Odd things they do in other countries...

[Industrialaska]

Dutch breakfast sprinkles, Austria essentially closing down on Sundays, Austrian grocery stores that have multiple shelves dedicated solely to mayonnaise in various flavors, and the general lack of cold beverages in Central Europe. I'm not sure if the last part is throughout all Europe, I've only been through a portion of it.

Having different shelves for mayonnaise isn't weird. Consumers need to be encouraged to reach for the "spicy cajun" "onion and chive" or "low calorie gravy" flavored mayo, or else they'll just get the regular stuff.

[Savojarna]

Dutch breakfast sprinkles

I guess I'm missing something

The Swiss have railway platforms that lead directly to the side walk across the entire length, no ledges, fences or anything. So weird.

I never noticed that in 20 years until you pointed it out. But it kind of makes sense, because that way you can access the train from the bus without having to go through a narrow spot. At my home station two or three buses arrive at the same time and everyone has to go through the same tunnel, do that in the morning and you have a strong hate for humanity. Compared to getting out in one of those you described, where you can just walk out into the city without being bothered by the others, and that seems so much nicer to me.

[The Baphomet]

Tibetans stick their tongues out as a form of greeting. Americans seem to either be morbidly obese or anorexic. Western fashioned designers seemed obsessed with covering everything but things that should be covered. Catalans and their weird Christmas decorations. The paradoxical teenage American obsessions with dessert and staying thin. That's what I can think of off the top of my head.

I feel greeting people in Oman by pressing noses together is odd.

[Galloism]

It's true, the USSR used it, and so does China.

We don't need commie math, thank you very much.

Yeah? Can you tell me off the top of your head, how many pounds make a ton? How many yards are there in a mile? And what a standard gravity (sea level) is in Imperial units?

What you DO know about the Imperial measuring system had to be learned by rote, in your first years of school, and right there is why Americans are so BAD AT MATHS.

Mathematics in its pure form is beautiful and inspiring. The assurance that (even if you don't get it at first) mathematics is internally consistent and fundamentally logical is essential to developing thinking skills, and those thinking skills serve a person well even if their later field of study is politics or fine art. Think consistently, you get the Correct answer, think inconsistently you get the Incorrect answer, that is a fundamental in thinking which serves well whatever the subject.

Mathematics teaches consistent thinking which is ALWAYS better than vague and interstitial thinking to reach a conclusion. Even in the vaguest and least scientific fields, where all the precepts are arbitrary and disputable, consistent and logical thinking leads to sounder conclusions, and from that better business decisions, better advocacy of whatever cause they champion, better contributions to society and fundamentally a better person. The unique quality of a human, over all other animals, is the ability to think abstractly. "I think, therefore I am".

School education is not the only source, in no way is it the only source: parents or whatever elder passes for a parent in the child's early years teach the child to think by teaching language (even accidentally just by using language, which infants have enormous propensity to learn). There is a mass of media, which for many children nowadays fills as much of their time or more than the deliberate efforts of school teachers. Not even the best school can level the playing field and give every child equal opportunity in this fundamental of being a good and worthwhile person; the ability to think consistently. But schools are the leveler, catching up the children whose parents (perhaps just by being poorly educated themselves) have failed them in providing early childhood teaching in thinking skills. Schools provide opportunity to all children, and by doing so they serve all of society because when all children have an opportunity to express their talents and profit from them, mediocre but privileged children are out-competed, and the more talented but less privileged children take their place. Better scientists, better entrepreneurs, better doctors and lawyers and artists and politicians, better specialists of all kinds. Widening the intake from early childhood, for all the most important careers, isn't just a social justice thing ... it serves all of humanity.


Early, too early, in mathematics teaching is this arbitrary rubbish about measurements. Everyone has to learn it, but it is not mathematics. Get that shit out of the way early, with a measurement system that was designed to be simple and internally consistent, and move on to real mathematics which develops logical and consistent thought in students. The longer it takes to teach them measurements, the more of a boring chore mathematics will appear to them later, when the fundamentals are out of the way and actual mathematics (and logic) is presented to them.


