Unfortunately, that is not really a surprise. To change the subject slightly, I am currently attending graduate school in Ottawa (I come here from Oregon) and was also surprised to learn that basically all weights at my university's fitness room are imperial. There is a scale in the men's locker room that has kg in addition to pounds. Most people up here still use pounds to describe body weight.
Prosper! ~Cole K. ----- Original Message ----- From: "ezra steinberg" <[email protected]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2010 2:47:55 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: [USMA:46928] Disappointing science program ... and it's Canadian!!! Just watched an otherwise terrific show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) thanks to cable TV on alternative energy generation. I say "otherwise" because, while the content was most interesting and well presented, I was quite surprised to hear the narrator, who sounded Canadian and was presenting on a science show (The Nature of Things, I believe), talk about how many miles of tubing a solar plant in the Mojave desert had and how many acres it occupied and that he didn't translate the American plant engineer's use of Fahrenheit when giving the temperature of the solar heated oil in the tubes into Celsius. On the other hand, he did give the span of the wind turbine blades being manufactured in Denmark in meters, so it wasn't a total washout for metric. I guess I was not expecting that a Canadian educated his whole life in metric and who I presume was consistently exposed to kilometers and hectares on Canadian TV and who was presenting a science program to a Canadian audience would use mostly US Customary units. I conclude we have more of a "bad" influence on Canada than I had ever suspected! As an aside, I hope everyone is adapting to Daylight Saving Time here in North America. I rather wish we had kept to the old schedule of waiting until early April to switch, but that's just me. Cheers, Ezra
