Units of measurement in the USA

[Lothar Frings]

<http://retailcomic.com/comics/june-8-2016/>

"That's highway robbery! A 2-liter bottle
doesn't cost that much! What makes them
think they can get away with charging so much
for a measly 20 ounces of sugar water?"

Fuel is sold by the gallon in the US,
I think. But in this comic strip, the
metric system (liter) is even mixed
with the $OTHER_SYSTEM that uses ounces.

Are liters now a common unit
of measurement in the USA?

[Harrison Hill]

In Britain we measure distance in miles, yards (which we know to be
metres), feet, centimetres, millimetres. Speed is always in "mph".

Liquids are measured in litres. The milk in our fridge is 2.27
litres aka four pints :)

Hot weather we measure in Fahrenheit. Cold weather we measure in
Centigrade.

[RH Draney]

For some things, sody pop being one of them....r

[Lothar Frings]

Lothar Frings wrote :

Sorry, I forgot to mention that this is
about a can of soda pop.

[Richard Heathfield]

On 09/06/16 09:05, Harrison Hill wrote:
<snip>

>
> In Britain we measure distance in miles, yards (which we know to be
> metres), feet, centimetres, millimetres.

FSVO "we", I suppose.

My choice of units depends on the context. For scientific work, I use
SI. For everyday use, I prefer miles, yards (which I know *not* to be
metres), feet, inches, pints, gallons, etc.

> Speed is always in "mph".

Yes, more or less, but velocity is always in m/s (except, of course, in
occasional cases of inconsistency). "Furlongs per fortnight" is always
popular, too.

> Liquids are measured in litres. The milk in our fridge is 2.27
> litres aka four pints :)

I don't have any milk in my fridge at the moment. But when I buy some,
later on today, the container will hold four pints. If the supplier
chooses to write 2.27 on the container for whatever obscure reason,
well, it's a free country. As long as it says "4 pints" on it somewhere,
I'll be happy to buy it.

> Hot weather we measure in Fahrenheit. Cold weather we measure in
> Centigrade.

Weather is /always/ measured in Fahrenheit. Centigrade is an invention
of the devil. Kelvins are fine, though. I can live with Kelvins.

--
Richard Heathfield
Email: rjh at cpax dot org dot uk
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
Sig line 4 vacant - apply within

[Harrison Hill]

On Thursday, 9 June 2016 09:36:08 UTC+1, Richard Heathfield wrote:
> On 09/06/16 09:05, Harrison Hill wrote:
> <snip>
> >
> > In Britain we measure distance in miles, yards (which we know to be
> > metres), feet, centimetres, millimetres.
>
> FSVO "we", I suppose.
>
> My choice of units depends on the context. For scientific work, I use
> SI. For everyday use, I prefer miles, yards (which I know *not* to be
> metres), feet, inches, pints, gallons, etc.
>
> > Speed is always in "mph".
>
> Yes, more or less, but velocity is always in m/s (except, of course, in
> occasional cases of inconsistency). "Furlongs per fortnight" is always
> popular, too.
>
> > Liquids are measured in litres. The milk in our fridge is 2.27
> > litres aka four pints :)
>
> I don't have any milk in my fridge at the moment. But when I buy some,
> later on today, the container will hold four pints. If the supplier
> chooses to write 2.27 on the container for whatever obscure reason,
> well, it's a free country. As long as it says "4 pints" on it somewhere,
> I'll be happy to buy it.
>
> > Hot weather we measure in Fahrenheit. Cold weather we measure in
> > Centigrade.
>
> Weather is /always/ measured in Fahrenheit. Centigrade is an invention
> of the devil. Kelvins are fine, though. I can live with Kelvins.

I don't believe there is anyone in Britain who says: "Apparently it
is 14 degrees out there!" when they could say "Apparently it is -10!"

[Richard Heathfield]

On 09/06/16 09:42, Harrison Hill wrote:
> On Thursday, 9 June 2016 09:36:08 UTC+1, Richard Heathfield wrote:
>> On 09/06/16 09:05, Harrison Hill wrote:
<snip>
>>

>>> Hot weather we measure in Fahrenheit. Cold weather we measure in
>>> Centigrade.
>>
>> Weather is /always/ measured in Fahrenheit. Centigrade is an invention
>> of the devil. Kelvins are fine, though. I can live with Kelvins.
>
> I don't believe there is anyone in Britain who says: "Apparently it
> is 14 degrees out there!" when they could say "Apparently it is -10!"

I would be a counter-example, if it weren't for the fact that I wouldn't
use "apparently" in that way.

[Peter T. Daniels]

Soda comes in 12-oz. cans, 16- and 20-oz. bottles, and 1-liter
and 2-liter bottles. The really cheap store brands are sometimes seen in
3-liter bottles but they're really too heavy to be practical.

I've seen 1-gallon bottles of Snapple (iced tea brand), and cider (which is
non-alcoholic) can come in 1-gallon glass jugs.

[Don Phillipson]

"Lothar Frings" <Lothar...@gmx.de> wrote in message
news:5583b64a-b8e6-40cb...@googlegroups.com...

> Are liters now a common unit
> of measurement in the USA?

No. Metric measures were legally approved in the
USA quite early in the 20th century (cf. early history
of the National Bureau of Standards) but were never
adopted except in laboratories. Globalization of trade
means that metric measures now can be found on US
retail store shelves, but many Americans feel they
are rare or alien.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

[HVS]

On 09 Jun 2016, Harrison Hill wrote

> On Thursday, 9 June 2016 08:50:38 UTC+1, Lothar Frings wrote:
>> <http://retailcomic.com/comics/june-8-2016/>
>>
>> "That's highway robbery! A 2-liter bottle
>> doesn't cost that much! What makes them
>> think they can get away with charging so much
>> for a measly 20 ounces of sugar water?"
>>
>> Fuel is sold by the gallon in the US,
>> I think. But in this comic strip, the
>> metric system (liter) is even mixed
>> with the $OTHER_SYSTEM that uses ounces.
>>
>> Are liters now a common unit
>> of measurement in the USA?
>
> In Britain we measure distance in miles, yards (which we know to be
> metres), feet, centimetres, millimetres. Speed is always in "mph".

Measurements in architecture and construction have been metric for quite
some time now, although the industry only uses metres or millimetres.

Centimetres are a consumer retail measurement, but aren't used in the
industry: if you asked a builder to measure a door that was sold at the
local DIY as "72 cm", I'd be utterley amazed if he said anything other than
"720 mil".

>
> Liquids are measured in litres. The milk in our fridge is 2.27
> litres aka four pints :)
>
> Hot weather we measure in Fahrenheit. Cold weather we measure in
> Centigrade.

Hmmm..... Surely I can't be the only person in England to have converted
many moons ago to degrees C for both cold and hot weather?

--
Cheers, Harvey
CanEng and BrEng, indiscriminately mixed



---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

[Mallocy]

No: far from it! Amusingly, BBC often uses 'centigrade'.

[charles]

In article <XnsA62299AA...@178.63.61.145>, HVS

<off...@REMOVETHISwhhvs.co.uk> wrote:
> On 09 Jun 2016, Harrison Hill wrote

> > On Thursday, 9 June 2016 08:50:38 UTC+1, Lothar Frings wrote:
> >> <http://retailcomic.com/comics/june-8-2016/>
> >>
> >> "That's highway robbery! A 2-liter bottle doesn't cost that much! What
> >> makes them think they can get away with charging so much for a measly
> >> 20 ounces of sugar water?"
> >>
> >> Fuel is sold by the gallon in the US, I think. But in this comic
> >> strip, the metric system (liter) is even mixed with the $OTHER_SYSTEM
> >> that uses ounces.
> >>
> >> Are liters now a common unit of measurement in the USA?
> >
> > In Britain we measure distance in miles, yards (which we know to be
> > metres), feet, centimetres, millimetres. Speed is always in "mph".

> Measurements in architecture and construction have been metric for quite
> some time now, although the industry only uses metres or millimetres.

> Centimetres are a consumer retail measurement, but aren't used in the
> industry: if you asked a builder to measure a door that was sold at the
> local DIY as "72 cm", I'd be utterley amazed if he said anything other
> than "720 mil".

I initially learnt Physics using the CGS system ("C" standing for
Centimetre".

> >
> > Liquids are measured in litres. The milk in our fridge is 2.27 litres
> > aka four pints :)
> >
> > Hot weather we measure in Fahrenheit. Cold weather we measure in
> > Centigrade.

> Hmmm..... Surely I can't be the only person in England to have converted
> many moons ago to degrees C for both cold and hot weather?

--

from KT24 in Surrey, England

[Katy Jennison]

Well, mostly. For weather, I know the "feel" of most of the range of F
temperatures I'm ever likely to experience, but I really only have an
equivalent sense of between about 10 and 25 C. All right, 30 is hot;
below 10 is chilly. But if I went outside and you asked me the
temperature, I could instantly give you an approximation in F, whereas
I'd have to stop and think about C.

--
Katy Jennison

[Tak To]

On 6/9/2016 8:02 AM, Don Phillipson wrote:
> "Lothar Frings" <Lothar...@gmx.de> wrote in message
> news:5583b64a-b8e6-40cb...@googlegroups.com...
>
>> Are liters now a common unit
>> of measurement in the USA?
>
> No. Metric measures were legally approved in the
> USA quite early in the 20th century (cf. early history
> of the National Bureau of Standards) but were never
> adopted except in laboratories. Globalization of trade
> means that metric measures now can be found on US
> retail store shelves, but many Americans feel they
> are rare or alien.