The nail in the coffin of the "standard" or "traditional" measurement system (aka Imperial measurement), is that those who learned them have to unlearn them again, starting again with Metric, if they want to pursue a STEM education and career.

Well I won't say that teaching the Imperial system is wholly responsible for why Americans suck at mathematics and suck at STEM. Those are hard ways to make a living (anywhere) and in the US where luck-and-style ways to become a billionaire are paraded and celebrated (as a dream for the masses who want to believe that they could someday become rich, that the farce is actually a lottery) all that hard work is not attractive to intelligent children. Being the next Einstein is hard, much harder than a century ago, and there's pitifully little financial reward for coming close.

But it really does not help that public education is narrowing the field of talent from the first years of school by obfuscating mathematics with all that medieval merchant cruft you call a measurement system. Fuck that. Go Metric!

*

. I was taught only the Imperial system in kindergarten (yes, kindergarten in 1960's: I was a privileged child) and in Infant school (year 1 and 2), then I was taught both systems, then by High School it was all Metric. It was horrible, frankly: though I was good at pure mathematics from the start, I always had a sense of inadequacy because I could not memorize to three significant places the conversion factors between inches and centimetres, pounds and kilograms, and so on. Being expected to learn both systems is far worse than being expected to learn either one. And how about that: if you want to specialize in hard sciences in the US you have to master Metric, yet most schools only teach the Imperial as basic knowledge from the start. To get into STEM you have to change systems mid-way, and right there is part of the reason the US is having such trouble graduating enough STEM students from high school, adequately educated to take up tertiary study.

†

The word Mathematics is a plural noun, it should be shortened to Maths or else the abbreviation breaks the grammar of the sentence it is used in. Generally I do not object to abbreviations, providing they do not create a new homophone or homograph, but math instead of maths really gets my goat.

You put an awful lot of effort responding to something where we clearly weren't serious.

[Auze]

The metric system is overrated, for many reasons.
And also Celsius, which is even more overrated

Celsius is flawed, I must admit. The freezing point of water is not exactly 0 C and the boiling point of water is not exactly 100 C

But at least it tried, and at least it got close, to a scale based on two properties of water.

While Fahrenheit has only one anchor, it's human body temperature, and it got that wrong by two whole degrees. The other anchor, 0ºF, is way out in nowheresville, some nonsense about ice and salt and a dodgy thermometer that some guy built himself.

Celsius is arbitrary, it's bad, and it is embarassing to have to include it in SI units, but Celsius > Farhenheit any fucking day.

Yes, but due to how it was created Fahrenheit has more use in everyday life, after all, many of our temperature readings fall nicely within the 0-100 range.
I guess xkcd discussed it best : https://xkcd.com/1643/

[Ifreann]

Celsius is flawed, I must admit. The freezing point of water is not exactly 0 C and the boiling point of water is not exactly 100 C

But at least it tried, and at least it got close, to a scale based on two properties of water.

While Fahrenheit has only one anchor, it's human body temperature, and it got that wrong by two whole degrees. The other anchor, 0ºF, is way out in nowheresville, some nonsense about ice and salt and a dodgy thermometer that some guy built himself.

Celsius is arbitrary, it's bad, and it is embarassing to have to include it in SI units, but Celsius > Farhenheit any fucking day.

Yes, but due to how it was created Fahrenheit has more use in everyday life, after all, many of our temperature readings fall nicely within the 0-100 range.
I guess xkcd discussed it best : https://xkcd.com/1643/

How does that make Fahrenheit more useful?

[Galloism]

Yes, but due to how it was created Fahrenheit has more use in everyday life, after all, many of our temperature readings fall nicely within the 0-100 range.
I guess xkcd discussed it best : https://xkcd.com/1643/

How does that make Fahrenheit more useful?

Admittedly, farenheit does round nicely. You can say "the 70s" and everyone knows it's a comfortable temperature. If you say "the 20s" in Celsius, that covers everything from just perfecr to fucking hot.

The 10s covers everything from light jacket to just perfect.

