alt textComic strip of a ghost and a person with the American flag pasted on the head. The ghost repeats “Boo!” in the first three panels without getting any reaction, but when it in the fourth panel says “kg, cm, km, °C” the American gets scared and screams “AHHHH!!!”.
As a celsius user I have absolutely no need for fahrenheit. It needs more numbers when there is no need for more precision. Half a degree C is barely even noticable.
It’s one of those things that truly and honestly just doesn’t matter. Celsius makes more sense if you think about water freezing at 0 and boiling at 100, but beyond that it really doesn’t make a big difference.
The lower point of Fahrenheight is near the freezing point of brine (salt water) which freezes at -6 F (-21 C).
It was designed around what the coldest day at the time of its invention could get and the 100F was marked around how hot the hottest day of the year at the timr would get. Hence its choice to scale 0-100 to local weather vs celcius’ choice to use kelvin and offset it to standardize it to pure water.
Nothing in particular, it’s an arbitrary starting point. But that’s really not a good reason to knock it.
Does water actually freeze at 0 celsius? It depends on the air pressure, right? I guess 0 celsius is the freezing point of water at sea level, but air pressure’s not consistent at all. I guess maybe it’s the temperature water freezes at the average air pressure at sea level? I assume that’s the case.
The point I’m trying to make is the Celsius isn’t super rock solid either, and it really doesn’t affect anything if water freezes at 0 or 32 degrees. The best argument for celsius is that it’s standard, but that doesn’t make necessarily make it better.
If we really cared about having a rock-solid starting point, we’d use Kelvin because you literally cannot go below 0.
yeah I was looking for something like “at 0 F something happens” as in Centigrades you can be sure that at 0C and with 1atm the water will freeze, instead of something arbitrary, so you can compare calibrate instruments
Europeans acting smug like knowing how close to boiling the temperature is is more important than knowing how close to 100% hot out the temperature is.
100°F is roughly (like really roughly) the hottest temp your likely to see in most temperate climates throughout a year. 0°F is(again really roughly) the lowest. The result is you can use Fahrenheit basically as a percentage, or a 0 to 100 temperature score to help you decide how to dress/prepare for the day. If the temperature is above or below 100 or 0 then you need to consider fairly serious precautions before going outside for any length of time.
It’s not a very precise system at all, and it obviously has no place in a laboratory or similar situation. But it does work quite well for communicating the weather to common people. There is very little desire among Americans to change to Celsius not because they don’t understand it (we’re all taught Celsius in grade school) but because Fahrenheit serves most people’s needs perfectly adequately.
OP is also arguing that easily recalling the boiling temperature of water (one of the big purported advantages of Celsius) is useless for most people as nobody actually measures the temperature of water while boiling it. Except, maybe, in a classroom, probably while demonstrating to children how the Celsius scale works.
If it’s 0 F, it’s 0% hot out. If it’s 50 F, it’s 50% hot out, if it’s 100F, it’s 100% hot out.
It’s a more human measurement. Who the hell knows how long a kilometer or meter is? Everyone knows what a football field looks like and a yard is 1/100th of it.
It’s based on how humans react to the heat, you need active cooling such as sweat, moving air isn’t enough above 100 degrees. 100% hot out is just a silly way of putting it.
I found it on Wikipedia. At first, he fixed zero at the stable temperature of a “mixture of ice, water, and salis Armoniaci [transl. ammonium chloride]” and 96 at the human body temperature, but later he would change the lower reference point to water’s freezing point at 32 and still later the upper one to the boiling point of water at 212. So it has always been pretty arbitrary.
Edit: But I will agree that the scale of zero to one hundred does correspond more closely to how warm humans feel.
100°C is an acceptable sauna temperature. You won’t last much longer naked in 0°C!
Edit: To make my point more clear, I know some crazy people who go directly from a close to 100 degree sauna to a close to 0 degree ice bath. I think that could be described quite well as going from 100 to 0 % within the human temperature tolerance.
Also, that’s not my initial point. My initial point was that “percent hot outside” means nothing in Fahrenheit or Celsius.
Who the hell knows how long a kilometer or meter is?
Everyone outside of America.
Everyone knows what a football field looks like
You’re either trolling or a living embodiment of the ‘Americans think the USA is the whole world’ meme. Nobody outside of the USA knows how long a football field is.
No it’s not, as i live in the equator, and that’s the issue i have with fahrenheit. The whole thing is devoid of context and people think it makes sense naturally.
You know what pissed me off earlier this year? We took a trip from the U.S. to Canada and my Prius didn’t even have the option to show kmph instead of mph on the dashboard. We looked through the manual, we looked online. My specific model doesn’t allow it. Why?!
