FOX) a knowledge of imperial is handy...but if you watch Canadian channels etc, then metric is more relevant.

I wasn't teaching imperial measures...I was merely roughly converting for my childrens perspective the imperial measurement to something that they could understand.

Re: The price of cheese
 

I prefer to know cold stuff (Canadian winter temps) in celcius, bit hazy on the bottom end of fahrenheit... they converge at some point, don't they?

Still not doing KM, except to match speed limits - but the car cruise control is clickable up and down in mile increments so I've learned some of those along the way.


I don't think I was taught those in school but I picked them up from perfume bottles ;)

Re: The price of cheese
 

-40. Out here, that's only a theoretical consideration.

Re: The price of cheese
 

Buying a lot of our cheese at Costco pays for the membership easily. We eat quite a bit of the Woowich Goat Cheese and the Reggiano Parmagiano and it is quite a bit cheaper at the Kirkland Boutique.

Re: The price of cheese
 

I think cheese everywhere is expensive.
In NZ we pay $16 per kilo for plain old cheddar or edam. Butter is $5 for 500g and I live in a dairy producing country!
At least expensive dairy products won't be a shock when we eventually get to Canada :)

Re: The price of cheese
 

Probably one for DBD this - do you think the proliferation of metric is to make programmers lives easier? Got to be easier to write a program that uses metric rather than imperial, surely?

Re: The price of cheese
 

In France, yes. In Canada, no. French products come in actual metric measures, 500g, 1l, etc and most products come in metric. Canadian ones generally come in imperial measures but are labelled in metric, so 455g of butter, 355ml of beer and so on. For the sake of clarity, computers, like people, convert to pounds, compute and convert back to metric for reporting to the government.

In the systems I've worked on there have been elaborate conversions for units of measure as supplied and as sold; the uom typically varies with the product and also with inbound and outbound; a flat of eggs coming in becomes dozens of eggs going out. Goods are bought and sold by metric measures, imperial measures, buckets, each, chains, US gallons, baker's dozen's, all manner of arcane measures depending on the good. Any of them is as easy or as difficult to deal with as the other so long as the product has one uom for purchase, one for sale and one for consumption; for example petrol is typically purchased in litres but consumed in mpg.

Most of the systems I've worked on dealt with engineered goods and so the units sold were generally a fraction of units supplied but I did a job for an abbatoir in Toronto where, alarmingly, the weight of products derived from incoming pigs was greater than the original pig weight. I had a phase of not eating sausages.

Bill-of-material explosions and implosions are common applications in which units come into play. The ones I've seen specify the uom at each level so a desk may be made of 18 square feet of board, a dozen 1 1/2" screws and four one metre legs; the system copes equally well or badly regardless of the uom. If you want the cost in pounds shillings and pence though that gets complicated.

Incidentally, we had television installed over the weekend and I watched a Canadian program, Holmes on Homes. It wasn't very metric, all the measurements were in imperial and even Mr. Holmes' son was described as being 6' 2" tall. You really gotta know both systems to get by here (for the time being, I expect eventually the government will get over this flirtation with metric).