NHNT (neither here nor there):

Stewart Brand -- compiler of /The Whole Earth Catalog/ and
hypertext visionary -- was a vociferous opponent to adopting
the metric system in the US.

--
Tak
----------------------------------------------------------------+-----
Tak To ta...@alum.mit.eduxx
--------------------------------------------------------------------^^
[taode takto ~{LU5B~}] NB: trim the xx to get my real email addr

[Richard Heathfield]

On 09/06/16 16:37, Katy Jennison wrote:

<snip>

> For weather, I know the "feel" of most of the range of F
> temperatures I'm ever likely to experience, but I really only have an
> equivalent sense of between about 10 and 25 C. All right, 30 is hot;
> below 10 is chilly. But if I went outside and you asked me the
> temperature, I could instantly give you an approximation in F, whereas
> I'd have to stop and think about C.

Stopping and thinking about it wouldn't help me. I'd have to stop and
/calculate/ it. (Fortunately, as Holmes famously said...)

[charles]

In article <njc2fs$sf7$1...@news.albasani.net>, Katy Jennison

How about -40°?

[Richard Heathfield]

Kelvin or Rankine? :-)

As a matter of fact, the /correct/ conversion of -40 is to "too cold -
back inside, everyone".

[Peter Young]

BBC Radio usually uses Celsius, and not degree Celsius, and I've
always understood the former to be correct.

Peter.

--
Peter Young, (BrE, RP), Consultant Anaesthetist, 1975-2004.
(US equivalent: Certified Anesthesiologist) (AUE Os)
Cheltenham and Gloucester, UK. Now happily retired.
http://pnyoung.orpheusweb.co.uk

[Mack A. Damia]

You ain't gunna drink that in here, sodbuster.

[Whiskers]

On 2016-06-09, Richard Heathfield <r...@cpax.org.uk> wrote:
> On 09/06/16 09:05, Harrison Hill wrote:
> <snip>
>>
>> In Britain we measure distance in miles, yards (which we know to be
>> metres), feet, centimetres, millimetres.
>
> FSVO "we", I suppose.
>
> My choice of units depends on the context. For scientific work, I use
> SI. For everyday use, I prefer miles, yards (which I know *not* to be
> metres), feet, inches, pints, gallons, etc.
>
>> Speed is always in "mph".
>
> Yes, more or less, but velocity is always in m/s (except, of course, in
> occasional cases of inconsistency). "Furlongs per fortnight" is always
> popular, too.
>
>> Liquids are measured in litres. The milk in our fridge is 2.27
>> litres aka four pints :)
>
> I don't have any milk in my fridge at the moment. But when I buy some,
> later on today, the container will hold four pints. If the supplier
> chooses to write 2.27 on the container for whatever obscure reason,
> well, it's a free country. As long as it says "4 pints" on it somewhere,
> I'll be happy to buy it.
>
>> Hot weather we measure in Fahrenheit. Cold weather we measure in
>> Centigrade.
>
> Weather is /always/ measured in Fahrenheit. Centigrade is an invention
> of the devil. Kelvins are fine, though. I can live with Kelvins.

Centigrade is supposed to be called 'Celcius' these days, even though it
isn't. I tend to use whichever scale is on the nearest thermometer, but
all I'm really worried about are oven settings and 'too hot' (which this
room is now in full summer sunshine) and 'too cold' (which this room can
be in the depths of winter if I don't turn the heat on).

--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~

[Whiskers]

The cartoon seems to involve a "20 oz" can of pop which costs more than
a (much larger) 2 litre bottle of similar stuff presumably from a shop
of some sort. Both protagonists seem to be comfortable using both
ounces and litres as measures of volume, and to know that 20 oz is a
smaller quantity than 2 litres. The joke lies in the willingness of the
purchaser to make the extra expenditure at the vending machine rather
than wait to go to the shop to spend less for more (or get some free
water from a water fountain or [tap|faucet]).

[Richard Tobin]

In article <slrnnlj654.6...@ID-107770.user.individual.net>,

Whiskers <catwh...@operamail.com> wrote:

>Centigrade is supposed to be called 'Celcius' these days,

The SI unit is Celsius (sic), but we haven't delegated authority
over the English language to them.

-- Richard

[Charles Bishop]

In article <5583b64a-b8e6-40cb...@googlegroups.com>,

Soda is commonly sold in 2 liter bottles as an "economy" size. It is
also sold in other, smaller sizes, usually measured in fluid ozs, but
also with the metric unit on the container as well.

In the comic, they have raised the price on sodas in a vending machine,
in apparently 20 oz bottles. The customer is complaining that elsewhere,
such as in a supermarket, he can buy a 2 liter bottle for less than they
are charging for the soda in the machine.

He forgets that the 20 oz bottle in right there, but he would have to
travel to get the cheaper 2 litre bottle. But of course that isn't the
point which is that though he complains about the increase in cost he is
willing to pay it anyway (assuming he pays his coworker back the
borrowed quarter ($0.25).

Of course it's a comic strip so "facts" are conveniently forgotten to
help support the humor. We don't know what money he was intending to use
to pay for the soda, but unless he had exact change he would have had
enough to pay for the soda without borrowing the $0.25. However, knowing
that it was $1.50 before, he may just have brought that amount with him
to the soda machine.



--
charles, Any more nits, above or elsewhere?

[RH Draney]

On 6/9/2016 9:33 AM, Whiskers wrote:
>
> The cartoon seems to involve a "20 oz" can of pop which costs more than
> a (much larger) 2 litre bottle of similar stuff presumably from a shop
> of some sort. Both protagonists seem to be comfortable using both
> ounces and litres as measures of volume, and to know that 20 oz is a
> smaller quantity than 2 litres.

Wait until you get around to buying a car tire...there are three numbers
in the description of the size: one in millimeters, another in inches,
and the third a unitless ratio....r

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Peter Young skrev:

> BBC Radio usually uses Celsius, and not degree Celsius, and I've
> always understood the former to be correct.

It's not. We write "°C" - not just "C". Besides I saw on a page
that I can't find now, that it's "degree" before Fahrenheit and
Celsius but not before Kelvin.

--
Bertel, Kolt, Denmark

[Peter Young]

Reputed Norwegian saying: "There is no such thing as cold, there is
only inadequate clothing".

[Peter Young]

Actually that's incorrect. I looked it up after my last post on
Celsius, and the SI unit is the Kelvin. Celsius is a "derived unit".

[Joe Fineman]

Right. In SI, the kelvin (lowercase when spelled out; the abbreviation
is K) is treated just like any other unit: 293 K for 293 kelvins. That
is sensible, IMO, in that the absolute scale (unlike the others) has a
natural zero -- the temperature at which, by the third law of
thermodynamics, all substances in equilibrium have the same entropy. It
is like length properly so called, in contrast to (say) shoe sizes.
--
--- Joe Fineman jo...@verizon.net

||: Music is the brandy of the damned. :||

[Mark Brader]

Richard Tobin:

> > The SI unit is Celsius (sic), but we haven't delegated authority
> > over the English language to them.

Peter Young:

> Actually that's incorrect. I looked it up after my last post on
> Celsius, and the SI unit is the Kelvin. Celsius is a "derived unit".

Both wrong. The SI unit is the kelvin (no capital). The derived
unit is the degree Celsius (two words).
--
Mark Brader "The people have spoken...
Toronto And they must be punished!"
m...@vex.net --Ed Koch, after not being reelected, 1989

[Mark Brader]

Richard Tobin:
>>> The SI unit is Celsius (sic), but we haven't delegated authority
>>> over the English language to them.

Peter Young:
>> Actually that's incorrect. I looked it up after my last post on
>> Celsius, and the SI unit is the Kelvin. Celsius is a "derived unit".

Mark Brader:

> Both wrong. The SI unit is the kelvin (no capital). The derived
> unit is the degree Celsius (two words).

All three wrong. The kelvin is an SI *base* unit. The degree Celsius
is an *SI* derived unit. Sorry, I knew that.
--
Mark Brader, Toronto | "Common sense isn't any more common on Usenet
m...@vex.net | than it is anywhere else." --Henry Spencer

[Mark Brader]

Lothar Frings asks about:
> > <http://retailcomic.com/comics/june-8-2016/>

Charles Bishop explains correctly:

> Soda is commonly sold in 2 liter bottles as an "economy" size. It is
> also sold in other, smaller sizes, usually measured in fluid ozs, but
> also with the metric unit on the container as well.
>
> In the comic, they have raised the price on sodas in a vending machine,
> in apparently 20 oz bottles. The customer is complaining that elsewhere,
> such as in a supermarket, he can buy a 2 liter bottle for less than they
> are charging for the soda in the machine.
>
> He forgets that the 20 oz bottle in right there, but he would have to
> travel to get the cheaper 2 litre bottle.

Also, in most stores the 2 L bottle would be stored on an open shelf,
whereas the 20 fl.oz. bottle from the vending machine would already be
refrigerated and therefore ready to drink from.

Charles continues:

> We don't know what money he was intending to use to pay for the soda,
> but unless he had exact change he would have had enough to pay for the
> soda without borrowing the $0.25. However, knowing that it was $1.50
> before, he may just have brought that amount with him to the soda machine.

