Dear Cole: Congratulations on your acceptance to grad school in Ottawa! I hope you are enjoying the environment up there (in all its aspects :-)
I'm not sure why you say it's not really a surprise that Mr. Suzuki should present a scientific topic using Imperial units rather than metric for things like distance (when all road signs use "kilometres") or area (when I believe most references in Canadian programs, books, articles, etc. use hectares or square kilometres), or temperature (when I believe Celsius is nearly universal in Canada). Body mass (weight) is apparently the last item of usage to change from Imperial to metric (as has also been the case even in a country with an exemplary conversion program like Australia). So, I would consider the use of Imperial for body mass to not be any good signal about the use of metric vs Imperial in other aspects of daily life. Since you're up in Ottawa, which has the advantage of being both the national capital and not right near the US border, I'm wondering what you observe on radio, TV, in the newspapers, and in daily conversation when it comes to the usage of metric vs Imperial. What can you share with us? Regards, Ezra P.S. I most recently moved from just outside Portland and worked in Beaverton. Plus, my partner grew up near Eugene and attended U of O. So, we have some connections to Oregon! :-) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Cole Kingsbury" <cgkings...@comcast.net> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <usma@colostate.edu> Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2010 6:10:58 PM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific Subject: [USMA:46933] Re: Disappointing science program ... and it's Canadian!!! 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" <ezra.steinb...@comcast.net> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <usma@ColoState.EDU> 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
