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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Really had to do a double take. Like, what the fuck, the ocean is boiling, it can't be that be that bad, right? Then it clicked that you're using that weird Fahrenheit system.
Yes, sorry, it's weird. Celsius is easy - water freezes at 0 and boils at 100 and there we go..
F is easy.. 0 is cold. 100 is HOT..
As an American this is how I interpret Celsius
30 is hot.
20 is nice.
10 is cool.
0 is ice.
40 and 50 can just not, please.
Yeah I'm down by 30° latitude. I'd be inclined to agree with you back when I lived north of 40°
As a Norwegian:
I regularly convert between the two just by remembering the conversions for 10, 20, 30, and 40. It's actually pretty easy.
If you ever forget what one of them is, then just add 18F for every 10C from the last one you remember.
Metric:
10 mm = 1cm, 100 cm = 1m, 1000 mm = 1m, 1000m = 1 km.
1 cm3 water = 1 gram
1 Watt heats 1 gram of water 1 C°
1 dm3 water = liter = 1 kg
1 m3 = 1000 kg = 1 tonne
Imperial:
1 mile = ?? yards = ?? feet = ?? inches
1 ton = ?? stone = ??punds = ?? oz = ?? grain
1 Galon = ?? pints = ?? fluid ounce
1 inch3 = ?? grain = ?? power to heat ?? fahrenheit
There is no system to any of these, they are unscientific and impractical.
How does Imperial still have any relevance as a measurement system?
That's exactly how I've memorised imperial as well. We must have used the same manual.
Yes, you could say Imperial is easier, because you'd never calculate anything in your head, you ask Google.
But how did that even work before we had Internet?
I suppose they had little booklets. A bit like the logarithmic tables that people kept for complicated calculations. Maybe they were issued on the first day of school or something. People would keep them all their life and look at them surreptitiously whenever they had to convert units.
1 barrel is 734 ounces. Whoo what a handy table. LOL ;)
I lived someplace with an old sticker inside a cabinet door with a bunch of basic, useful conversions. It was neat.
60 miles = 318 Kilofeet
This is actually great, I've never found a good way to remember Celsius temperatures. I might go closer to Terrasque's scale though, 30 is definitely hot where I am.
Thinking about it... Isn't that exactly what the Celsius scale does just with reliable definitions about what "cold" and "HOT" mean?
Shower water with 38°C is hot, a bowl of rice at 38°C/100F is decidedly not "HOT". So the perceived convenience of the Fahrenheit scale is not applicable to everything, is it? How is it convenient then?
O F is the freezing temperature of a saturated brine solution, while 100 F was the body temperature of a human. Yes, body temperature has been revised a bit, but the two points were chosen as stable points that anyone could access that would generally be unchanged by pressure changes, etc. Human homeostasis is quite good at keeping a temperature in a narrow range. Also, boiling is massively affected by air pressure. At 5000' elevation, boiling is approximately 202 F and continues to get lower as altitude increases. Lots of people live at higher altitudes. (Hi! I am one of them !)
Edit: I was a little off on the temperature selected for body temp, but still pretty close: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit
This is really interesting and I think there is a lot of support for the body temperature point. I was curious about whether the method of deriving 0F is insensitive to pressure changes and I can't find any evidence of that. But I don't know enough about chemistry or physics myself. Do you know, or have any details on where you learned this?
So I was a little off on the temperature chosen for the body, but the Wikipedia page has some good details: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit
Re: freezing temperature of brine and pressure sensitivity, of course it is sensitive but we are talking about MPa-GPa of pressure, way beyond small pressure changes due to changes in altitude. You can get started by looking at physical chemistry of solutions if you are interested! A good place to start is "freezing point depression" and "boiling point elevation" of solutions. Also, single component phase diagrams: here it is for water.
It is convenient because they are used to it. That is all there is to it, and peace be to that.
It only becomes silly when they begin to claim that F is better for "human temperature", because again it all comes down to what you are used to and celsius is just as convenient if you are used to that.
It's not boiling but that is hot tube temperature for reference.
With how mountainous Europe is, no it doesn't. What bothers me (aside from the ongoing, increasingly vivid global extinction event) is the sense that, were the situation flipped, you guys wouldn't miss a beat telling people to look it up instead of assuming every country works like theirs does.
Good news is, we'll both have something else to complain about in a year or two, if we're...still able to do that.
Oh, I think you might be projecting there. Have you ever been to Germany or France or any other European country? If the situation was flipped and we Europeans were the only ones using a system no one else does, we wouldn't tell you to look it up, we would never stop complaining about our governments for not changing shit.
Well, I'm..american, so I'm generally too broke to leave my house. I will openly admit I'm increasingly jealous of the French tendency to fuck shit up at the slightest inconvenience. They seem to know a lot more about getting things done.
I think one would also have to account for geography in that, no? If a country were landlocked and surrounded by a ton of others that all used the same separate system that they themselves do not, then there would be very significant reason and pressure to change. As much as it's derided for it, America IS very much a universe unto itself, and the only dealings it has with nations that do things differently are in areas of work that have switched over to more standard measurements.
All science and engineering are primarily or totally done in metric ~~after we crashed the Mars Orbiter headlong into the dirt at mach speed.~~ Everything else tends to use the more mathmatically sensible kelvin. Mexico uses metric and celsius, but I've literally never had a reason to go to mexico and probably never will. Canada uses both, but same deal.
I make a concerted effort to include both systems whenever I have to type for an audience of mixed/ambiguous nationality, but in my day-to-day, I will never meet another person who can easily switch between them and I have no use to do that either. It is a useless skill for me to have. Despite this, I have the sense that I see more europeans complaining about farenheit than I ever see Americans complain about celsius existing, and for such a damn stupid populace, I'm left to assume we either comment less or google it more.
Regarding projecting, I could be tongue-in-cheek and ask if you've ever met a European before. Our food. Our language. Our buildings, cities, cars, media, sports, slang, holidays, garbage disposals, windows, classrooms, whether or not we take our shoes off in the house. I struggle to think of a single subject you guys will not routinely make an inordinate amount of fuss over, as if it killed your children, and I'm convinced at this point that it's for love of spite and there's literally nothing we could do to make Europe happy if we wanted to. It makes sense that any chance to acknowledge the alternate measuring system would be prime ribs.
Brits especially will snark about american english that routinely turns out to be a defunct british word. Germans will complain about the drywall, but their own houses have the same drywall. Houses in Switzerland are made of wood, but nobody bitches at the Swiss.
Parting note, the downvote feels in keeping with that kind of pettiness.
Oh, I think you might be projecting there. Have you ever been to Germany or France or any other European country? If the situation was flipped and we Europeans were the only ones using a system no one else does, we wouldn't tell you to look it up, we would never stop complaining about our governments for not changing shit.