There was something I read once upon a time that was like:
F is how hot/cold people are C is how hot/cold water is K is how hot/cold matter is
I feel like that’s pretty accurate.
I got used to Celsius while living abroad in Europe and Japan and prefer it to Fahrenheit. The extra granularity of the latter scale doesn’t really add much more utility.
However, while 32 F and 212 F are pretty arbitrary, so is calibrating to the freezing and boiling temperatures of water. I’d rather have a scale that’s calibrated to humans rather than H2O.
212 warm / 100 warm
warmMeme was made by a space shuttle tile.
warm
0 C being the temperature water freezes is useful for knowing if there is ice outside, which has practical use. If we keep going the way we are, soon 100 will be an indicator that there is no water outside. Practical if you’re a hydrophobe or hydrophile.
Fun fact Americans do both
europeans too. why are monitors and TVs in inch 😭
I know no one in the U.S. that measures anything in yards outside of football. It’s feet/miles. We don’t say we are 2y1" tall.
All I’m saying is I am American and use both metric and imperial all the time and they both are good and suck for different reasons.
Yeah sorry, I was trying to expand on what you were saying, not refute it
Burgerperson here, metric should be standard
Soon it won’t matter anyways. Isn’t AmericaUS like…done now? We can move on with our normal shit and chuckle at it like a museum piece.
Ah yes Americaus
Calling the boiling point of water simply “warm” is a bit sus.
It’s a warm sauna.
Come up with a metric time system then. Also, fix the damn calendar.
The second is the metric time system: A day is 86.4 kiloseconds!
Jokes aside the French did come up with Decimal Time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time), but it didn’t catch on.
Never too late to catch on.
Also, fix the damn calendar
13 months, 28 days per month = 364 days. New Year’s Day can be its own holiday separate from the rest of the year, and every fourth year it can be 2 days long.
Now we just need to get Big Calendar on board.
Oh yeah? How about
Ok, that’s on me, I knew that existed. I meant adopt a metric time system.
But why? Binary is a better basis for numbering, when I was demo coding in assembler on the Commodore 64, I learned a technique to vastly speed up trig calculations: divide the circle into 256 degrees, you can use simple 8 bit integer math to blast out sine values. I figure the same should go with time. It’s not like we still use our fingers to count.
Meanwhile, me counting to 4 in base two using my fingers.
Neat ! Gradians
There is. Now be a hero, lead the way and use it.
Also, fix the damn calendar.
The calendar has been intentionally mangled to obscure the solstices, equinoxes, etc. for the sake of religion. The shitty and arbitrary nature is a feature, not a bug. It’s emphasizes hegemonic control of our lives.
A similar thing is happening with time where solar noon, sunrises, and sunsets are obscured for the sake of capitalist work clocks.
The system doesn’t want our lives based on the natural world around us. It wants control.
They’re never going to “fix” this because it already works as designed.
Why would you want to change the time system? The whole world agrees on the current system
0 is absolute cold, any other system is wrong.
Ok Kevin
100 warm
Yeah, I suppose that’s one way to describe 100°C
“It’s a bit warm today.”
On a cosmic scale 100C is practically freezing.
That’s how I like my showers
That’s how I like my
showerssaunaYou need more wood
Boiling warm is still warm
Kilometers to miles is probably the easiest common conversion. 5 km is 3 miles, easy peasy.
Except 5km is not 3 miles… it’s 3.1069 miles so off by a considerable factor. 1 mile = 1.6km is a much more accurate approximation that’s easy to remember.
That’s 4%, that’s not a significant amount for functional purposes and it’s a whole number to whole number conversion. Most of the time, if I’m converting, it’s from metric to imperial so 1 km is 0.62 miles. If you tell me the speed limit is 70 km/h it’s way easier for me to calculate 70 ÷ 5 x 3 = 42 mph than to calculate either 0.62 x 70 or 70 ÷ 1.6 = 43.49.
Are we talking about British, American or sea miles?
A mile is 8 furlongs.
C is even more intuitive than the graphic.
0 = water’s frozen 100 = water’s boiling
I had an American explain “well you just know that 68 is long sleeve warm, 80 is shorts” or something, as if people cannot memorize that 18 is chilly and 21/22 is usual room temperature, 26 is shorts.
The only thing I dislike like about Celsius is that my thermostat supports both, but doesn’t allow half degrees Celsius, so it provides less granular control in Celsius than if you set it to Fahrenheit.
I’m in Québec, -10 is chilly, 14 is shorts :)
I was about to say, in Denmark i definitely have shorts on in the teens, else I’d barely need to own any
Same in Alberta -10 maybe put on a jacket, 14 grab the beers and fire up the BBQ it’s patio time
oui, toujours :)
As you approach 0°F it is getting dangerously cold. As you approach 100°F it’s getting dangerously hot. Celsius is obviously better scientifically, but fahrenheit is pretty reasonable for everyday use (unlike other imperial measurements).
0°F is way colder than 100°F is hot.
