I have this theory that Americans suck at math because they insist on sticking with the imperial measurement system and so nothing makes mathematical sense - Americans intuitively just think in every day units qualitatively. Whereas the rest of the world uses metric, so base 10 math just comes naturally.
Source: I am a US STEM professor. Our students suck at math.
When I was 16, I went to high school in California for half a year as an exchange student. I am from Germany and as a junior, I would have had something like my 4th or 5th year of chemistry in school, but out of necessity (or laziness) I took beginner’s chemistry.
For exercises I had been paired with two girls who used to try to make fun of me (I think; I never really figured out what their deal was), and asked me stupid questions about myself or Germany. I remember they once asked laughingly whether I like oranges because I was wearing a t-shirt with an orange print.
Well, then one day, there we go. Converting exercises. You have students from 9th to 12th grade in groups of 3-4, trying to convert imperial measurements to metrics. And then metrics to metrics. Basically, for a couple of weeks, we just converted stuff like 14 cm to mm or dm. I forgot so much about my time abroad but the most vivid memory I have is of the girls looking at each other (after a couple of days and repeated explanations) and one says “the decimal system just makes no sense” and the other one quietly and slowly nods in agreement. I ask them how it makes no sense. “Well it just makes no sense.” It’s just base 10 everything and the rest is practice, it’s not different from inches to feet. “No but you see this makes sense. There are 12 inches in a foot”, continued by a list of how many shmekels make up a whoopsiedoodle and how many dingelings fit into a hybotron.
I understand how you first have to get accustomed to new units and how conversion might need practice when you aren’t familiar with the prefixes, especially when you aren’t too experienced in the stem field. But I am still flabbergasted by the statement that having a system where everything is just base 10 and then you shift the decimal point around makes no sense. We are talking about fellow juniors here. How do you make it to age 16/17 never having heard of a decimal point or having trouble with base 10 conversion? HOW CAN YOU SAY IT MAKES NO SENSE?! It’s the simplest, most logic based system there is!
IMO metric also allows you to reason about things in your head more easily because doing base-10 calculations in your head is doable.
For example, “Each 1m section of a pipeline contains 20L of oil. The goal is to empty a 200 km section of pipe into trucks. If each truck can handle 20 tonnes of oil, how many trucks would be needed?” In metric that calculation is 20 * 1000 * 200 = 4 million L. 20 tonnes is approx 20,000 L since 1L of water is 1kg, so it’s going to be at least within an order of magnitude of that for oil. 4M / 20k = 200.
With US customary units it would be "Each 1 foot section of a pipeline contains 1.5 gallons of oil. The goal is to empty a 100 mile section of pipe into trucks. If each can handle 20 tons of oil, how many trucks will be needed? To handle that calculation you’ll have to convert feet to miles. Gallons to pounds, pounds to tons, etc. You can do it on paper, but all those weird conversions add massively to the difficulty.
There’s a reason why the American science community has long converted to metric. You just can’t do calculations like this quickly enough.
well how dense is the oil
Not as dense as those teenagers
True, also i side note. Tanker turks are measured in Volume here. Thats makes it easier
I’m imagining a tank wearing a fez.
tanker trucks
Crude is approximately the same as water, about 0.8 to 0.9 g/mL. But, even if it were significantly less dense, like gasoline (0.74 g/mL) it’s still good for an order-of-magnitude calculation. Knowing that 1L has a mass of 1kg is especially useful since many of the liquids we commonly encounter are water-based.
Fuck me we did those conversions in primary school in Italy in the eighties. Can’t remember what year exactly but we were prolly 7yo?
Exactly, we also had this early on. Also with imperial measurements or some random antique ones. I remember the worst conversion exercises were in grade 5, where you had to convert a large number, say 5316, to a number if the base was 8, not 10. This felt completely useless and took a lot of time but it also wasn’t necessarily hard. And it made sense because math usually does.
ok how about this america abopts the metric system but every moves on to base 12.