[Cetacea]

Celsius is flawed, I must admit. The freezing point of water is not exactly 0 C and the boiling point of water is not exactly 100 C

But at least it tried, and at least it got close, to a scale based on two properties of water.

While Fahrenheit has only one anchor, it's human body temperature, and it got that wrong by two whole degrees. The other anchor, 0ºF, is way out in nowheresville, some nonsense about ice and salt and a dodgy thermometer that some guy built himself.

Celsius is arbitrary, it's bad, and it is embarassing to have to include it in SI units, but Celsius > Farhenheit any fucking day.

Yes, but due to how it was created Fahrenheit has more use in everyday life, after all, many of our temperature readings fall nicely within the 0-100 range.
I guess xkcd discussed it best : https://xkcd.com/1643/

How is Farhenheit more useful everyday?
how is going from 32 to 212 even logical?

Using celcius I know that if the temperature is less than 0 I'm going to be facing frost and ice, 24C is warm, 30 is getting hot and over 37 means I have a fever, 40+ is getting crazy.
when my water boils it's 100 although my coffee will be better at 90. Milk boils at 80 if I want a latte

[Calladan]

When writing the date, there are foreign countries that put the month before the day. mm/dd/yyyy as opposed to the vastly and chauvinistically superior dd/mm/yyyy.

Savages.

There's only one that I'm aware of that does that - and if you work in an industry where start and end dates have massive relevance, it's enough to make you go totally postal at regular intervals.

Oh gods yes, but we sort of fixed this in our company because we wrote it into a contract that when our American supplier was writing dates, they HAD to use a standard of MON/dd/yyyy (or dd-MON-yyyy) so that the month wasn't just two figures, it was spelt out as three letters. It added an extra step in decoding it for our coders, but it solved every other problem we had with deciding what fricking date they were on about when they wrote 05/05/2002. Stupid dumb-ass dating system.

[Cetacea]

There's only one that I'm aware of that does that - and if you work in an industry where start and end dates have massive relevance, it's enough to make you go totally postal at regular intervals.

Oh gods yes, but we sort of fixed this in our company because we wrote it into a contract that when our American supplier was writing dates, they HAD to use a standard of MON/dd/yyyy (or dd-MON-yyyy) so that the month wasn't just two figures, it was spelt out as three letters. It added an extra step in decoding it for our coders, but it solved every other problem we had with deciding what fricking date they were on about when they wrote 05/05/2002. Stupid dumb-ass dating system.

My job is data handling and dates trigger most of our milestone processes. unfortunately the CRM we have uses US dates mm/dd/yy rather than sensible dd/mm/yy. So if people forget it throws the entire system out due to dates not matching. It drives me batty as half my work is reduced to changing dates

[USS Monitor]

Australians don't ride kangaroos to school.

(Yes, I had a friend that told me he had met some Americans who actually believed that we Aussies ride kangaroos to school.)

Oh, people have all kinds of weird misconceptions about countries they aren't familiar with.

When I lived in China, I met a Ghanaian guy who apparently thought Hollywood movies were an accurate depiction of American life. He also thought "War of the Worlds" -- the movie version set in modern New York/New England -- was a true story.

[USS Monitor]

The metric system is overrated, for many reasons.
And also Celsius, which is even more overrated

Just gonna leave this here....

That's nice, but Fahrenheit and Celsius both have the same problem when it comes to using them for science: because the scale doesn't start at absolute zero, they're basically useless for any sort of calculation that looks at the relationships between temperature, pressure, etc.

[USS Monitor]

In Mali I've seen quite a few people who still use old trade muskets for hunting or defense. Like full on flintlock, black powder muskets

That is so fucking cool.

[Proctopeo]

It's true, the USSR used it, and so does China.

We don't need commie math, thank you very much.

Yeah? Can you tell me off the top of your head, how many pounds make a ton? How many yards are there in a mile? And what a standard gravity (sea level) is in Imperial units?

Just gonna respond to this.

The only one of those I don't remember is standard gravity - the other two are 2000 and 1760. Now, it's not like standard gravity in feet per second per second is any difficult number - it's about 32.2. If you had to remember it, it would be just as easy as 9.81 meters per second per second.