There are hardly any population centers that reach the lower temperature while there’s a shitton of them that reach the hotter one. That should say enough about how dangerous and inhospitable each is.
That’s not true. NYC frequently reaches 0°F and is home to 15 million people. All of northern US, and all of Canada frequently reach 0°F. It’s a fact than anything below 0°F is actively dangerous and anything above 100°F is actively dangerous.
Anything below 10°F is actively dangerous. Anything above 110°F is actively dangerous.
NYC barely ever reaches 0°F according to this site:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/new-york/lowest-temperatures-by-year
Seriously, NYC is closer to having regular 100°F weather than 0°F and it is in the Northern US!
In other terms: -18°C is extremely fucking cold, 38°C is just regular hot.
I grew up in Rochester NY, and there are many days with a zero or subzero windchill. Once it gets below 0°F, it is definitely actively dangerous. I’ve waited for a school bus in 7 to 10°F weather without issues.
Really my point is you can memorize new numbers when you look at the weather report.
When I go (went ) to the US it was not obvious to me looking at the weather in Fahrenheit what it would feel like.
Of course. I’m just adding that there is some logic to fahrenheit in day to day use.
Yeah, you just remember 0/20/40 °C close enough to 30/70/100 °F is freezing/good/heat stroke.
Copium is real
Most metric units are designed around water in some way. Very easy to convert to different units because of this. 1mL of water is equal to 1g of water which is equal to 1 cubic cm of water, for example.
and it takes 1 calorie to heat 1g of water by 1°C, so with your daily recommended food intake of 2000kcal you could heat 2000l of water by 1°C or raise 20l of water from 0°C to 100°C.
Also a normal person can rides the bike between 0W and 100W comfortably, while trained people peak at around 1000W for short sprints.
And weight also revolves around water. 1L of water is 1KG which is 1000cm3 whereas 1cm3 is 1g. Super easy to calculate things.
Edit: correction
I once heard an American say something “weighs as much as a 2 liter bottle” and it made me raise an eyebrow.
*cm³
*at sea level, assuming pure water
It’s intuitive with respect to water. Applying it to anything else is exactly the same as the Fahrenheit scale: you associate various things with numbers.
Tbf as someone who grew up with the imperial system due to being raised by a British boomer its fairly easy if you’re familiar with it, I still often cook in imperial due to a load of old cook books I have.
Having said that anyone who wants the imperial system in the modern day is a absolute idiot, metric is objectively superior.
A brit once told me that the imperial system makes sense if you look at it from the perspective of a peasant at the market - units of 12 was a lot easier to work with in the olden days because it’s easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6.
I guess it makes sense from a historical viewpoint.
Its basically entirely this, its not for no reason much of the world wound up using something akin to it. Honestly for small scale stuff such as cooking I do genuinely quite like using it but especially in the digital age its simply become obsolete I can’t imagine having to code something which requires employing imperial measurements.
I just wish it was always 12 instead of 3, 12, 1760 and whatever the eff they come up with.
Farenheit on the other hand does not make sense at all
Fahrenheit makes more sense as a unit in use. 100 equals hot, but doesn’t equal death, 0 equals cold. In a lot of the world freezing is only kind of cold, not actually cold. Metric makes sense for science while imperial is more of a common persons unit; that’s also why Americans in science use metric.
Best way to use Fahrenheit is to consider it as a percentage of how hot it is. 0 degrees is zero percent hot, and 100 is fully hot. Beyond that you’re in super cold/hot territory.
But yeah, Celsius is still better.
Fahrenheit is better at describing weather in reference to human interaction with temperature Celsius is better for everything else.
But that’s the same for everything imperial. It’s always better when it comes to actual human elements. How big is that stick? How many things in that piece of bread? How much weight is that rock? I need to move.
While metric is basically better anytime you have tooling you need to be extremely exact. You need to know something that is less human and more mathematical or abstract.
Well each system can do the thing. They’re not great at it quickly falls apart. That’s a big reason why people tend to say imperial sucks. Most people no longer actually interact with the natural world anymore. Everything is computers, exact measurements, quantifiable numbers from shops. The only thing left that most people deal with on a day-to-day basis is the weather and why Fahrenheit may be better than Celsius. It’s only vaguely better since weather is already such an imprecise thing that really doesn’t matter.
Well yes the granularity of Fahrenheit is far more useful. If you actually want to be like specific about things Celsius when it comes to weather it’s close enough f****** does the job
That “better reference to human interaction” argument just doesn’t hold any water though. The claim that using imperial means you are closer to nature is ludicrous and also horrendously US defaultist. Much of continental Europe was fully metric when people were still so much “closer to nature” and barely anything “was computer” yet, except for some room filling mainframes. Yet people here had no issue with all those metric units.
While imperial is absolutely atrocious at engineering and at scientific applications, SI units work perfectly fine for human reference interactions. Are there tiny differences, that give maybe imperial an edge in some circumstances? Possibly? In a way that it actually matters? Hardly.