Fifth grade prepared me for base whatever, bring it on
Ok in base pi what is 10
Oh that’s a great question, we only did integers as bases - my guess would be 100.58 (or 100.18)? But I absolutely admit defeat here.
Non-integer base, anyone?
It may be that or it may be that our entire educational system has turned into shit through decades of low pay for teachers weeding out all the best people.
I am a US STEM professor.
Prove it! What is the speed of light in anacondas/average Snapchat duration?
Edit: around 10^11 anacondas per average daily snapchat usage among US teens
Does the person on Snapchat have buns? 'Cause otherwise my anaconda don’t want none, hun.
Isn’t there a filter for that?
2! No, 3!
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Clocks and calendars must give you nightmares…
Counting days suck ass. Quick, how many days during next 3 months? How many weeks is 95 days? How many weeks is 666 hours?
Our time and date is pretty much locked in, but it does have some limitations
During the French Revolution they tried to create metric time units, but it didn’t stick.
The one thing I think is possible within our lifetimes is getting rid of time zones. Instead of a business being open from 9:00 EDT to 17:00 EDT it could just be 13:00 UTC to 21:00 UTC. Then it’s much easier to schedule things with people in other parts of the world. China is already kind-of doing that, the entire country is on China Standard Time, even though it’s a huge country. That means that the sun is directly overhead at approx 3PM CST in the far west, and at the equinox the sun will rise at about 9am and set at about 9pm.
I mean, you can do that today. Just post your hours and schedule your meetings in UTC.
Tineszones exist because we have two uses for time: the linear progression of the universe, and “where is the sun and what am I doing in the day”.
To communicate across wide stretches of the earth, you need a way to know where the sun is wherever the person you’re talking to is so you don’t call them in the middle of the night when they’re asleep.
We’ll always have something that lets us lookup "is the man in Madrid likely asleep if I’m eating lunch?”.
Tineszones work well for this because I can see that Madrid is gmt+1 and I’m gmt-5, so if I’m eating lunch they’re probably not in bed, because it’s 1800 there.As long as humans care about where the sun is in the sky for how we order our days we’ll need timezones, even if we reinvent them and give them a new name.
Tineszones exist because we have two uses for time
Not really. Time zones exist for 1 reason: it was too difficult for each town to have its own time, especially when it came to train schedules. So, they were organized into zones so that 6pm in Baltimore and 6pm in Philadelphia were the same. But, people were still used to having 12 pm being the time when the sun was at its peak, so NYC was put in a different zone from Los Angeles.
To communicate across wide stretches of the earth, you need a way to know where the sun is wherever the person you’re talking to is
You normally don’t need to know where the sun is, you need to know if it is normal business hours. Or, if it’s a friend, what their schedule is like and if this is a convenient time for them. You can search for the time in that other place and guess that maybe their business hours are 9 AM to 5 PM, but that isn’t always true across companies and especially across cultures. What you really need to know is something like “what are Dimitri’s business hours” which is easier if everyone uses UTC. If you ask “What are Dimitri’s business hours” and you get the answer 8h - 16h EET, now you need to figure out what “EET” means. But, if you get 6h - 14h UTC and you’re also using UTC, there’s no conversion needed.
is the man in Madrid likely asleep if I’m eating lunch?
If that’s what you need to know, what you really need are the current UTC offsets used to describe time zones. Just store those as “sun offsets” relative to cities and nuke the time zone aspect.
See, at the end? What you’re describing is timezones with a different name, and more fine grained so we have more of them. This makes it harder.
Business hours are correlated to where the sun is, which is why I used the sun as a stand in for “how people progress through their day as mediated by our biological day night cycles”.
People communicate with people in parts of the planet where everyone would say it’s a different time because the sun is in a different part of the sky.
Lumping places together by rough sun position is better than every town keeping their own time.Jumping through hoops to avoid saying that our sense of time is linked to the location of the sun in the sky is just making things more complex than it needs to be.
Again, we already have UTC. People use it where it makes sense.