No, he knew what it was before, and it was less than $1.50.
--
Mark Brader, Toronto | "I will take your word for it: this is very amusing."
m...@vex.net | --"Suddenly Human", ST:TNG, Phillips/Whelpley/Taylor

My text in this article is in the public domain.

[Mike Barnes]

HVS wrote:
> On 09 Jun 2016, Harrison Hill wrote
>>

>> Hot weather we measure in Fahrenheit. Cold weather we measure in
>> Centigrade.
>
> Hmmm..... Surely I can't be the only person in England to have converted
> many moons ago to degrees C for both cold and hot weather?

I''m with you... Celsius is normal for me, and Fahrenheit is weird.
Day-to-day I never come across F, except occasionally from populist
media, and from Americans of course.

--
Mike Barnes
Cheshire, England

[Richard Tobin]

In article <2688a48d5...@pnyoung.ormail.co.uk>,

Peter Young <pny...@ormail.co.uk> wrote:
>On 9 Jun 2016 ric...@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) wrote:
>
>> In article <slrnnlj654.6...@ID-107770.user.individual.net>,
>> Whiskers <catwh...@operamail.com> wrote:
>
>>>Centigrade is supposed to be called 'Celcius' these days,
>
>> The SI unit is Celsius (sic), but we haven't delegated authority
>> over the English language to them.
>
>Actually that's incorrect. I looked it up after my last post on
>Celsius, and the SI unit is the Kelvin. Celsius is a "derived unit".

The point is that no-one is in a position to decide what would are
supposed to call it.

-- Richard

[Jerry Friedman]

Someone who teaches "boot camp fitness" at my college is reputed to say,
"There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing."
It may be relevant that we don't have hurricanes or tornadoes here.

("Boot camp fitness" is not very much like boot camp, which I know all
about from some glances at TV shows in the 1970s.)

--
Jerry Friedman
"No Trump" bridge-themed political shirts: cafepress.com/jerrysdesigns
Bumper stickers ditto: cafepress/jerrysstickers

[Jerry Friedman]

On 6/9/16 6:02 AM, Don Phillipson wrote:
> "Lothar Frings" <Lothar...@gmx.de> wrote in message
> news:5583b64a-b8e6-40cb...@googlegroups.com...
>

>> Are liters now a common unit
>> of measurement in the USA?
>

> No. Metric measures were legally approved in the
> USA quite early in the 20th century (cf. early history
> of the National Bureau of Standards) but were never
> adopted except in laboratories. Globalization of trade
> means that metric measures now can be found on US
> retail store shelves, but many Americans feel they
> are rare or alien.

In my experience, Americans of all educational levels are thoroughly
familiar with two-liter plastic bottles of pop (soda, etc.). That's
probably the best-known metric measurement here.

[Dingbat]

On Thursday, June 9, 2016 at 1:35:52 PM UTC+5:30, Harrison Hill wrote:

> On Thursday, 9 June 2016 08:50:38 UTC+1, Lothar Frings wrote:
> > <http://retailcomic.com/comics/june-8-2016/>
> >
> > "That's highway robbery! A 2-liter bottle
> > doesn't cost that much! What makes them
> > think they can get away with charging so much
> > for a measly 20 ounces of sugar water?"
> >
> > Fuel is sold by the gallon in the US,
> > I think. But in this comic strip, the
> > metric system (liter) is even mixed
> > with the $OTHER_SYSTEM that uses ounces.
> >

> > Are liters now a common unit
> > of measurement in the USA?
>

> In Britain we measure distance in miles, yards (which we know to be

> metres), feet, centimetres, millimetres. Speed is always in "mph".
>
No place is entirely metric in quoting the speed of cars. In the metric system, speed is reckoned in m/s; 20 m/s would be 45 mph or 72 km/h.

>
> Liquids are measured in litres. The milk in our fridge is 2.27
> litres aka four pints :)
>

That would be imperial pints. A half gallon (4 pints) of milk in the US is a little under 1.9 liters.

>
> Hot weather we measure in Fahrenheit. Cold weather we measure in
> Centigrade.

Interesting. I think Rankine would have been best for the common man and that the degree centigrade was a worthless invention. BTW, it's not clear why "centigrade" continues to be used; it was officially renamed to "Celsius" in 1948.

In Rankine, all temperatures would be positive and temperatures quoted by the commoner would be only up to 3 digits long. The highest temperatures quoted by the common man would be the temperatures in ovens. Kelvin has most of these advantages but has the disadvantage of being coarser, making it more necessary to add a digit after a decimal point to state the temperature more precisely.

[j...@mdfs.net]

Harrison Hill wrote:
> In Britain ...

> Hot weather we measure in Fahrenheit.

No we don't. It was a sweltering 23 degrees today.

jgh

[j...@mdfs.net]

Joe Fineman wrote:
> Right. In SI, the kelvin (lowercase when spelled out; the abbreviation

> is K) ...

K isn't the abbreviation for kelvin, it's the symbol for kelvin. K m g
A s etc aren't abbreviations, they're symbols.

jgh

[Robert Bannister]

On 9/06/2016 4:36 PM, Richard Heathfield wrote:
> On 09/06/16 09:05, Harrison Hill wrote:
> <snip>
>>

>> In Britain we measure distance in miles, yards (which we know to be
>> metres), feet, centimetres, millimetres.
>

> FSVO "we", I suppose.
>
> My choice of units depends on the context. For scientific work, I use
> SI. For everyday use, I prefer miles, yards (which I know *not* to be
> metres), feet, inches, pints, gallons, etc.
>

>> Speed is always in "mph".
>

> Yes, more or less, but velocity is always in m/s (except, of course, in
> occasional cases of inconsistency). "Furlongs per fortnight" is always
> popular, too.
>

>> Liquids are measured in litres. The milk in our fridge is 2.27
>> litres aka four pints :)
>

> I don't have any milk in my fridge at the moment. But when I buy some,
> later on today, the container will hold four pints. If the supplier
> chooses to write 2.27 on the container for whatever obscure reason,
> well, it's a free country. As long as it says "4 pints" on it somewhere,
> I'll be happy to buy it.

It would take me 3 to 4 weeks to drink that much milk whether it were in
pints or litres. One litre lasts me about a week.

--
Robert B. born England a long time ago;
Western Australia since 1972

[Robert Bannister]

On 9/06/2016 4:42 PM, Harrison Hill wrote:

>> Weather is /always/ measured in Fahrenheit. Centigrade is an invention
>> of the devil. Kelvins are fine, though. I can live with Kelvins.

I thought "Centigrade" was an English invention. The rest of the world,
apart from of course the USA, uses Celsius. Even during the first 31
years of my life which were spent in England, I never did understand
that Fahrenheit nonsense: 32°, 98°, 212° - is this a joke?

[Robert Bannister]

On 9/06/2016 11:37 PM, Katy Jennison wrote:
> On 09/06/2016 15:06, HVS wrote:
>> On 09 Jun 2016, Harrison Hill wrote

>>
>>> On Thursday, 9 June 2016 08:50:38 UTC+1, Lothar Frings wrote:
>>>> <http://retailcomic.com/comics/june-8-2016/>
>>>>
>>>> "That's highway robbery! A 2-liter bottle
>>>> doesn't cost that much! What makes them
>>>> think they can get away with charging so much
>>>> for a measly 20 ounces of sugar water?"
>>>>
>>>> Fuel is sold by the gallon in the US,
>>>> I think. But in this comic strip, the
>>>> metric system (liter) is even mixed
>>>> with the $OTHER_SYSTEM that uses ounces.
>>>>
>>>> Are liters now a common unit
>>>> of measurement in the USA?
>>>

>>> In Britain we measure distance in miles, yards (which we know to be

>>> metres), feet, centimetres, millimetres. Speed is always in "mph".
>>
>> Measurements in architecture and construction have been metric for quite
>> some time now, although the industry only uses metres or millimetres.
>>
>> Centimetres are a consumer retail measurement, but aren't used in the
>> industry: if you asked a builder to measure a door that was sold at the
>> local DIY as "72 cm", I'd be utterley amazed if he said anything other
>> than
>> "720 mil".
>>>

>>> Liquids are measured in litres. The milk in our fridge is 2.27
>>> litres aka four pints :)
>>>

>>> Hot weather we measure in Fahrenheit. Cold weather we measure in
>>> Centigrade.
>>

>> Hmmm..... Surely I can't be the only person in England to have converted
>> many moons ago to degrees C for both cold and hot weather?
>>
>

> Well, mostly. For weather, I know the "feel" of most of the range of F
> temperatures I'm ever likely to experience, but I really only have an
> equivalent sense of between about 10 and 25 C. All right, 30 is hot;
> below 10 is chilly. But if I went outside and you asked me the
> temperature, I could instantly give you an approximation in F, whereas
> I'd have to stop and think about C.
>

And that is something I never could do in my 31 years in England. People
would tell me "The water is 57°" or "It's over 80° in here" and I never
knew whether they meant cold, hot or what. The Fahrenheit scale never
made any sense to me at any time and because from the age 15 I managed
to go to the continent most summers, I grew used to the more sensible
Celsius system:
20° is warm, but a bit too cool for sitting in for long;
30° is warm; definitely no pullover and not too much running:
40° is hot.
Anything under 20° is for Siberians and Canadians and will eventually
send you mad.