[Calladan]

Just gonna leave this here....

That's nice, but Fahrenheit and Celsius both have the same problem when it comes to using them for science: because the scale doesn't start at absolute zero, they're basically useless for any sort of calculation that looks at the relationships between temperature, pressure, etc.

I am not certain why that is relevant. Especially since the vast majority of people in the world don't give a shit and just want to know whether they should put a jacket on or wear a t-shirt, and seeing 5 degrees C or 25 degrees c pretty much spells it out. And seeing -5 degrees c also tells you you might slip and fall cause it be COLD out there.

[Calladan]

Oh gods yes, but we sort of fixed this in our company because we wrote it into a contract that when our American supplier was writing dates, they HAD to use a standard of MON/dd/yyyy (or dd-MON-yyyy) so that the month wasn't just two figures, it was spelt out as three letters. It added an extra step in decoding it for our coders, but it solved every other problem we had with deciding what fricking date they were on about when they wrote 05/05/2002. Stupid dumb-ass dating system.

My job is data handling and dates trigger most of our milestone processes. unfortunately the CRM we have uses US dates mm/dd/yy rather than sensible dd/mm/yy. So if people forget it throws the entire system out due to dates not matching. It drives me batty as half my work is reduced to changing dates

(grin) Like I said, we literally forced our customers to stop that idiocy and bow to our will

And why would ANYONE need the Month first? Who looks at a date and thinks "Yes - it's important I know what month it is and not what day it is?" I have literally never understood the point of it.

[USS Monitor]

That's nice, but Fahrenheit and Celsius both have the same problem when it comes to using them for science: because the scale doesn't start at absolute zero, they're basically useless for any sort of calculation that looks at the relationships between temperature, pressure, etc.

I am not certain why that is relevant. Especially since the vast majority of people in the world don't give a shit and just want to know whether they should put a jacket on or wear a t-shirt, and seeing 5 degrees C or 25 degrees c pretty much spells it out. And seeing -5 degrees c also tells you you might slip and fall cause it be COLD out there.

For those purposes, Fahrenheit works fine.

[New haven america]

This is fine. The point is that it follows a logical process. It will proceed from the year to the day, or the day to the year. Not month/day/year or year/day/month. From my wee time spent in Japan, I understand that they also write the date beginning with the year too.

Yeah, month/day/year weirds me out.
Fucks me over working on American customer computer systems as well cause they use that format, so I end up grabbing completely different groups of data than I wanted

It's actually better for organization.

Ironically, the most logical dating system (d/m/y) happens to be the worst for both organization (Where m/d/y if preferable) and computer systems (Where y/m/d is preferable).

[Savojarna]

Australians don't ride kangaroos to school.

(Yes, I had a friend that told me he had met some Americans who actually believed that we Aussies ride kangaroos to school.)

Oh, people have all kinds of weird misconceptions about countries they aren't familiar with.

When I lived in China, I met a Ghanaian guy who apparently thought Hollywood movies were an accurate depiction of American life. He also thought "War of the Worlds" -- the movie version set in modern New York/New England -- was a true story.

It's understandable though, and I might be slightly victim to the same. In Europe, we get absolutely bombarded with American pop culture while not being in direct personal contact with the US. If you keep getting that consistent picture from movies, which is not completely impossible (I assume it's an overexaggerated picture of reality), I can't blame you for believing it. Now the war of the worlds thing is obviously a bit weird.

[New haven america]

That's nice, but Fahrenheit and Celsius both have the same problem when it comes to using them for science: because the scale doesn't start at absolute zero, they're basically useless for any sort of calculation that looks at the relationships between temperature, pressure, etc.

I am not certain why that is relevant. Especially since the vast majority of people in the world don't give a shit and just want to know whether they should put a jacket on or wear a t-shirt, and seeing 5 degrees C or 25 degrees c pretty much spells it out. And seeing -5 degrees c also tells you you might slip and fall cause it be COLD out there.