See, at the end? What you’re describing is timezones with a different name, and more fine grained so we have more of them. This makes it harder.
No, timezones are intended for people who live in them to be in a time that’s roughly coordinated with other people living in the same area. I’m saying that’s unnecessary. There’s no reason that 12:00PM should be close to the time that the sun is at its peak. That already isn’t true for people in the west of China. For them it’s normal to think that 3PM is when the sun is at its peak. What I’m suggesting is that that be applied worldwide.
If, for some reason, you want to know where the sun is relative to someone else on the planet, there are plenty of ways of doing that. I suggested some. That doesn’t mean that you need time zones.
Business hours are correlated to where the sun is
There’s a correlation, sure. But that isn’t enough information to know if a business is open, especially if it’s a business in another country which has different cultural ideas about when things should be open. Business hours are no reason to stick with clunky time zones.
People communicate with people in parts of the planet where everyone would say it’s a different time because the sun is in a different part of the sky.
No, they say that because it’s what they’re used to. If they were used to using UTC they’d say it’s the same time. They already do that for some things, because time is understood to be related to causality. As in, “Did that happen before or after the bridge collapsed?” People in different time zones will agree that in that sense, time is the same for everyone, even if they’re using a different time zone for historical reasons.
Again, we already have UTC. People use it where it makes sense.
And don’t use it where it would also make sense for historic reasons. People also use US customary units not because “they make sense”, but because of historic reasons.
My professor for my first real engineering class had an excellent quote, “A good engineer can work in any unit system.”
There’s actually quite a lot of advantages the US could have in math education if we properly harnessed both unit systems. Becoming fluent in both and regularly doing conversions would give students a lot of real world application and simple math practice.
A good software developer can also work with any language, but if you’re going to use Javascript to build an enterprise level software you are guaranteed to have a bad time.
You use what is best for the job and from my understanding there’s really no benefit to using imperial measures over SI, beyond the familiarity of growing up with them. If you were taught SI units from the very start you wouldn’t ever use imperial.
There are actually reasons to use imperial, but it’s all inertia. Industry has a bunch of controls and correlations and empirical equations that use imperial, so the inputs all need to be imperial too.
Of course, you could always do it in metric and then convert at the end. That’s one approach to unit systems.
if you’re going to use Javascript
to build an enterprise level softwareyou are guaranteed to have a bad timeftfy. also applies to Python for any code you plan to use for more than 1 day
Or you end up doing what I do to troll my friends, and mix the styles the systems like.
“This post should be 5/16ths of a decameter” The rational numbers you find in imperial are helpful for dividing things compared to decimals, but everyone gets all weird when you do fractional meters or kilograms.
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Three scientists arguing over the definition of zero
Celsius says “zero is the freezing point of water”
Fahrenheit says “no, zero is the freezing point of ammonium chloride”
Kelvin says “hold my beer”
Kelvin: Zero is the freezing point of the universe
Kelvin: Zero is the freezing point.
Scientists: Of what?
Kelvin: Yes.
I really like your attention to detail here. Fahrenheit and Celsius both have degree symbols, but Kelvin doesn’t – just as it should be.
The Kelvin timeline is the worst
lol!
Yall just jealous that a mile is longer than a kilometer.
It’s the opposite. I’ve lived in both modern, and backward countries.
When you’re driving somewhere and you see “50” to your destination, it’s infinitely preferable for that to be Km rather than miles. Makes every journey shorter
a mile? what’s that in barleycorns?
My dick is 11 units while Yours only 6.
Zero is freezing
10 is not
20 is pleasing
30 is hot
40 frying
50 dying
Someone posted here once something like
Farienhiet is how humans feel. Celsius is how water feels. Kelvin is how atoms feel.
I kinda like that.
And Rankine is a sin.
Ah, more FCK jokes.
Oh for FCK’s sake…
I read somewhere that F is the scale of how hot/cold people are, C is the scale of how hot/cold water is, and K is the scale of how hot/cold particles are.
How hot/cold organs are
Celsius.