[Robert Bannister]

On 9/06/2016 11:49 PM, charles wrote:
> In article <njc2fs$sf7$1...@news.albasani.net>, Katy Jennison

> How about -40°?
>

Not on scale.

[Garrett Wollman]

In article <njbn1t$6od$1...@news.albasani.net>,

Don Phillipson <e9...@SPAMBLOCK.ncf.ca> wrote:
>"Lothar Frings" <Lothar...@gmx.de> wrote in message
>news:5583b64a-b8e6-40cb...@googlegroups.com...
>

>> Are liters now a common unit
>> of measurement in the USA?
>

>No. Metric measures were legally approved in the USA quite early in
>the 20th century (cf. early history of the National Bureau of
>Standards) but were never adopted except in laboratories.

Not so.

Many state labeling laws require the use of US customary units, but
these have since the 19th century been defined in terms of the metric
base units. One foot is 0.3048 m, exactly, and all the other units of
length, area, and volume follow according to their traditional
formulation relative to the inch or foot.[1] A pound (mass) is defined
to be about 0.454 kg (the actual definition is more precise), and so
on for all the derived units.

As for food products, the two-liter soda bottle was introduced in the
late 1970s and has been standard ever since, although because of those
state labeling laws it must be described as a "33.6 fluid ounce"
bottle. Alcoholic beverage labeling is a matter of federal law, and
both metric units and "metric" container sizes are mandatory (e.g.,
the 750 ml wine bottle). For soft drinks and non-carbonated
beverages, a very wide variety of container sizes are in use,
including 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 32, 64, and 128 fluid ounces, 120 ml,
240 ml, 500 ml, 750 ml, 1 L, 2 L, and 3 L (the last used primarily for
"economy" sizes of off-brand sodas). The 240 ml package is a
"nutritional cup", slightly larger than the ~236 ml US customary cup
of 8 fluid ounces. (Recall that in US customary fluid measure, 1 pint
= 16 fl. oz., and likewise for quarts and gallons.)

-GAWollman

[1] Ignoring the rarely relevant survey foot and related measures,
which are based on the older definition of 1 ft = 1200/3937 m.
--
Garrett A. Wollman | What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft
wol...@bimajority.org| repeated, than the story of a large research program
Opinions not shared by| that impaled itself upon a false central assumption
my employers. | accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993

[Garrett Wollman]

In article <njdb6r$khc$1...@grapevine.csail.mit.edu>, I wrote:

>As for food products, the two-liter soda bottle was introduced in the
>late 1970s and has been standard ever since, although because of those
>state labeling laws it must be described as a "33.6 fluid ounce"

Oops! Got my one- and two-liter bottles mixed up. It's 33.8
fl. oz. for the one-liter bottle, but the two-liter bottle, which was
introduced first, as best I can recall, is officially "67.6 fl. oz."
(well, actually, "67.6 FL OZ" since grocery people like to shout).

-GAWollman

[bill van]

In article <dru0pl...@mid.individual.net>,

Most Canadians can deal with either. We've been metric in temperature
for decades, but we are exposed daily to U.S. media, which use F.
--
bill

[bill van]

In article <1335978d5...@pnyoung.ormail.co.uk>,
Peter Young <pny...@ormail.co.uk> wrote:

> On 9 Jun 2016 Mallocy <nu...@example.net> wrote:

>
> > On 2016-06-09, HVS <off...@REMOVETHISwhhvs.co.uk> wrote:
> >> On 09 Jun 2016, Harrison Hill wrote
> >>

> >>> On Thursday, 9 June 2016 08:50:38 UTC+1, Lothar Frings wrote:
> >>>> <http://retailcomic.com/comics/june-8-2016/>
> >>>>
> >>>> "That's highway robbery! A 2-liter bottle
> >>>> doesn't cost that much! What makes them
> >>>> think they can get away with charging so much
> >>>> for a measly 20 ounces of sugar water?"
> >>>>
> >>>> Fuel is sold by the gallon in the US,
> >>>> I think. But in this comic strip, the
> >>>> metric system (liter) is even mixed
> >>>> with the $OTHER_SYSTEM that uses ounces.
> >>>>

> >>>> Are liters now a common unit
> >>>> of measurement in the USA?
> >>>

> >>> In Britain we measure distance in miles, yards (which we know to be
> >>> metres), feet, centimetres, millimetres. Speed is always in "mph".
> >>
> >> Measurements in architecture and construction have been metric for quite
> >> some time now, although the industry only uses metres or millimetres.
> >>
> >> Centimetres are a consumer retail measurement, but aren't used in the
> >> industry: if you asked a builder to measure a door that was sold at the
> >> local DIY as "72 cm", I'd be utterley amazed if he said anything other than
> >> "720 mil".
> >>>
> >>> Liquids are measured in litres. The milk in our fridge is 2.27
> >>> litres aka four pints :)
> >>>

> >>> Hot weather we measure in Fahrenheit. Cold weather we measure in
> >>> Centigrade.
> >>
> >> Hmmm..... Surely I can't be the only person in England to have converted
> >> many moons ago to degrees C for both cold and hot weather?
>

> > No: far from it! Amusingly, BBC often uses 'centigrade'.

>
> BBC Radio usually uses Celsius, and not degree Celsius, and I've
> always understood the former to be correct.
>

Local television weather people here keep telling us the temperatures
are going to be hotter or colder. I talk back and tell them that the
temperatures will be higher or lower, but it's only the weather that
will be hoter or colder. They do not listen.
--
bill

[Peter Moylan]

On 2016-Jun-10 12:54, Robert Bannister wrote:
> On 9/06/2016 4:42 PM, Harrison Hill wrote:
>
>>> Weather is /always/ measured in Fahrenheit. Centigrade is an invention
>>> of the devil. Kelvins are fine, though. I can live with Kelvins.
>
> I thought "Centigrade" was an English invention. The rest of the world,
> apart from of course the USA, uses Celsius. Even during the first 31
> years of my life which were spent in England, I never did understand
> that Fahrenheit nonsense: 32°, 98°, 212° - is this a joke?

It's not really that bad. Admittedly the Fahrenheit scale feels
unsuitable for human use when you haven't used it for a while, but I
recall it making sense when I was a child.

The one figure that still sticks in my mind is "one hundred degrees
means mid-summer". Even then, though, the really important numbers
weren't as round as that. Normal body temperature was 97, or something
like that (I've forgotten the precise figure), and school wasn't
cancelled until the temperature reached 105. Our temperatures never got
down to zero Fahrenheit, so we never developed any intuition for the
cold end of the scale.

It's at least three-quarters of a lifetime since I last saw a weather
report in anything but Celsius, so Fahrenheit does have a Stone Age feel
to it now. The word Centigrade sounds merely mediaeval.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW, Australia

[Peter T. Daniels]

73 F is "sweltering"?? Where are you??

[Peter Moylan]

On 2016-Jun-10 01:37, Katy Jennison wrote:
> On 09/06/2016 15:06, HVS wrote:

>> Hmmm..... Surely I can't be the only person in England to have converted
>> many moons ago to degrees C for both cold and hot weather?
>>
>

> Well, mostly. For weather, I know the "feel" of most of the range of F
> temperatures I'm ever likely to experience, but I really only have an
> equivalent sense of between about 10 and 25 C. All right, 30 is hot;
> below 10 is chilly. But if I went outside and you asked me the
> temperature, I could instantly give you an approximation in F, whereas
> I'd have to stop and think about C.

I'm the opposite. I have the feel of what Celsius temperatures mean, and
that's partly because "weather" temperatures come in nice round numbers:
0 freezing
10 cold
20 comfortable; not too cold
25 very comfortable
30 warm
40 hot

With Fahrenheit I have no intuitive feel at all, even though that's what
we used WIWAL. If someone tells me the temperature is 55 degrees
Fahrenheit, I couldn't even tell you whether that was beach weather.

[Peter Moylan]

On 2016-Jun-10 09:57, Dingbat wrote:

[long line re-wrapped]

> Interesting. I think Rankine would have been best for the common man
> and that the degree centigrade was a worthless invention. BTW, it's
> not clear why "centigrade" continues to be used; it was officially
> renamed to "Celsius" in 1948.

Strictly speaking, Fahrenheit is also a centigrade (one hundred steps)
scale, because it is based on the idea that 0 is the lowest achievable
temperature and 100 is the temperature of the human body.

[Peter Moylan]

On 2016-Jun-09 22:02, Don Phillipson wrote:
> "Lothar Frings" <Lothar...@gmx.de> wrote in message
> news:5583b64a-b8e6-40cb...@googlegroups.com...
>

>> Are liters now a common unit
>> of measurement in the USA?
>

> No. Metric measures were legally approved in the
> USA quite early in the 20th century (cf. early history
> of the National Bureau of Standards) but were never

> adopted except in laboratories. Globalization of trade
> means that metric measures now can be found on US
> retail store shelves, but many Americans feel they
> are rare or alien.

The reason Americans don't like metric measurements is that the USA has
been pussyfooting forever with a mixed system: different units for
different applications. It's as if your road signs used kilometres for
distances and mph for speed limits, a combination designed to drive
anyone crazy. Faced with that, most people will stubbornly stick with
the old and familiar.

