I’ll grant that farenheit has merit, but for me, the foot/inches distance works a bit better for casual measurements, and stuff that doesn’t have to be very precise.
Beyond maybe someone’s height, I’d rather work in metric. I’m also very much in favor of celsius and I still have trouble converting between the temperature scales. I grew up with temps in degrees C, and height and some sort distances in feet/inches. IDK, I’m weird.
Idk, 0 being the melting point and 100 the boiling point of water just seems to make much more sense to me than whatever the hell the Fahrenheit scale is doing
Metric boiling system can be simplified to boiled or not boiled. Also the difference between 13°C and 16°C is huge in Fahrenheit while it looks like a mere 3 points, it’s actually a difference between cold and comfortable not-so warm.
This is really not a problem with Celsius. It’s a result of us being used to Fahrenheit. We could probably switch and not have any issues after a month or so if we really wanted to.
Beer was the only drink you could get in prole pubs. The proles were supposed not to drink gin, though in practice they could get hold of it easily enough. The game of darts was in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun talking about lottery tickets. Winston’s presence was forgotten for a moment. There was a deal table under the window where he and the old man could talk without fear of being overheard. It was horribly dangerous, but at any rate there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had made sure of as soon as he came in.
"E could ‘a drawed me off a pint,’ grumbled the old man as he settled down behind a glass. 'A 'alf litre ain’t enough. It don’t satisfy. And a ‘ole litre’s too much. It starts my bladder running. Let alone the price.’
‘You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,’ said Winston tentatively.
The old man’s pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in the bar-room that he expected the changes to have occurred.
‘The beer was better,’ he said finally. ‘And cheaper! When I was a young man, mild beer – wallop we used to call it – was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.’
I switched to metric for all my personal projects right around the time I started doing any sort of project that had a form of measuring. Metric is better full stop
Americans saying that F° is a more human and relatable temperature measurement, how many times have you been to Dantzig in the 18th century again? Do you even know where Dantzig is? Because i’ve seen water freezing quite a few times before.
I think the two points missing from most debates are
The imperial system does a damn good job at measuring things the way a human would. A foot is roughly the length of a big foot. A single degree farenheit is just big enough that you could guesstimate it with enough practice. If the temperatures are negative, you dump sand on the roads instead of salt.
It’s like seven units of measurement in a trenchant. You never have to convert gallons to cubic miles. You never have to convert from dots to angstoms, and nobody has ever had to convert the surveyors mile to the nautical mile. It feels schizophrenic because claiming it’s one singular system is like saying Italian, French, and Portuguese languages are all regional dialects of Europeanese.
My point isn’t “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”, I’m saying for the average non-scientist there may be a logical reason why we like it so much
No no. The rest of the world is constantly out of sorts on what common measurements are. It’s like how monolingual non-English-speaking people are constantly aware they’re not speaking the natural language of English.
If the USA wants a system of measurement based entirely on water for temperature and mass, and distance as one millionth of the distance from the equator to the pole, then I’m sure they’ll call.
Hard agree with metric for the most part. I forever stand by Fahrenheit for temperatures you experience, and Celsius for science. I don’t want to have to use decimals in my everyday life, but that’s just me
And really, K is the ideal temperature unit for scientific purposes, since there’s actually a hard starting point, rather than picking an arbitrary state change at an arbitrary pressure of a kind of arbitrary compound.
The measurement for temperatures you experience really does not matter outside of what you’re used to, do you think non-Americans get confused about how cold 6°C or 23°C is?
Temperature scale doesn’t matter in daily life, so I hate that there’s always this argument about which scale makes more sense. Knowing what a given temperature feels like is no more difficult than remembering that water freezes at 32 degrees fahrenheit and boils at 212.
I’m all for a system based around multiples of 10, but for temperature, even Celsius isn’t done that way, other than 0 and 100.
Every temperature scale in our usual range is pretty arbitrary at the end of the day, but you have to admit that the fixpoints of Fahrenheit are particularly useless in everyday life.
I didnt forget, i said pretty good frame of reference because it didnt feel necessary given the context of people using it for real world everyday things. Which is typically at “fuck it, close enough” for most people to not have to worry about
If i said perfect, excellent, amazing, the best then i might concede your point, but i didnt so i dont however correct you are that there are other factors that can change the points of reference
It gets way easier for “feel” of weather too! In most habitable places in the world, 0°C is around as cold as you’ll regularly see (also a handy number for when you need to watch for ice). Similarly, 40°C is around as high as most habitable places get, also a nice easy number to work with.
In fahrenheit, these numbers are 30 and 105, I mean I can get rounding down for ease of use but you’re moving the reference points a lot to make it 25 to 100 for what you usually see and that’s certainly not more intuitive than 0-40
Consider it as a general scale from 0-100. First third is freezing, second third is alright, the rest is kinda bleh. Above or below the scale, take caution when you’re outside
That’s medieval units for you. At least they use the same units in the whole country, which is progress compared to how it used to be in the rest of the medieval world. They just didn’t take the last step to modernity.
Add comment