And the other one is spelled wrong too I believe, though that one doesn’t really matter.
Lol whoops… I just changed it to F/C/K because fuckin whatever. Ya’ll know what I’m trying to say.
Which is 10.48 feet per gallon
Or 0.8435 meters per liter
100C° is not death, it is Finnish sauna temp. Really, Sauna competitions start with 110C°. Famously in 2010 one Russian competitor died, and the Finn who won had to be sent to ER.
Edit: didn’t know that they actually haven’t held any competitions after that.
I think it means dead as in trying to live in a 100° environment. Kind of like the survival rule of 3s, where you can survive 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water, 3 hours in an extreme environment, and 3 minutes without air.
I guess it could say “unsustainable” instead of dead, but that’s less snappy.
Sauna competitions
I appreciate how you just dropped this casually like of course everyone knows about Sauna competitions.
No degree sign for the my man Kelvin?
Kelvin actually isn’t written with a degree sign!
And I will continue to demand it should! But yeah, sadly it’s not…
why should it? none of the other SI units get their own fancy symbol in between the number and the unit
Okay that’s the first argument I could almost accept except typing this response I remember kg which is already one example of a unit getting something semi-special in that it always has its prefix with it!
But other than that good argument there ^^
This is why I’m Fahrenheit gang all the way. I’m not running lab experiments daily, but I am going outside all the time. If you have to express the temperature with decimal precision for everyday use, you’ve lost.
Edit: It’s hilarious how easily you can piss people off by saying Fahrenheit is subjectively better as a human temperature scale. Too much of your identity is wrapped up in being able to talk temperature in multiples of ten, people. Chill out. Maybe something near 42 degrees. Sorry, meant to say 5.6 degrees for the nerds in here.
People who use Celsius don’t typically casually refer to the temperature with a decimal place.
The comfortable range is more compressed, but just like you probably say 75 instead of 74.5, they say 24 instead of 23.889.
Fahrenheit does coincidentally line up nicely for subjective weather scales, so it’s not offensive for that use, similar to how pint is a good cup size, but in general consistency is king and you’re not loosing anything by compressing a scale, particularly when we basically already measure the temperature in five degree increments, and generally refer to in in units of ten.
As a metric person, I can confirm.
Indoor temperatures are basically 18-22 for most people most of the time.
15-25 covers the whole range of indoor temperatures that people with functioning heat or A/C would see.
For temperatures outside we commonly round to the nearest five:*
- -5 and below: very cold winter weather
- 0 cold winter weather
- 5 mild winter weather
- 10 autumn weather
- 15 spring weather
- 20 summer weather
- 25 beach weather
- 30 heatwave
- 35 and higher heatwave in the Sahara
The only thing I admire of the Fahrenheit scale is that it can round to the nearest 10 and still be a little bit more precise than Celsius with the nearest 5. And when discussing fever temperatures, Celsius needs half degrees and Fahrenheit does not.
But it’s an absolutely awful scale for cooking.
Rounding Fahrenheit temperatures to 10 is less precise than rounding Celsius temperatures to 5.
Yeah, but precision really doesn’t matter for the scale of “what do I wear outside”. “The 70s” and ”20-25” both convey “short sleeves, light pants or shorts”.
If you want precision you shouldn’t be rounding at all, and you’re probably doing something where you should use Celsius because of convention. Rounding and precision don’t really go together.
I agree; I was just being precise.
For cooking I think it’s mostly a matter of what you’re used to. Neither 145 or 63 are particularly “intuitive” numbers in my opinion, so as long as it’s clear which you’re using it doesn’t really matter.
Of course, generations of humans cooked without thermometers or thermostats. You could cook with the Rankine scale if you get used to it .
But let me just say, I don’t think it’s an accident France is both the originator of the Metric system and haute cuisine.
Advanced cooking is as much engineering as it is art.
