Regarding bushfires:
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Today i learned it was 1 September 1972, 50 years ago, when Australia switched from degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius. I was only a bub at the time.
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The older generations seemed to cope and adapt to that much better than the change to metric measurements a couple of years later. āThe old scaleā was sometimes mentioned in relation to weather but my parents and grandparents were still referencing miles, stones, pounds, ounces, feet, yards and inches decades later. My sisters still have old recipe cards handwritten by my grandmother with the old measurements on them.
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Weird when people say they had 25 mls of rain online ā¦ so they had a tablespoon or just over lol .
I know they mean mm but ml and mm are totally different.
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The UK seems to have had a hard time letting go of Fahrenheit - still commonly heard in conversation and weather reporting.
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I remember this stamp issue from when I was a kid. We had a poster of these characters at primary school and I remember the teacher teaching us about it.
My parents came from a European country where they had already been using the metric system all their life. It was weird for them coming to Australia and trying to use the antiquated imperial system, then converting back a decade later.
Quite strange that America, which is supposed to be one of the most advanced countries in the world, is still one of the only ones still using imperial measurements.
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I have never been comfortable with metric for height. This is because my first in-depth encounter with height was with basketball cards growing upā¦
Easy to remember that anyone over the low 6 ft mark is pretty tall, whilst 7 ft is remarkably tall. 200 cm (ā2 metre Peterā) is the equivalent in metric.
Being a weather nut I know my way around the Fahrenheit scale. Here too, there are some handy yardsticks (pardon the pun), particularly with higher temperatures. 70F/21C= comfortable, 80F/27C= getting warm, 90F/32C= hot, 100F/38C and above= bloody hot. You have to admit saying 100 degrees Fahrenheit hammers the horror of that temperature home much more than 38 Celsius.
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40 degrees sounds pretty bad though. At the other end of the scale, -10 C seems a lot more appropriate description of the cold than 14F.
Thankfully I never had to deal with the old currency either which sounds like a nightmare - pounds shillings and pence and florins, guineas etc whatever they were!
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Sciences, big industry and international trade has all but converted to metric behind-the-scenes. Itās mostly in common usage where imperial refuses to die.
7 ft is approx 213cm
Yes, not exact, what I meant was that 2 m is the equivalent yardstick for ābloody tallā in metric.
We could get half our months average rainfall over the next 2 days.
Though donāt get too excited our average is just 33mm.
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Oh yes, half a years rain in 2 days would have been much more noteworthy than half a month (which is what i assume you meant).
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Yeah lol . Changed that.
Crazy that Mackay hasnāt even had a metre of rain and Sydney has had 2 metres.
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Bendigo had 30mms on Tuesday. Not much Wednesday or Today though. Although that did make up 1/3 of our rain last month
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Some oldies still talk about having an inch of rain, but yes mm is definitely the common measure (not to mention the most appropriate for rainfall).
Iāll almost cop the argument about Fahrenheit being well suited to living temperatures, although the common sense of having your temperature range bound by the freezing and boiling points of water cannot be escaped either. So if itās below zero itās literally freezing - makes sense really.
As a kid born in the metric era, I too have learnt to equate heights in both feetānāinches/centimetres but other measures such as weight Iām strictly a kilogram guy. I donāt know nor care to know how many stone someone might weighā¦
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Iām similar ā¦. Iām Ok with imperial heights and lengths and distances/speeds, but yep I struggle with ounces, pounds and stone a bit too. Fahrenheit is OK for me though.
But Iāve totally lost it with imperial currency (pence, shillings and pounds etc).
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