Fahrenheit works fine for that too. (And could actually be better, seeing as how most humans live between 0F and 100F)

Unless you use Kelvin for everyday use (Which is the best system overall), metric users really don't have the right to complain.

[New haven america]

It's true, the USSR used it, and so does China.

We don't need commie math, thank you very much.

Yeah? Can you tell me off the top of your head, how many pounds make a ton? How many yards are there in a mile? And what a standard gravity (sea level) is in Imperial units?

What you DO know about the Imperial measuring system had to be learned by rote, in your first years of school, and right there is why Americans are so BAD AT MATHS.

Mathematics in its pure form is beautiful and inspiring. The assurance that (even if you don't get it at first) mathematics is internally consistent and fundamentally logical is essential to developing thinking skills, and those thinking skills serve a person well even if their later field of study is politics or fine art. Think consistently, you get the Correct answer, think inconsistently you get the Incorrect answer, that is a fundamental in thinking which serves well whatever the subject.

Mathematics teaches consistent thinking which is ALWAYS better than vague and interstitial thinking to reach a conclusion. Even in the vaguest and least scientific fields, where all the precepts are arbitrary and disputable, consistent and logical thinking leads to sounder conclusions, and from that better business decisions, better advocacy of whatever cause they champion, better contributions to society and fundamentally a better person. The unique quality of a human, over all other animals, is the ability to think abstractly. "I think, therefore I am".

School education is not the only source, in no way is it the only source: parents or whatever elder passes for a parent in the child's early years teach the child to think by teaching language (even accidentally just by using language, which infants have enormous propensity to learn). There is a mass of media, which for many children nowadays fills as much of their time or more than the deliberate efforts of school teachers. Not even the best school can level the playing field and give every child equal opportunity in this fundamental of being a good and worthwhile person; the ability to think consistently. But schools are the leveler, catching up the children whose parents (perhaps just by being poorly educated themselves) have failed them in providing early childhood teaching in thinking skills. Schools provide opportunity to all children, and by doing so they serve all of society because when all children have an opportunity to express their talents and profit from them, mediocre but privileged children are out-competed, and the more talented but less privileged children take their place. Better scientists, better entrepreneurs, better doctors and lawyers and artists and politicians, better specialists of all kinds. Widening the intake from early childhood, for all the most important careers, isn't just a social justice thing ... it serves all of humanity.


Early, too early, in mathematics teaching is this arbitrary rubbish about measurements. Everyone has to learn it, but it is not mathematics. Get that shit out of the way early, with a measurement system that was designed to be simple and internally consistent, and move on to real mathematics which develops logical and consistent thought in students. The longer it takes to teach them measurements, the more of a boring chore mathematics will appear to them later, when the fundamentals are out of the way and actual mathematics (and logic) is presented to them.


The nail in the coffin of the "standard" or "traditional" measurement system (aka Imperial measurement), is that those who learned them have to unlearn them again, starting again with Metric, if they want to pursue a STEM education and career.

Well I won't say that teaching the Imperial system is wholly responsible for why Americans suck at mathematics and suck at STEM. Those are hard ways to make a living (anywhere) and in the US where luck-and-style ways to become a billionaire are paraded and celebrated (as a dream for the masses who want to believe that they could someday become rich, that the farce is actually a lottery) all that hard work is not attractive to intelligent children. Being the next Einstein is hard, much harder than a century ago, and there's pitifully little financial reward for coming close.

But it really does not help that public education is narrowing the field of talent from the first years of school by obfuscating mathematics with all that medieval merchant cruft you call a measurement system. Fuck that. Go Metric!

*

. I was taught only the Imperial system in kindergarten (yes, kindergarten in 1960's: I was a privileged child) and in Infant school (year 1 and 2), then I was taught both systems, then by High School it was all Metric. It was horrible, frankly: though I was good at pure mathematics from the start, I always had a sense of inadequacy because I could not memorize to three significant places the conversion factors between inches and centimetres, pounds and kilograms, and so on. Being expected to learn both systems is far worse than being expected to learn either one. And how about that: if you want to specialize in hard sciences in the US you have to master Metric, yet most schools only teach the Imperial as basic knowledge from the start. To get into STEM you have to change systems mid-way, and right there is part of the reason the US is having such trouble graduating enough STEM students from high school, adequately educated to take up tertiary study.