So, it actually isn’t a coincidence, but not in the way that you’re implying. :)
After their whole “fuck the monarchy” phase, France got deep into “throw it out and replace it with something better”. Part of that was metric, and part was “OMG they’re so many unemployed royal chefs now, what if we made it so everyone could have a chance to eat like a king for a meal?”.
Surplus chefs, a cultural tilt towards trying new things, and Frances historical position giving them access to a huge array of spices, meat, dairy and fish made for a great opportunity for culinary revolution.
So they’re both born from the same spirit, but one didn’t cause the other. :) Thankfully they didn’t go the way of metric time, or the French revolutionary calendar, neither of which panned out.
In Canada the scale goes higher and lower.
- -5 to -10: a warm day in the winter, a break from the misery
- -10 to -20: Ugh, again?
- -20 to -40: Wow, it’s actually really cold out!
- -40 and below: Wow, even with all my winter gear, this is going to suck.
Then sometimes in summer:
- 35-40: WTF, we’re hotter than the Sahara again!
Fahrenheit does coincidentally line up nicely for subjective weather scales
In what sense?
similar to how pint is a good cup size
Actually a pint is 2 cups.
In the sense that the image we’re talking under is discussing. Below zero is when air temperature starts to get hazardous, and above 100. The ten degree increments are convenient delineations of rough weather conditions in an actionable way.
This isn’t intentional on the part of Fahrenheit, and it’s not some deal breaking feature since people who use Celsius for the same thing obviously know when to wear a coat or if the air will kill them outside.
It’s just a nice coincidence.Actually a pint is 2 cups.
Nice.
Below zero is when air temperature starts to get hazardous
Hazardous in what sense? If you’re not wearing proper clothing, lower than 10C can be hazardous. Many hikers who get lost get hypothermia even if it’s above zero because they were dressed for an energetic hike, not sitting around waiting for a rescue.
If you are properly dressed, -10C is no big deal. Many people do outdoor sports for hours when the temperature is well in the negatives.
IMO, if you’re within 10C of ideal room temperature, you may be uncomfortable but you’re probably not in danger. But, if the temperature is above 30C or below 10C you need to take precautions: shade and water in the case of hot weather, warm clothing in the case of cold weather. I don’t think there’s anything special about 0C for humans, except for the fact it’s when water turns to ice, rain turns to snow, etc. If you have the right gear, 5C, 0C, -10C and -20C are all survivable, possibly even comfortable. You just need more and more specialized gear as the temperature gets lower.
Like I said, people who use Celsius know when to wear a coat.
But if we’re maintaining that 0 and 100 are special numbers, then Fahrenheit maps hazardous conditions more neatly to those numbers.
I don’t think 0 and 100 have as much special significance as people seem to think when it’s assigned to water.
Like I said, people who use Celsius know when to wear a coat.
So do people who use Fahrenheit.
But if we’re maintaining that 0 and 100 are special numbers, then Fahrenheit maps hazardous conditions more neatly to those numbers.
I completely disagree. 0 Fahrenheit is very cold, but there’s nothing special about that temperature. You need to start dressing for cold conditions long before it gets that cold, and if you dress for cold conditions you can easily handle temperatures well below 0F. 100F is also nothing useful. Yes, it’s very hot, but you start needing to take precautions for heat long before it hits 100F.
Basically the Fahrenheit scale has nothing particularly useful at 0 or 100F. The Celsius scale has useful things at 0C and 100C. 100C is not useful for weather, but 0C is very useful for weather because it tells you whether it’s likely to be icy out.
I don’t say 74.5, your right but I do care when the temperature is set to 72 or 73. I can tell the difference of that vs. 70 even.
which temperature unit requires using decimals?
Have you ever stayed in a hotel with the wall thermostat set to C? If so, press the up/down temperature buttons. They’ll move by 0.2 or 0.5 usually.
many times, and no they don’t.
Go figure. I guess the hotels I stay at don’t exist then. Thanks for the info.
Who said that? I’m in Europe, and here all temperature controls I’ve seen move in 1 degree increments. Maybe it’s different in the states.