Not in California though. You can own it, but you can’t buy nor shoot 5.56 or .223 on BLM or CA owned land. They’re also in the courts (appeals) to ban Assault rifles in the state.
Least important it may be. But it is the most significant. This scheme follows the conventional scheme we follow while writing numbers - the most significant digit to the left and significance reducing as we move right.
The advantage of YYYY-MM-DD becomes when you add time to it in ISO-8601 or RFC 3339 format: YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss. All the digits are uniformly decreasing in significance from left to right.
This becomes even more apparent if you are trying to sort by time - say, a stack of files, or datetime in a computer. Try doing this with any other scheme.
Depends on context, IMO did/mm/yyyy is the most natural when writing some text, but partial ISO yyyy-mm-dd is ideal for when naming files and directories, makes lexicographical ordering follow chronological order.
Lots of stuff is written differently, than it is spoken. In case of the date it is weird, not to go from biggest to smallest or vice versa. I guess you are used to it now, but for me it would be the same as putting seconds before minutes or inches before feet.
What really grinds my gears - literally - is having to have two sets of sockets because America. It’s really gets annoying when you lose your 10mm socket and the other one isn’t quite right, but you can’t work out is 18/32s is close enough and then you bust a nut.
American cars have been using both metric and SAE fasteners since at least the 1980’s. I wish they would just gone all metric so I wouldn’t have to drag out two socket sets anytime I need to do anything.
I just hate the fact if 10mm is too big, I can get 9mm, but if 15/16 is too big, fuck me, I guess. Bringing the full toolbox over because what random fucking bullshit number comes before it?
Like I’m here to fix shit, not do math to figure out which socket is one size smaller.
Yeah, everyone shits on the US for this but we do science in metric, and also everyone seems to ignore that the UK is all kinds of fucked up as well-- weight in stone, etc. I’d also argue that outside science F is a better scale for talking about weather. Sure 0 makes for a better freezing point, but most temps on inhabited earth are about 0100 F or -2540 C. If you knew nothing about F or C and someone asked if a scale from 0 to 100 or -25 to 40 made more sense, which one do you think most people would pick?
-25 to 40 is very useful for weather. Especially in a northern country. The only reason they don’t switch is “best country in the world” delusions they’ve been fed to believe is true since birth.
My point was any numbers are useful for weather if you’re used to them, but if you proposed a new scale without any baggage attached to it 0 to 100 makes way more sense than starting at neg something and going to 40 instead of a rounder number like 50 or 100
Below 0 C? Freezing doesn’t mean dangerous (obviously it’s dangerous if you’re homeless or don’t have regular access to heat). I live somewhere now that it hovers around freezing all winter and I literally can’t wear my old thick coats from where I grew up (northern US). I have to wear a fall coat pretty much all winter or I overheat. Below 0 F is a much better indication of dangerous weather than the freezing point.
How about just slipperyness? The fact that you can’t farm and thus have no reliable food source? The fact your water souce disappears?
I’ll admit, no method of measurement is perfect as biomes changes too drastically. This doesn’t mean Fahrenheit is better though. It’s not more intuitive, it’s not better at actual measurements, and it’s not as accepted by society ('cause people way smarter than me did find Fahrenheit worse than Celcius (see any above high school science/engineering))
To explain the more intuitive, I am literally incapable of using Fahrenheit, and it means fuck all to me. Thus my intuition is incapable of using it, and thus **Fahrenheit isn’t naturally understandable.**Granted, Celcius isn’t either.
The actual reason the us hasn’t switched is the many billions of dollars it would cost for basically no tangible benefit. There are probably better uses of that money if we actually got to spend it on what we wanted, like social programs.
or public transport, ending the war on drugs, LGBTQ+ rights, fixing climate change, eating less meat, funding education, non-predatory student loans, living wage, affordable homes, ending slavery in prisons, ending corporations as people, ending super PACs and lobbying, and establishing ranked choice voting or even basic democratic concepts as one-man-one-vote.
Well, there is basically only one country that has been too afraid to change from its archaic measurement system to the internationally agreed upon standard.
3 actually, and it’s not a good group… And I’d like to say that most Americans actually support the idea of switching, but as a stubborn guy who uses metric for everything here I can sadly say that they are not by a long shot.
Gauge is 1.67 over the cube root of the diameter in inches. Technically it’s derived from lbs since the number refers to the number of lead balls the width of the barrel you’d need to equal 1 lb. Eg, a 12 gauge is the width of a 1/12th lb ball of lead.
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