Re: [GZG] [FT] Cancon 2006 Random Observations

On 2/1/06, gzg-l-request@lists.csua.berkeley.edu
<gzg-l-request@lists.csua.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:10:46 -0500
> From: Jerry Han <jhan@warpfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [GZG] [FT] Cancon 2006 Random Observations
> To: gzg-l@lists.csua.berkeley.edu
>
> You know, this brings to mind a curiousity question -- what nations
are
> left that would still have reasonable facility with Imperial?  Canada
> switched over to Metric almost thirty years ago now, but, because our
> trade is so tied in to the United States, we still have to know
Imperial
> distance measurement pretty well.

Most Canadians can function relatively well without having to know
miles versus kilometers. Speedometers on Canadian and American
vehicles are marked both ways, and some of the higher end vehicles
even let you change temperature gauges and odometers from imperial (or
"english", as is usually displayed in American vehicles; Americans
don't like to call it "imperial") to metric. While on the highway, a
rough "one mile per minute" conversion is close enough, while on
Canadian highways (particularly the 401 in Ontario, where speeding
seems to be mandatory) a "two kilometres per minute" conversion works.

The building trades in Canada are still almost exclusively imperial. A
lot of dyed-in-the-wool carpenters stuck with the imperial system. It
also meant that Canadian lumber mills could manufacture products in
the same size as for the U.S., thus eliminating the need for two sets
of inventory. Go into a Home Depot in Canada and you'll see wood,
drywall, etc. sold in imperial measurements. Furniture is typically
sold in imperial, with metric conversions listed (the main exception
is furniture bought from Ikea). Canadian and American garage mechanics
have both imperial and metric tool sets, but that's mostly because of
those silly foreign cars that use metric.

Canadian tape measures typically have both imperial and metric. My
dad, who was a master carpenter, preferred imperial. He could make
things to higher tolerances. A millimeter is bigger than 1/32 of an
inch, which almost all tape measures display, and often tape measures
get down to 1/64 of an inch. You could go down to a 10th of a
millimeter, but that's too small to use. I never saw tape measures
graded in half-millimeters. Besides, he -- and most of his colleagues
-- were "old school" and would never have converted to metric, so the
new guys didn't convert either.

The answer, for metric confusion issues at the gaming table, is to buy
Canadian tape measures!

(As an aside, for fix-it projects I don't mind too much that Americans
don't use the metric system. It _really_ bugs me that they never
embraced that wonderful invention known as the Robertson screw!
Phillips and slot-head screws are simply inferior. There, I've said
it, and I'm glad!)

Allan
--
Allan Goodall		 http://www.hyperbear.com
agoodall@hyperbear.com
awgoodall@gmail.com

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