Australia went for a "rapid change" approach, with things like labelling
laws that forced everyone to think in metric pretty much immediately. As
a result, the transition went fairly smoothly, and even those of us who
remember the old units don't think in them any more.

If you're teaching a cat to swim, you don't lower it into the water a
millimetre at a time.

[Dingbat]

On Thursday, June 9, 2016 at 1:20:38 PM UTC+5:30, Lothar Frings wrote:
> <http://retailcomic.com/comics/june-8-2016/>
>
> "That's highway robbery! A 2-liter bottle
> doesn't cost that much! What makes them
> think they can get away with charging so much
> for a measly 20 ounces of sugar water?"
>
> Fuel is sold by the gallon in the US,
> I think. But in this comic strip, the
> metric system (liter) is even mixed
> with the $OTHER_SYSTEM that uses ounces.
>

> Are liters now a common unit
> of measurement in the USA?

I don't know whether the first 2 liter/ litre bottle was designed specifically for the USA; the international market must have figured into the equation. Nevertheless, it was a convenient size even for the US because it was almost exactly 10 times of a 6.5 oz Coke bottle against which John Sculley was trying to mount a challenge. He decided to make a size that people would drink as a family and thereby get used to Pepsi to the point of favoring it when they drank a soft drink on their own, and to make the bottle unbreakable (with Du Pont's help) so that stores would want to stock it. He dropped it on the floor in sight of Sam Walton who was impressed that it didn't break and make a mess.

[RH Draney]

On 6/9/2016 8:33 PM, Peter Moylan wrote:
>
> The one figure that still sticks in my mind is "one hundred degrees
> means mid-summer".

It was 104 here today, but then things have cooled down considerably
since last week....r

[RH Draney]

On 6/9/2016 5:57 PM, j...@mdfs.net wrote:
> Joe Fineman wrote:
>> Right. In SI, the kelvin (lowercase when spelled out; the abbreviation
>> is K) ...
>
> K isn't the abbreviation for kelvin, it's the symbol for kelvin.

It's also the symbol for potassium, for black, for strike-out, for one
thousand, for one thousand twenty-four, for lysine, for phylloquinone,
for permeability, for a tanker aircraft, for the federal reserve bank of
Dallas, and for Daniel McGrath's nurse at the Broome Developmental
Center....r

[James Hogg]

Peter Moylan wrote:
> Normal body temperature was 97, or something
> like that (I've forgotten the precise figure)

Hey, 98.6.

(STS warning)

--
James

[Mark Brader]

Peter Moylan:

> Strictly speaking, Fahrenheit is also a centigrade (one hundred steps)
> scale, because it is based on the idea that 0 is the lowest achievable
> temperature and 100 is the temperature of the human body.

That's disputed. Fahrenheit himself gave out different information at
different times, perhaps because he considered his methods trade secrets.
--
Mark Brader | "One of the lessons of history is that nothing
Toronto | is often a good thing to do and always a clever
m...@vex.net | thing to say." -- Will Durant

[charles]

In article <njdcdk$8ga$1...@dont-email.me>,

Peter Moylan <pe...@pmoylan.org.invalid> wrote:
> On 2016-Jun-10 12:54, Robert Bannister wrote:
> > On 9/06/2016 4:42 PM, Harrison Hill wrote:
> >
> >>> Weather is /always/ measured in Fahrenheit. Centigrade is an invention
> >>> of the devil. Kelvins are fine, though. I can live with Kelvins.
> >
> > I thought "Centigrade" was an English invention. The rest of the world,
> > apart from of course the USA, uses Celsius. Even during the first 31
> > years of my life which were spent in England, I never did understand
> > that Fahrenheit nonsense: 32°, 98°, 212° - is this a joke?

> It's not really that bad. Admittedly the Fahrenheit scale feels
> unsuitable for human use when you haven't used it for a while, but I
> recall it making sense when I was a child.

> The one figure that still sticks in my mind is "one hundred degrees
> means mid-summer". Even then, though, the really important numbers
> weren't as round as that. Normal body temperature was 97, or something
> like that (I've forgotten the precise figure),

98.4°F - it was intended (by Mr Farenheit) to be 100°, but something went
wrong



> --

--
from KT24 in Surrey, England

[Richard Heathfield]

On 10/06/16 01:50, j...@mdfs.net wrote:
> Harrison Hill wrote:
>> In Britain ...
>> Hot weather we measure in Fahrenheit.
>
> No we don't.

Some of us do.

> It was a sweltering 23 degrees today.

I'll fetch some salt for the path, and an axe for the water-butt.

--
Richard Heathfield
Email: rjh at cpax dot org dot uk
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
Sig line 4 vacant - apply within

[Dingbat]

On Friday, June 10, 2016 at 8:24:46 AM UTC+5:30, Robert Bannister wrote:
> On 9/06/2016 4:42 PM, Harrison Hill wrote:
>
> >> Weather is /always/ measured in Fahrenheit. Centigrade is an invention
> >> of the devil. Kelvins are fine, though. I can live with Kelvins.
>
> I thought "Centigrade" was an English invention. The rest of the world,
> apart from of course the USA, uses Celsius. Even during the first 31
> years of my life which were spent in England, I never did understand
> that Fahrenheit nonsense: 32°, 98°, 212° - is this a joke?

The prototype for the Farenheit scale had 30, 90 for the freezing point of water and human body temperature since it was modified from the Reaumer scale on which these are 7.5 and 22.5 degrees.

In the redesigned Farenheit scale, these became 32 & 96 degrees. Regardless of what others say, I consider it unlikely that body temperature turning out to be 98.4, not 96, is the result of an error in calibrating the scale.

It seems more likely that there was a further redesign to make the difference between boiling point of water and the freezing point a multiple of 60. 212-32 is a multiple of 60.

[Richard Heathfield]

On 10/06/16 04:05, Robert Bannister wrote:
> On 9/06/2016 11:49 PM, charles wrote:
>> In article <njc2fs$sf7$1...@news.albasani.net>, Katy Jennison
>> <ka...@spamtrap.kjennison.com> wrote:

<snip>

>>> But if I went outside and you asked me the
>>> temperature, I could instantly give you an approximation in F, whereas
>>> I'd have to stop and think about C.
>>
>> How about -40°?
>>
>
> Not on scale.

Charles's point is, of course, that -40 * 9 / 5 + 32 = -40

[Cheryl]

I found the Fahrenheit system perfectly sensible during my early years,
even after I was introduced to the Celsius one in school. Once I started
hearing the Celsius one on weather reports, that one became natural and
the other I have to think about unless it's something really common - I
still remember 60-70 as room temperature.

There is one exception - recipes and ovens are still F, well, mostly,
and on the rare occasions I bake or roast, I use F.

--
Cheryl

---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

[Cheryl]

I don't find that but I don't watch much US media, at least not the kind
that discusses temperature. When I got my new phone, the weather app
that came with it was in F, could set to C, but when I clicked on it for
more details, tended to revert to F. It irritated me enough that I
switched back to my old habit of firing up a browser and checking
Environment Canada's forecast.

[Cheryl]

It would be here in Newfoundland at this time of year. It's 5C now and
expected to go up to 10C.

June is notorious for cold, wet weather. We call it caplin weather,
although it's a bit unfair to blame the caplin, since all they do is spawn.

[charles]

In article <njdueh$o3b$1...@dont-email.me>,

Richard Heathfield <r...@cpax.org.uk> wrote:
> On 10/06/16 04:05, Robert Bannister wrote:
> > On 9/06/2016 11:49 PM, charles wrote:
> >> In article <njc2fs$sf7$1...@news.albasani.net>, Katy Jennison
> >> <ka...@spamtrap.kjennison.com> wrote:
> <snip>
> >>> But if I went outside and you asked me the
> >>> temperature, I could instantly give you an approximation in F, whereas
> >>> I'd have to stop and think about C.
> >>
> >> How about -40°?
> >>
> >
> > Not on scale.

> Charles's point is, of course, that -40 * 9 / 5 + 32 = -40

correct.

[Adam Funk]

On 2016-06-09, RH Draney wrote:

> On 6/9/2016 9:33 AM, Whiskers wrote:
>>
>> The cartoon seems to involve a "20 oz" can of pop which costs more than
>> a (much larger) 2 litre bottle of similar stuff presumably from a shop
>> of some sort. Both protagonists seem to be comfortable using both
>> ounces and litres as measures of volume, and to know that 20 oz is a
>> smaller quantity than 2 litres.
>
> Wait until you get around to buying a car tire...there are three numbers
> in the description of the size: one in millimeters, another in inches,
> and the third a unitless ratio....r

coverage viewed from the center in steradians...


--
Avoid socks. They are the fatal give-away of a phony
nonconformist. --- Elissa Jane Karg

[Adam Funk]

On 2016-06-10, Garrett Wollman wrote:

> Many state labeling laws require the use of US customary units, but
> these have since the 19th century been defined in terms of the metric
> base units. One foot is 0.3048 m, exactly, and all the other units of
> length, area, and volume follow according to their traditional
> formulation relative to the inch or foot.[1] A pound (mass) is defined
> to be about 0.454 kg (the actual definition is more precise), and so
> on for all the derived units.

The standard pin spacing on ICs is 2.54 mm.