Maybe someday a metric country will take 13th place for walking on the moon
Guess which system NASA uses
I refuse
Chuckled at this. Well done
Pre- or post- Mars orbiter?
Well they did for the moon landing, and have as a policy since 1979.
I didn’t know about why that orbiter failed though, pretty funny!
The orbiter failed because while NASA used metric, the contractor (Lockheed Martin, I believe?) used imperial for one system and no one caught their mistake.
It is worth pointing out though that NASA employees use imperial units in their everyday lives. Using both systems may have given US scientists and engineers a competitive advantage over European scientists and engineers.
That burn was out of this world
If you have to express the temperature with decimal precision for everyday use, you’ve lost.
I don’t think it’s necessary to do in Celsius though?
“Necessary” is a strong word, but it is, moreso than when using Fahrenheit.
Weather, cooking, at least people around me don’t use decimals for that. One degree C is not really big enough difference for those two to break down into decimals. Moreso I guess in the sense that one Fahrenheit difference is smaller than the same for Celsius. Do you know people using decimals for daily stuff with C?
When measuring body temperature, digital temp gauges usually, and my cars AC thermostat (0.5C jumps) come to mind right away.
But honestly you’re using decimals so much during daily life that it’s really a 2nd nature to deal with them.
I don’t measure my body temp daily. Maybe it’s a thing some do but I don’t think I know anyone who does. As for cars, don’t know about those. I could see them doing decimals in AC but I also don’t see it as something that’s needed. Mine just had heater with those things you turn where the slider goes █ ▆ ▄ ▁
Yeah not quite “daily” thing but very very common thing especially since kid started kindergarten lol
Hah, that I can believe
Daily? No. Never. I’d actually think it weird if an app or person told me the weather temperature with decimal places. The only place I’d expect to see decimals is body temperature which is not daily and not something you really think about.
I grew up using Celsius but had a thermostat in Farenheit for long enough to get accustomed to them both, at least when it comes to comfortable living temperature ranges. I find they both work fine in that range, but (likely because I grew up with it) find Celsius much more intuitive when it comes to more extreme temperatures.
As said elsewhere, every ten degrees more or less marks different weather ranges for what I can expect to feel and wear that day.
I think it’s a straw man personally because most people will still talk in integer amounts.
Nobody even uses exact degrees when using Fahrenheit and talking about the weather. You can’t feel the difference between 71 and 72. Most people just round off to the nearest 5 degrees or so when talking about the weather. With Celsius you might be slightly more likely to use a non-rounded value, say 22 degrees instead of 20 or 25. But, you’re almost never going to use fractional degrees.
We all subjectively are more used to our scales, and what numbers mean “very hot” and “very cold” are very varied based on your physiology, adaptation to the climate and the relative humidity.
For water, however, freezing pretty bang on zero (slight variation due to pressure), and you get enough days below zero water of different amounts will start freezing. Which I’d argue is an objective benefit over Fahrenheit for weather. Water freezing at zero is a useful distinction.
Negative? Freezing. Looks great on a graph with an X axis for time and y for temp. To get the equivalent nice graph in Fahrenheit gotta put a line at whatever weird number lines up with freezing.
A random city which I thought may be dipping below zero. That’s interesting, there’s a line at freezing, almost like that’s useful or something.
Putting a line that’s not zero, look at what Fahrenheit needs to do to mimic a fraction of our power!
Point of order, the Celsius chart also has a line.
Without a scale on the axis it’s kinda necessary with both so I’m not sure that conveyed your point too well.Celsius is good because of how it fits with the rest of metric and the units stay pretty rather often, and because everyone else uses it.
That it makes water freeze at zero is kinda the smaller bit. As you mention, charts can just have lines on them because you can’t see the axis and it’s really not that hard to remember 32 vs 0. Hell, I remember both. Also 100, 212 and 451. Had to lookup 233 though, I don’t remember that one.My point here is that both graphs have a line at freezing (°F and °C). My point is that freezing is a useful differentiation when it comes to weather. Celcius is suitably set to have freezing at zero, a nice round number, which then is negative when water starts to freeze.
