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2002-02-21
How is he able to know the distances to these places he
mentions at the end of his posting in miles, unless his car odometer is not
Canadian. If he had a kilometre odometer, he would have a hard time
comprehending miles. So, ask this guy how he is able to know all
these "miles" if everything is signed in kilometres and the maps are metric and
if he had a kilometre odometer, does he measure in metric and convert to
miles?
John
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, 2002-02-21 23:27
Subject: [USMA:18336] Comments from a
friend in Toronto
This is a friend from another list entirely that I
correspond with. He was born in the USA but now lives in Toronto as a
Canadian citizen.
The subject was passenger trains, and at the end of a
post he wrote:
For US readers other than Carleton, 170 km/h is about
105 mph.
And I replied:
Thank you ... it's a long and hard
battle down here.
cm
And he wrote back (note comment in bold if
you can see that):
I guess one of the lesser disappointments of the current US
president
is that if Gore had won, there might have been some chance of
nudging
the US back toward modern measures.
Actually the dirty
truth is that I am still struggling to make myself
think metric in
everyday life. I have no objection whatever to the units
(I studied
physics for a while before I got sucked into systems programming,
so I
certainly ought to know what a meter is); but I am so accustomed
to
thinking in inches and feet and miles when looking at the real world
that
it is hard to adapt. I would probably do better if English
units had
died out entirely up here; I am reasonably accustomed to
thinking about
the weather in Celsius now, for example, and it helped a
lot that forecasts
up here just don't use Fahrenheit any more. But
a couple of nights ago
when I had supper at the Royal York with [a fellow
from the UK], and he asked me
how far away I lived, I had to do an
explicit conversion in my head:
about an hour's walk is about four miles
is about six kilometers.
A couple of years ago I hoped my bicycle
would help: my old cycle `computer'
(digital speedometer/odometer/clock)
died, and the one I bought to replace
it has the notion that 24-hour
clocks and metric distance are tied firmly
together. Since I insist
on using 24-hour time, obviously I had no choice
but to go metric for
distances, and given the fait accomplit it was obviously
correct
anyway. Alas, I haven't cycled as much since then, so although
I
can tell you that it's about 115km from Essex Junction VT to Rutland
by
the route I used on my only recent long-distance tour, I still think
of it
as about 5 miles to the credit union and about 11 miles to York
University
and so on. The cure for that is obvious, but will take
time to sink in.
--------
.. the real world of real
peole out there.
Carleton
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