--
The history of the world is the history of a privileged few.
--- Henry Miller

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Peter Moylan skrev:

> I'm the opposite. I have the feel of what Celsius temperatures
> mean, and that's partly because "weather" temperatures come in
> nice round numbers:
> 0 freezing
> 10 cold
> 20 comfortable; not too cold
> 25 very comfortable
> 30 warm
> 40 hot

Ditto, but I don't think that round numbers play a part. I'm just
used to Celsius, and I have no idea about Fahrenheit except that
I remember that 104 蚌 is a high body temperature. I remember
that because of a story of a little boy lying sick in bed
thinking that he was about to die because he knew that the normal
body temperature is 37 (蚓).

--
Bertel, Kolt, Denmark

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Peter Moylan skrev:

> Australia went for a "rapid change" approach, with things like labelling
> laws that forced everyone to think in metric pretty much immediately. As
> a result, the transition went fairly smoothly, and even those of us who
> remember the old units don't think in them any more.

> If you're teaching a cat to swim, you don't lower it into the water a
> millimetre at a time.

That is a bad comparison. Force children into the water and they
develop a lifelong fright of water. Let them get used to it in
their own time, and they learn to love it.

But I agree that such changes as unit changes work best with a
sudden switch - although it would have been kind of funny to
watch if Sweden had decided to move to right-traffic in small
steps.

--
Bertel, Kolt, Denmark

[Cheryl]

There was, supposedly, a country (not Sweden, I think) that switched
from left to right hand traffic suddenly and with little publicity. The
results were as expected.

I think you need a combination of information and encouragement with
fairly rapid change. Otherwise, you can get bogged down in eternal
debate and people never really becoming used to one system or the other.

--
Cheryl

[Peter Young]

On 10 Jun 2016 Cheryl <cper...@med.mun.ca> wrote:

[snip]

> There was, supposedly, a country (not Sweden, I think) that switched
> from left to right hand traffic suddenly and with little publicity. The
> results were as expected.

Ethiopia?

> I think you need a combination of information and encouragement with
> fairly rapid change. Otherwise, you can get bogged down in eternal
> debate and people never really becoming used to one system or the other.

Peter.

--
Peter Young, (BrE, RP), Consultant Anaesthetist, 1975-2004.
(US equivalent: Certified Anesthesiologist) (AUE Os)
Cheltenham and Gloucester, UK. Now happily retired.
http://pnyoung.orpheusweb.co.uk

[Lothar Frings]

Cheryl wrote:

> On 2016-06-10 8:07 AM, Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:

> > But I agree that such changes as unit changes work best with a
> > sudden switch - although it would have been kind of funny to
> > watch if Sweden had decided to move to right-traffic in small
> > steps.
> >
> There was, supposedly, a country (not Sweden, I think) that switched
> from left to right hand traffic suddenly and with little publicity. The
> results were as expected.

Did they test the concept by switching to right-hand
traffic for trucks only, first?

>
> I think you need a combination of information and encouragement with
> fairly rapid change. Otherwise, you can get bogged down in eternal
> debate and people never really becoming used to one system or the other.

Or you occasionally crash a Mars lander
because different software teams use different units.

[Cheryl]

On 2016-06-10 8:19 AM, Peter Young wrote:
> On 10 Jun 2016 Cheryl <cper...@med.mun.ca> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>> There was, supposedly, a country (not Sweden, I think) that switched
>> from left to right hand traffic suddenly and with little publicity. The
>> results were as expected.
>
> Ethiopia?

It was in Africa. It might have been Ethiopia.


--
Cheryl

[Cheryl]

Or a modern jet turns into a glider....

After many (but not quite all) things in Canada switched to metric, I
met young people who either were infants, or not yet born, when the
change occurred who sometimes lamented the passing of the old system.
They were merely quoting their parents, since any conversation quickly
revealed that they knew almost nothing of the older system, and the
types of arithmetic calculations I had had to learn in school in order
to use it.

Educational efforts about a change sometimes have unexpected results. An
attempt to make metric units more familiar by advertising that a litre
was about the same as a quart etc. led my grandmother to joke that the
metric system must be a very inaccurate one since all the units were
only about the same as something else.

--
Cheryl

[Lothar Frings]

Cheryl wrote:

> After many (but not quite all) things in Canada switched to metric, I
> met young people who either were infants, or not yet born, when the
> change occurred who sometimes lamented the passing of the old system.
> They were merely quoting their parents, since any conversation quickly
> revealed that they knew almost nothing of the older system, and the
> types of arithmetic calculations I had had to learn in school in order
> to use it.

At the university I had that problems with
different instruments displaying different
units. Especially pressure units - we used
mmHg, bar, atmospheres and PSI (pounds
per square inch). Remembering a few factors helps.

It is worse with fuel consumption: Americans
do it in "miles per gallon" (so more is better),
Germans in "liters per 100 km" (so less is better).

[Peter Young]

On 10 Jun 2016 Cheryl <cper...@med.mun.ca> wrote:

> On 2016-06-10 8:19 AM, Peter Young wrote:
>> On 10 Jun 2016 Cheryl <cper...@med.mun.ca> wrote:
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>>> There was, supposedly, a country (not Sweden, I think) that switched
>>> from left to right hand traffic suddenly and with little publicity. The
>>> results were as expected.
>>
>> Ethiopia?

> It was in Africa. It might have been Ethiopia.

I think Ethiopia was the only African country which made the switch.
Mind you, the standard of driving there was even worse when I visited
last November than when I worked there in 1965-68. I wouldn't be at
all surprised if they did do the switch without a lot of publicity.

Remember the story about the Spaniard who visited Africa, and wondered
why the local language didn't have a word similar to the Spanish
manana? There are, of course, a lot of similar words, but none of them
have quite the same overtones of urgency.

[Richard Heathfield]

On 10/06/16 12:03, Cheryl wrote:

<snip>

> Educational efforts about a change sometimes have unexpected results. An
> attempt to make metric units more familiar by advertising that a litre
> was about the same as a quart etc. led my grandmother to joke that the
> metric system must be a very inaccurate one since all the units were
> only about the same as something else.

I suspect that this group has more than its fair share of insatiable
readers. Selectivity is a nice-to-have, but the amount of reading
material available at the breakfast table can at times be limited. *But*
-- in an emergency, there's always the cereal packet!

In the late 1960s or early 1970s, at a time when Kellogg's Cornflakes
was le petit déjeuner du jour in my childhood home, Kellogg's ran a
series of metrication awareness articles on their cereal packets. Space
was at a premium, of course. Half of one of the narrow sides was
allocated for this purpose, and they used a large, friendly, colourful
font, so they really didn't have room to say very much. In fact, they
just had room for two lines of verse. So some of the packets had
metrication panels that read:

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

Others read:

"A metre measures three foot three;
It's longer than a yard, you see."

And still others read:

"Two and a quarter pounds of jam
Weigh about a kilogram."

From a units conversion perspective
It was /extraordinarily/ effective.

Forty years on, I still find
I can bring these rhymes to mind.

<brrrr>

Not those last two.

Anyway, it worked. The first one is very accurate (it's less than a
centipint out), the second isn't bad (it's right to within about 0.4
inches), and the third will do ('two and a fifth' wouldn't have scanned,
so it would have been harder to learn). The rhymes have served me well
over the past four decades in the process of converting back and forth
between the two systems.

They were rather less successful at persuading me that the metric system
was a good idea -- I still prefer the real units (except, admittedly,
when I'm mucking about with science). But what can you expect from half
a side-panel?

[spuorg...@gowanhill.com]

On Friday, 10 June 2016 13:14:03 UTC+1, Richard Heathfield wrote:
> "A litre of water's
> A pint and three quarters."
>

> "Two and a quarter pounds of jam
> Weigh about a kilogram."

I was taught those same rhymes at school at that time.

Owain

[Adam Funk]

On 2016-06-10, Cheryl wrote:

> Educational efforts about a change sometimes have unexpected results. An
> attempt to make metric units more familiar by advertising that a litre
> was about the same as a quart etc. led my grandmother to joke that the
> metric system must be a very inaccurate one since all the units were
> only about the same as something else.

Excellent!


--
Unit tests are like the boy who cried wolf.

[Mike Barnes]

Robert Bannister wrote:
> On 9/06/2016 4:42 PM, Harrison Hill wrote:
>
>>> Weather is /always/ measured in Fahrenheit. Centigrade is an invention
>>> of the devil. Kelvins are fine, though. I can live with Kelvins.
>
> I thought "Centigrade" was an English invention. The rest of the world,
> apart from of course the USA, uses Celsius. Even during the first 31
> years of my life which were spent in England, I never did understand
> that Fahrenheit nonsense: 32°, 98°, 212° - is this a joke?

No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit

--
Mike Barnes
Cheshire, England

[Adam Funk]

The two ways of expressing that need to have opposite names, like
conducivity & resistivity; the German method is really "fuel
consumption", but I'm struggling to come up with an inverse.


--
Classical Greek lent itself to the promulgation of a rich culture,
indeed, to Western civilization. Computer languages bring us
doorbells that chime with thirty-two tunes, alt.sex.bestiality, and
Tetris clones. (Stoll 1995)

[CDB]

On 10/06/2016 12:37 AM, RH Draney wrote:
> j...@mdfs.net wrote:
>> Joe Fineman wrote:

>>> Right. In SI, the kelvin (lowercase when spelled out; the
>>> abbreviation is K) ...

>> K isn't the abbreviation for kelvin, it's the symbol for kelvin.