It’s not that hard to remember, sure, and both systems work okay, but I dislike when people pretend there aren’t objective (however slight) advantages to Celcius for every day use.
I’d challenge anyone to find a benefit to Fahrenheit that isn’t subjective, for every day use. (Because as noted, Celcius obviously wipes the floor with Fahrenheit in scientific use)
I feel people are clutching at straws trying to justify why Fahrenheit is “better”, or even “as good” for everyday use. But heck, they should just live with the fact they just like it, and that’s fine. (Just keep it to themselves because they’ll get weirdos like me on the internet who will tell them they’re wrong).
We all subjectively are more used to our scales
Definitely agree. We’re comfortable with what we grew up with and there’s nothing wrong with that.
For water, however, freezing pretty bang on zero … Which I’d argue is an objective benefit over Fahrenheit for weather.
Ehhh, only if you have to think of freezing as zero. For us Fahrenheiters, “above 0” is cold but manageable with a coat. “below 0” means don’t go outside unless you have to. That’s a pretty convenient gauge to me.
Negative? Freezing. Looks great on a graph
Of course. If you’re plotting shit on a graph then you’re likely doing lab work, and I’ll agree that celsius is a great scale. Not for daily “how’s the weather” use though.
For water, however, freezing pretty bang on zero … Which I’d argue is an objective benefit over Fahrenheit for weather.
Ehhh, only if you have to think of freezing as zero. For us Fahrenheiters, “above 0” is cold but manageable with a coat. “below 0” means don’t go outside unless you have to. That’s a pretty convenient gauge to me.
Notice how 0 means something concrete for celcius, and for Fahrenheit it’s just your subjective feeling. I’d argue this is an objective benefit, which mean celcius takes the cake for weather too (and it’s a tie or Celcius in every othe case, also). Ice forming means it gets slippery. Having a distinct indication of a negative symbol and emphasis on freezing at zero, I’d argue, is starting to be objectively more useful, since nothing in particular changes state at 0 °F which is of daily use.
Negative? Freezing. Looks great on a graph
Of course. If you’re plotting shit on a graph then you’re likely doing lab work, and I’ll agree that celsius is a great scale. Not for daily “how’s the weather” use though.
But I gave you weather graphs 🙁, this isn’t lab work in the slightest, that’s real-world everyday stuff. And funnily enough the Fahrenheit graph had a line at freezing too. Just not at 0.
Celcius is absolutely for “how’s the weather” use, and it’s even slight better for “how’s the weather”.
You don’t need decimals for everyday measurements. No one can tell the difference between 60 and 62 degrees F. With Celsius 10 or 5 degree ranges is all you need to know for weather purposes, and it falls into much more logical ranges.
Below 0 = cold, limit time outside 0-10C = wear a coat 10-15 = wear a jacket 15-20 = comfortable 20-25 = shorts 25-30 = hot 30-40 = limit time outside 40+ = thank you global warming; don’t live here.
People can spend hours outside at below 0C temperatures as long as they’re wearing the right gear. Some people even like doing sports outside when it’s -20C.
But, you’re right that most of the time people only care to the 5 degree range. It’s a bit different when it’s close to the ideal room temperature. If you personally like it at 22C and the room is set to 20C you will probably feel cold after a while. If it’s 24C you’ll probably feel overly warm. But, except for something like measuring a fever, people almost never care about fractional degrees.
You’re completely right, but this community gets way too much satisfaction from their “fAhReNhEiT sUcKs lMaO” circlejerk so you’re getting downvoted.
But you’re absolutely correct.
There is another! Woo hoo!
It’s kind of telling (and hilarious to me) how many comments I was able to spawn just by saying, “I like Fahrenheit better”. People using Celsius for daily, is-it-comfy-for-a-human use absolutely lose their shit if you challenge them.
What.
I’m not talking any louder, you’re going to have to move to the front of the room.
