2694: Metric vs Imperial Use in Cultural Zeitgeists May 6, 2024

In the English speaking world, at least in the US, and to different extents the UK Canada etc. the units of measurement are sort of all over the place. On one end of the scale, the US uses US customary units, sometimes—though incorrectly—referred to as the imperial system, but we’ll also run a 5K or maybe measure a small amount of food in grams. In some Commonwealth countries the core is metric, but some vestigial things remain like in Canada and South Africa where they use metric, but will still refer to people’s height in feet, and Canadian recipes may use ounces and cups etc.. The UK perhaps has the strangest relationship mixing the two, where things like temperature are nearly exclusively in celsius, distance is most often measured with the imperial system, but weight and volume will depend on the context. Perhaps the oddest example of this famously is that gasoline (or rather petrol) is sold in liters, but fuel-use is typically still miles-per-gallon.