> It's also the symbol for potassium, for black, for strike-out, for
> one thousand, for one thousand twenty-four, for lysine, for
> phylloquinone, for permeability, for a tanker aircraft, for the
> federal reserve bank of Dallas, and for Daniel McGrath's nurse at the
> Broome Developmental Center....r

And Tommy Lee Jones, unless that's covered under "black".

[Anton Shepelev]

Adam Funk:

> The two ways of expressing that need to have oppo-

> site names, like conducivity & resistivity; the
> German method is really "fuel consumption", but
> I'm struggling to come up with an inverse.

Fuel efficiency?

--
() ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail
/\ http://preview.tinyurl.com/qcy6mjc [archived]

[Garrett Wollman]

In article <aarq2dx...@news.ducksburg.com>,

Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
>On 2016-06-10, Lothar Frings wrote:

>> It is worse with fuel consumption: Americans
>> do it in "miles per gallon" (so more is better),
>> Germans in "liters per 100 km" (so less is better).
>
>The two ways of expressing that need to have opposite names, like
>conducivity & resistivity; the German method is really "fuel
>consumption", but I'm struggling to come up with an inverse.

"Fuel economy" is the official phrase.

-GAWollman

--
Garrett A. Wollman | What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft
wol...@bimajority.org| repeated, than the story of a large research program
Opinions not shared by| that impaled itself upon a false central assumption
my employers. | accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993

[Lothar Frings]

RH Draney wrote:

> On 6/9/2016 5:57 PM, j...@mdfs.net wrote:
> > Joe Fineman wrote:
> >> Right. In SI, the kelvin (lowercase when spelled out; the abbreviation
> >> is K) ...
> >
> > K isn't the abbreviation for kelvin, it's the symbol for kelvin.
>
> It's also the symbol for potassium, for black, for strike-out, for one
> thousand, for one thousand twenty-four,

"k" is the symbol for 1,000. "K" is for 1,024.

[Charles Bishop]

In article <EI6dnXb9aMRaWcTK...@giganews.com>,
m...@vex.net (Mark Brader) wrote:

> Lothar Frings asks about:
> > > <http://retailcomic.com/comics/june-8-2016/>
>
> Charles Bishop explains correctly:
> > Soda is commonly sold in 2 liter bottles as an "economy" size. It is
> > also sold in other, smaller sizes, usually measured in fluid ozs, but
> > also with the metric unit on the container as well.
> >
> > In the comic, they have raised the price on sodas in a vending machine,
> > in apparently 20 oz bottles. The customer is complaining that elsewhere,
> > such as in a supermarket, he can buy a 2 liter bottle for less than they
> > are charging for the soda in the machine.
> >
> > He forgets that the 20 oz bottle in right there, but he would have to
> > travel to get the cheaper 2 litre bottle.
>
> Also, in most stores the 2 L bottle would be stored on an open shelf,
> whereas the 20 fl.oz. bottle from the vending machine would already be
> refrigerated and therefore ready to drink from.

I'm trying to remember if, in convenience stores, they keep some 2 litre
bottles chilled, and I don't think they do, but it's possible. However a
convenience store price might be comparable to a vending machine one,
where a supermarket price would be likely to be as mentioned in the
comic strip.
>
> Charles continues:
> > We don't know what money he was intending to use to pay for the soda,
> > but unless he had exact change he would have had enough to pay for the
> > soda without borrowing the $0.25. However, knowing that it was $1.50
> > before, he may just have brought that amount with him to the soda machine.
>
> No, he knew what it was before, and it was less than $1.50.

I wasn't clear then. We don't know if he had two $1 bills to pay for the
soda, or exact change. If it wasn't exact change, or if he had more
change than the new cost of the soda from the machine he wouldn't have
had to borrow the additional $0.25 coin.

A very small nit to pick and I'm sorry now I mentioned it.

--
charles

[Adam Funk]

On 2016-06-10, Garrett Wollman wrote:

> In article <aarq2dx...@news.ducksburg.com>,
> Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
>>On 2016-06-10, Lothar Frings wrote:
>
>>> It is worse with fuel consumption: Americans
>>> do it in "miles per gallon" (so more is better),
>>> Germans in "liters per 100 km" (so less is better).
>>
>>The two ways of expressing that need to have opposite names, like
>>conducivity & resistivity; the German method is really "fuel
>>consumption", but I'm struggling to come up with an inverse.
>
> "Fuel economy" is the official phrase.

Yabbut what I'm looking for is something that conveys distance per
unit of fuel ("fuel consumption" = fuel consumed per unit of
distance).


--
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not
preserved, except in memory. LLAP. --- Leonard Nimoy

[David Kleinecke]

People laugh at the Y2K scare as though it were a hoax. Nothing bad,
perhaps even nothing notable, happened on Jan 1, 2000. I, for one,
consider it a great success. We screamed and hollered enough that people
heard us and fixed things. For once, things went right.

A real case where no news was good news.

Even if sadly misjudged.

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Adam Funk skrev:

> Yabbut what I'm looking for is something that conveys distance per
> unit of fuel ("fuel consumption" = fuel consumed per unit of
> distance).

Isn't i generally called "mileage"?

--
Bertel, Kolt, Denmark

[Richard Heathfield]

On 10/06/16 18:10, David Kleinecke wrote:
<snip>

> People laugh at the Y2K scare as though it were a hoax. Nothing bad,
> perhaps even nothing notable, happened on Jan 1, 2000. I, for one,
> consider it a great success. We screamed and hollered enough that people
> heard us and fixed things. For once, things went right.

When I started programming for a living (as opposed to a hobby), it
didn't occur to me to use anything other than the full date whenever I
had control over that decision. Very often, though, I had to ensure that
my code fitted in with existing code that used two-digit years. I always
found that rather frustrating. I anticipated that it would lead to
problems, but there wasn't much I could do about it. Then, in about
1995(?), the problem started to become known to the general public, and
concerns were raised. This pushed the industry into addressing the
issue. I served on the Y2K front line for fifteen months as a
contractor, fixing the code at a UK bank. And yes, there were a fair few
problems. And yes, we found them. And yes, we fixed them.

I'd better not tell you which bank, though, because we weren't /allowed/
to fix the problem properly. Instead, we had to use a technique known as
a 'sliding century window'. A century window is a period of 100 years
/from a given year/ (e.g. 1930), such that any two-digit year is unique
within that period: 30-99 is obviously 19xx, and 00 to 29 is obviously
20xx. A sliding century window allows you to move the base year onwards
once each year, so as to maintain the bodge for longer.

But yes, it was a real problem, and yes, we worked damn hard on it, and
yes, we fixed it, and yes, we stopped anything too terrible from
happening. And what thanks did we get? Well, okay, we got paid rather
well. But we /earned/ it. As you rightly say, Y2K was not a hoax. It was
a stupid mistake that got (mostly) fixed.

> A real case where no news was good news.
>
> Even if sadly misjudged.

I cried all the way to the bank.

[Pierre Jelenc]

In article <druofj...@mid.individual.net>,

Robert Bannister <rob...@clubtelco.com> wrote:
>On 9/06/2016 4:42 PM, Harrison Hill wrote:
>
>>> Weather is /always/ measured in Fahrenheit. Centigrade is an invention
>>> of the devil. Kelvins are fine, though. I can live with Kelvins.
>
>I thought "Centigrade" was an English invention. The rest of the world,
>apart from of course the USA, uses Celsius. Even during the first 31
>years of my life which were spent in England, I never did understand
>that Fahrenheit nonsense: 32°, 98°, 212° - is this a joke?

Celsius and Kelvin are both centigrade: there are 100 degrees between the
freezing and boiling points of water.

Pierre
--
Pierre Jelenc
The Gigometer www.gigometer.com
The NYC Beer Guide www.nycbeer.org

[Charles Bishop]

In article <29073b72-f3b7-46f4...@googlegroups.com>,

I heard much the same from several programmers, some of whom were called
back to service, in TONGs.

>
> A real case where no news was good news.
>
> Even if sadly misjudged.

Are there any other dates coming up?

--
chrles

[Charles Bishop]

In article <njetne$774$1...@dont-email.me>,

Another county heard from. Thanks to you and the others.


[snip persiflage]

--
charles, I'd rather read my own

[Peter Duncanson [BrE]]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2016 18:34:37 +0100, Richard Heathfield <r...@cpax.org.uk>
wrote:

>On 10/06/16 18:10, David Kleinecke wrote:
><snip>
>
>> People laugh at the Y2K scare as though it were a hoax. Nothing bad,
>> perhaps even nothing notable, happened on Jan 1, 2000. I, for one,
>> consider it a great success. We screamed and hollered enough that people
>> heard us and fixed things. For once, things went right.
>
>When I started programming for a living (as opposed to a hobby), it
>didn't occur to me to use anything other than the full date whenever I
>had control over that decision. Very often, though, I had to ensure that
>my code fitted in with existing code that used two-digit years. I always
>found that rather frustrating. I anticipated that it would lead to
>problems, but there wasn't much I could do about it. Then, in about
>1995(?), the problem started to become known to the general public, and
>concerns were raised. This pushed the industry into addressing the
>issue. I served on the Y2K front line for fifteen months as a
>contractor, fixing the code at a UK bank. And yes, there were a fair few
>problems. And yes, we found them. And yes, we fixed them.
>
>I'd better not tell you which bank, though, because we weren't /allowed/
>to fix the problem properly. Instead, we had to use a technique known as
>a 'sliding century window'. A century window is a period of 100 years
>/from a given year/ (e.g. 1930), such that any two-digit year is unique
>within that period: 30-99 is obviously 19xx, and 00 to 29 is obviously
>20xx. A sliding century window allows you to move the base year onwards
>once each year, so as to maintain the bodge for longer.
>

Some Microsoft applications used a similar window approach.