†

The word Mathematics is a plural noun, it should be shortened to Maths or else the abbreviation breaks the grammar of the sentence it is used in. Generally I do not object to abbreviations, providing they do not create a new homophone or homograph, but math instead of maths really gets my goat.

2000 lbs, 1760 y, and 21 mph/s (Or 32 ft, whichever you prefer).

That is a lot of effort put in for a joke...

[Arotania]

Just gonna respond to this.

The only one of those I don't remember is standard gravity - the other two are 2000 and 1760. Now, it's not like standard gravity in feet per second per second is any difficult number - it's about 32.2. If you had to remember it, it would be just as easy as 9.81 meters per second per second.

But once you find out that there are 160 imperial fl.oz. in an imperial gallon but 128 US fl.oz. in a US gallon it gets weird. Then you learn that an imperial fl.oz. is 28.4 ml and a US fl.oz. is 29.57 ml and the whole system etches closer and closer to insanity. After that you discover the US dry gallon that is not related to the others in any conceivable way but just seems to exist to further mess with people's heads and the only sane reaction to this mess of a "sytem" becomes maniacal laughter.

I mean, the US already uses half the SI system: ampere, second, mole, candela and many units derived of those. So they just should get it over with and also adopt the rest.
Can't be that hard to sell to the public. Just use that fact that many Americans wrongly think that they use the imperial system and dress the change as the throwing off of the last English imperial shackles and obtaining complete freedom. Then just add the fact that the French revolution was just a copy heavily inspired by the American revolution, so by transitivity the metric system is basically an American invention and everyone should be on board.

[USS Monitor]

Oh, people have all kinds of weird misconceptions about countries they aren't familiar with.

When I lived in China, I met a Ghanaian guy who apparently thought Hollywood movies were an accurate depiction of American life. He also thought "War of the Worlds" -- the movie version set in modern New York/New England -- was a true story.

It's understandable though, and I might be slightly victim to the same. In Europe, we get absolutely bombarded with American pop culture while not being in direct personal contact with the US. If you keep getting that consistent picture from movies, which is not completely impossible (I assume it's an overexaggerated picture of reality), I can't blame you for believing it. Now the war of the worlds thing is obviously a bit weird.

It's exaggerated, and it's also skewed toward particular segments of American society.

For example, since the industry is based in California, movies set in the eastern US, especially in places that are not major cities, are more inaccurate than those set in Cali or in iconic cities like New York. Anything set in New England outside Boston, you should just assume that it's not filmed on-location and they've completely misunderstood the local culture -- in addition to the deliberately exaggerated sex, violence, and drama that they put in regardless of the setting. They sometimes get Boston wrong too, but less wrong. Judging by what I've heard from Southerners and the fact that I have heard some bad fake Southern accents in movies, I think there is a similar problem with movies set in the South.

They also tend to show way more thugs and well-off white families than what we have IRL. When they do show poor people, it tends to be homeless or horrific ghettos rather than just working-class. The US actually has a large and ethnically diverse working class population.

[The Alexandrian Polis]

The metric system is overrated, for many reasons.
And also Celsius, which is even more overrated

Just gonna leave this here....

Eh, at least Jamaica and Belize use it to.

Puerto Rico you're supposed to be on our side!

[USS Monitor]

I am not certain why that is relevant. Especially since the vast majority of people in the world don't give a shit and just want to know whether they should put a jacket on or wear a t-shirt, and seeing 5 degrees C or 25 degrees c pretty much spells it out. And seeing -5 degrees c also tells you you might slip and fall cause it be COLD out there.

Fahrenheit works fine for that too. (And could actually be better, seeing as how most humans live between 0F and 100F)

Unless you use Kelvin for everyday use (Which is the best system overall), metric users really don't have the right to complain.

Celsius and Fahrenheit both work fine for "What should I wear today?" purposes. There's no point in arguing that one is "better" than the other because neither one has any real problems.