Do you remember being in the third grade and whining to your parents about how useless math was? And they would look wisely down at your wee self and tell you that you would use math every single day for the rest of your life, so suck it up and learn it?? They were so right. I should really have sucked it up and learned it while my brain was still young enough to actually absorb something.
By the way, it seems other English speaking people call it “maths,” plural, not singular. Which kind of makes sense. “Spellings” is another one of those things that turns out is really plural in the Queen’s English versus American English. But let me not digress, I have a lot of ground to cover here on the maths front and we can deal with spellings another day.
So, the maths issues are many and varied: the metric system, the 24-hour clock, and currency conversion are the three that pop up instantly as stuff we have to deal with every single day. We can cover the metric system and 24-hour clocks today and leave currency and conversions for another time.
The majority of the readers here are American (with the notable exceptions of the token Canuk—hi, Vicki! And the occasional drive-by Australian), so our few foreigners and those with ex-pat experience can chime in here to either verify what I say, or call me out as a liar.
Random Snow Photos: the construction site we can see from our bedroom window. They work 24/7, all weather. We have no idea what they are building, but they are quite serious about getting it done.
The rest of the world thinks it is a bit of a giggle that the U.S. failed to embrace the metric system. Seriously, I was at a gathering recently when I was the token American among about a dozen people, and the rest of the room were snickering over the fact that the US had had that huge honking “Embrace Metric” campaign way back in the 1970s and the whole thing just fizzled out.
I know, this is a small speed bump on the highway of life, but I have to tell you, it is embarrassing. Not from a “gosh, I’m embarrassed to be an American because we failed to embrace the metric system kind of way,” not, not at all. As an American, I have a lot of stuff to be proud of (the Constitution—hello! the Bill of Rights!) that makes up for some of our smaller failings on the world front. But on a personal level, I’m a little ashamed that I not only failed to embrace the metric system, but that I ignored it to such a degree that I required a remedial tutorial when I arrived here.
Random
Snow Photos: the night shot. I wasn't kidding when I said 24/7, all weather. We're very curious as to what it is, particularly given that there are so many housing units around here appear completed and yet also appear to be un-occupied.
As if Mandarin wasn’t hard enough, I now have to think (and speak!) in centimeters when I knit with my knitting group. And meters when I talk about the height of my children—as in, “Children Under 1.2M not Permitted” (a sign seen at Metro and frequently on the smaller sections of play areas). I have to tell you, I don’t know how tall they are in feet and inches let along in meters and centimeters! Kilometers are easy enough, mostly because the speedometer on the car and the road signs all match – if we have 50km to go and we are going 50km an hour, I’m all over it.
Temperatures, though, have become randomized in my pea brain: someone will toss out a conversation starter like, “Crickey, it’s 24 degrees at home, isn’t that just spot on!” And my overextended cranium needs to do some quick figuring to determine if “spot on” means good or bad. Is that hot?? Too hot?? Cold?? Too cold?? Or maybe like baby bears porridge, just right? If I could just internalize it, the same way that I now think, “32, brr, cold, 65, nice, but sweater weather, 95, delicious!!!,” then I’d feel much more confident talking about the weather, in English, let alone in Mandarin.
The 24-hour clock adds yet another maths dimension to our lives. Jeff and I (and now Tom, as he can tell time pretty well) are so trained in the 12 hour clock, that we have to do the mental maths from 24 hour back to 12 hour to figure out what time it is. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I’ll try to explain with an example: the children go to bed at 8:00pm. Which is another way of saying 20:00—note one of the benefits of the 24-hour clock is that you do away with that silly am/pm stuff—if it’s 20:00, it’s just 20:00. But my brain, instead of thinking, “Oh, it’s 20:00, time for wee ones to be in bed,” goes this route: “Let’s see the 24-hour clock says it’s 20:00, now what’s 20:00-12:00, let’s see, that’s 8:00! Oh, look, bedtime!!” If I could just reprogram my brain to think in a 24-hour clock, I would save precious minutes in my day. At least precious minutes in my afternoon and evening, because we’re okay so long as it’s before noon.
And, back to the metric system, my weight maintenance pool group (hi Karen! hi Anne!) now gets my weekly weigh-ins translated from kilograms. Let me tell you, it is not easy stepping on that scale at 6:30 (I’m using the 24-hour clock here, so you do the maths: morning or evening??) wishing I had remembered to turn on the radiant heat last night trying to figure out if 55.5 kilograms is over my maintenance limit or not. You would think I would just do the translation and put a post-it note over the scale with a few notations. These ideas generally occur to me (a) now, when I am busy with something else that is already late or (b) at 6:30am when I am standing in the dark shivering and the last thing in the world I am going to do is stop to dig up a post-it note and a pen. But maybe, since I’m about at the end now, I should just go do it. Pull up my Kilogram Conversion web-site and make a quick post-it chart. Or, maybe, now that it’s 13:06, I should go have lunch.
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Quick Updates: Sorry for the missed post yesterday! Busy day, and at the end of it I had two choices (a) spend an hour with Jeff or (b) post. No brain-er there.
Continued snow is forecast for this evening and all through the weekend. If it snows, the road to the airport will be closed, and it is possible no flights will go out anyway. So, we’re plotting. It is possible we will still make it to Thailand. It is possible we will spend the next week trapped in a series of Chinese airports. We are, as always, hoping for the best.
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