>But yes, it was a real problem, and yes, we worked damn hard on it, and
>yes, we fixed it, and yes, we stopped anything too terrible from
>happening. And what thanks did we get? Well, okay, we got paid rather
>well. But we /earned/ it. As you rightly say, Y2K was not a hoax. It was
>a stupid mistake that got (mostly) fixed.
>

The mistake was in continuing with standards that had been set decades
previously.

The use of abbreviated dates was orginally totally justified by the cost
of internal memory and the cost and slowness of storage on tape and
early discs.

Everything was abbreviated if it could be.

>> A real case where no news was good news.
>>
>> Even if sadly misjudged.
>
>I cried all the way to the bank.

--

Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)

[Richard Heathfield]

[Caution: techie alert!]

On 10/06/16 21:29, Peter Duncanson [BrE] wrote:

<snip>

> The use of abbreviated dates was orginally totally justified by the cost
> of internal memory and the cost and slowness of storage on tape and
> early discs.

I disagree. In fact, the /full/ date could have been stored in
two-thirds of the storage it took to hold a partial date.

It takes six bytes to store "100616" (today's date in DDMMYY format).

The trick is to use the right storage format.

When you capture a date from the user, you ask them for DDMMYYYY (in
whatever order seems fitting for your geographical area). Then you
perform the following calculation (in whatever language floats your boat):

long tojul(int yp, int mp, int dp)
{
long a=(14-mp)/12,y=yp+4800-a,m=mp+12*a-3,
jdn=dp+(153*m+2)/5+365*y+y/4-y/100+y/400-32045;
return jdn;
}

For today's date, that gives you a result of 2457550, which is easily
representable in 32 bits (four octets rather than six). And /that/ is
what you should store in the database, saving *thousands* of <insert
local currency unit here>.

This is an astoundingly convenient form in which to store dates. Want to
know how many days apart two dates are? No fussing with leap years and
30- and 31-day months. Just do: diff = LaterDate - EarlierDate and
you're done.

Want to know what day of the week a date falls on? Easy. Divide by
seven, ignore the result, and look at the remainder. 0 is Monday, 1 is
Tuesday, etc.

Want the date 100 days after this date? Easy, just add 100.

If you want to know, say, the third Thursday of the month, it's slightly
less obvious but still a darn sight easier than manipulating textual
date representations.

This is /so/ much more convenient for computation, and as a bonus it
takes two bytes less to store.

The only time you need to turn it back again is when you're writing
output (either to the screen or to a file), at which point you just do this:

void fromjul(int *yp, int *mp, int *dp, long jdn)
{
long y=4716,j=1401,m=2,n=12,r=4,p=1461,v=3,u=5,s=153,
w=2,b=274277,c=-38,f=jdn+j+(((4*jdn+b)/146097)*3)/4+c,
e=r*f+v,g=(e%p)/r,h=u*g+w;
*dp=(h%s)/u+1;
*mp=((h/s+m)%n)+1;
*yp=e/p-y+(n+m-*mp)/n;
}

and of course at this point you can show them the full four-digit year
if you wish.

(I should stress that I don't normally write C that densely!)

So this whole thing about saving storage is just not true. If they'd
really wanted to save storage in the 1950s, they'd have used Julian
dates from the very outset.

One might object that it's obvious with hindsight, but that at the time
they hadn't yet developed this algorithm... except that they /had/ - the
Smithsonian was using Julian Dates in 1957, and the International
Astronomical Union was using them in 1955.

> Everything was abbreviated if it could be.

But not enough. :-)

[Jerry Friedman]

On 6/9/16 9:31 PM, bill van wrote:
> In article <1335978d5...@pnyoung.ormail.co.uk>,
> Peter Young <pny...@ormail.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> On 9 Jun 2016 Mallocy <nu...@example.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On 2016-06-09, HVS <off...@REMOVETHISwhhvs.co.uk> wrote:
>>>> On 09 Jun 2016, Harrison Hill wrote
>>>>
>>>>> On Thursday, 9 June 2016 08:50:38 UTC+1, Lothar Frings wrote:
>>>>>> <http://retailcomic.com/comics/june-8-2016/>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> "That's highway robbery! A 2-liter bottle
>>>>>> doesn't cost that much! What makes them
>>>>>> think they can get away with charging so much
>>>>>> for a measly 20 ounces of sugar water?"
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Fuel is sold by the gallon in the US,
>>>>>> I think. But in this comic strip, the
>>>>>> metric system (liter) is even mixed
>>>>>> with the $OTHER_SYSTEM that uses ounces.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Are liters now a common unit
>>>>>> of measurement in the USA?
>>>>>
>>>>> In Britain we measure distance in miles, yards (which we know to be
>>>>> metres), feet, centimetres, millimetres. Speed is always in "mph".
>>>>
>>>> Measurements in architecture and construction have been metric for quite
>>>> some time now, although the industry only uses metres or millimetres.
>>>>
>>>> Centimetres are a consumer retail measurement, but aren't used in the
>>>> industry: if you asked a builder to measure a door that was sold at the
>>>> local DIY as "72 cm", I'd be utterley amazed if he said anything other than
>>>> "720 mil".
>>>>>
>>>>> Liquids are measured in litres. The milk in our fridge is 2.27
>>>>> litres aka four pints :)
>>>>>
>>>>> Hot weather we measure in Fahrenheit. Cold weather we measure in
>>>>> Centigrade.
>>>>
>>>> Hmmm..... Surely I can't be the only person in England to have converted
>>>> many moons ago to degrees C for both cold and hot weather?
>>
>>> No: far from it! Amusingly, BBC often uses 'centigrade'.
>>
>> BBC Radio usually uses Celsius, and not degree Celsius, and I've
>> always understood the former to be correct.
>>
> Local television weather people here keep telling us the temperatures
> are going to be hotter or colder. I talk back and tell them that the
> temperatures will be higher or lower, but it's only the weather that
> will be hoter or colder. They do not listen.

I've noticed that about people.

--
Jerry Friedman
"No Trump" bridge-themed political shirts: cafepress.com/jerrysdesigns
Bumper stickers ditto: cafepress/jerrysstickers

[Jerry Friedman]

On 6/10/16 3:20 AM, Cheryl wrote:
> On 2016-06-10 1:14 AM, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>> On Thursday, June 9, 2016 at 8:50:41 PM UTC-4, j...@mdfs.net wrote:
>>> Harrison Hill wrote:
>>
>>>> In Britain ...

>>>> Hot weather we measure in Fahrenheit.
>>>

>>> No we don't. It was a sweltering 23 degrees today.
>>
>> 73 F is "sweltering"?? Where are you??
>>
> It would be here in Newfoundland at this time of year. It's 5C now and
> expected to go up to 10C.
>
> June is notorious for cold, wet weather. We call it caplin weather,
> although it's a bit unfair to blame the caplin, since all they do is spawn.

Some people say that about other, with a good deal of blame suggested.

By the way, "capelin" is much more common than "caplin" at Google Books.
I thought they were both pronounced "bait".

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=caplin%2Ccapelin&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccaplin%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccapelin%3B%2Cc0

http://tinyurl.com/hnb4oh3

[RH Draney]

On 6/10/2016 1:38 AM, Dingbat wrote:
>
> It seems more likely that there was a further redesign to make the difference between boiling point of water and the freezing point a multiple of 60. 212-32 is a multiple of 60.

In particular, there are 180 degrees between freezing and boiling
because there are 180 degrees between north and south....r

[RH Draney]

Depends what you're measuring..."K" is the symbol for one thousand when
you're talking about dollars....r

[RH Draney]

On 6/10/2016 1:40 AM, Richard Heathfield wrote:
> On 10/06/16 04:05, Robert Bannister wrote:
>> On 9/06/2016 11:49 PM, charles wrote:
>>> In article <njc2fs$sf7$1...@news.albasani.net>, Katy Jennison
>>> <ka...@spamtrap.kjennison.com> wrote:
> <snip>
>>>> But if I went outside and you asked me the
>>>> temperature, I could instantly give you an approximation in F, whereas
>>>> I'd have to stop and think about C.
>>>
>>> How about -40°?
>>>
>>
>> Not on scale.
>
> Charles's point is, of course, that -40 * 9 / 5 + 32 = -40

And Robert's is that the mercury freezes before it ever gets that cold....r

[RH Draney]

On 6/10/2016 2:18 AM, Cheryl wrote:

> When I got my new phone, the weather app
> that came with it was in F, could set to C, but when I clicked on it for
> more details, tended to revert to F. It irritated me enough that I
> switched back to my old habit of firing up a browser and checking
> Environment Canada's forecast.

I had a similar problem with my first GPS...assuming you weren't using
metric units, long distances were always in miles, but you could select
either feet or yards for shorter ones...yards makes sense when you're
looking for a nearby freeway exit, but for elevations you want to go
with feet....r