This is certainly the case for °C vs °F. Anything finer than °C is below the precision of everyday thermometers and also hard to percept. While increments larger than that can be easily measured and are also perceptible. All relevant environmental temperatures are merely 2 digits, with boiling water at 100. That’s perfectly adjusted to human interaction and reference. Most people don’t need finer “granularity” in everyday life but if they do, they simply include the first position after the comma. This is optional and completely frictionless “ganularity”, when you need it.
I am not saying that Fahrenheit is necessarily worse. It is one of the few imperial units that don’t suck. But it is also not meaningfully better either, just different.
I mean, you can always use different units in different contexts. We use F for the weather but C for the kettle, personally! (C for the oven would probably also be better, but all the recipes are in F.)
– Frost
It makes a lot more sense if you know about chains. A chain is 22 yards, and there are 80 chains in a mile. There are also rods (a quarter of a chain) and furlongs (10 chains)
So: 3 Barleycorn in an inch 4 inches in a hand 3 hands in a foot 3 feet in a yard 5.5 yards in a rod 4 rods in a chain 10 chains in a furlong 8 furlongs in a mile
… And of course there’s the overlapping systems of length for manufacturing, agriculture, maritime, and horse racing, which have their own, separate subdivisions and largest units, but usually you can get away with just the nail, the fathom, the nautical mile, and the span.
Imperial is FAR more human and “natural” then metric. Metric fails frequently at being quantifiable with natural experiences and objects.
But imperial falls apart the second your trying to do something at a large scale, super small scales or literally anything that isn’t “human scale”
And basically every test I’ve ever seen. If you don’t have tools or some reference point, people will nine times out of 10 be able to more accurately gauge something using imperial measurements then using metric measurements.
Metric relies far too much on reference in tooling, but that’s also its greatest strength. It’s absurdly, exact and reliable while imperial is loosey-goosey
And basically every test I’ve ever seen. If you don’t have tools or some reference point, people will nine times out of 10 be able to more accurately gauge something using imperial measurements then using metric measurements.
That’s clearly utter bollocks
The biggest issue with imperial recipes is the constant use of measures by volume. If everything was in weight ounces it would be alright, but a lot of recipes insist on measuring solids by volume, like a cup of flour, a teaspoon of sugar etc, making them a lot harder to replicate consistently. My flour could be denser, my sugar could be finer, if things were measure by the actual mass such things would not matter but instead I have to fill a cup and pray to the gods that my cup of Ecuadorian flour has the same density as the one on the recipe (it almost never is)
Surely using oz & lbs on a scale solves this?
That’s the whole point, the recipes aren’t in oz and pounds, they’re in cups and table/teaspoons
Sounds like a issue with American cook books then ngl, you can also get defined standardised cul &tbsp scoops.
As a European living in the US now for many years the temperature scale is the least of my annoyances. It’s easy enough to memorize be ranges for what to wear. Fahrenheit is more granular, which is nice sometimes but really doesn’t matter.
No, let’s convert all the ridiculous weight/volume measures first. Having two kinds of ounces makes no sense. Measuring solids by volume (mostly) doesn’t make sense. Having different units for different magnitudes doesn’t make sense.
Fortunately things are often labeled in both metric and customary units so I can convert way easier.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to have my 12 fluid ounces of coffee and a 1/3 cup of oatmeal.
I very much prefer to cook/bake/prep in metric grams.
2c white flour, sifted.
1c brown sugar, packed.
1c room temperature water.
2tsp active dry yeast.
2tbsp vegetable oil.
1/2tsp baking powder.
2 egg yolks.
5 egg whites.
Pinch of cinnamon.Fuck you. Tell me how many grams that is. I don’t need five different tools to measure out my ingredients. I need a wet bowl, a dry bowl, and a scale.
Also this isn’t a real recipe I just started naming shit at random.
I’ve had to translate recipes from Norwegian to American and this struggle is real. Never thought I’d need to look up material density tables for cooking.
“To American” … what?
We have kitchen scales, we know how to weigh ingredients.
Old recipes in English often use volume measurements, across the pond too.
Modern recipes use weights when possible.
Idk why you’d convert to
ye olde style.I accidentally a word. Converting recipes from Norwegian and metric to American and US customary units.
I’m aware. I have a scale, too. But most people didn’t weigh dry ingredients. So when I translate for someone else I have to use the “normal” measures they’re used to. For myself, I speak the language and just use metric, my scale, and a measuring cup with both markings.
You made cake btw.
You gotta do the cooking by the book.
Having the more granular temperature seems more practical. I often find myself adjusting my thermostat by just a single degree F. Do heating/ac thermostats in Europe use half degrees as increments? Even then I don’t think it’s as granular. But just integer values would be super annoying.
Half a C is actually quite close to a whole F in delta. I don’t have a thermostat though.
I have not seen any thermostats in Europe with decimal degrees. But I also don’t think a thermostat is necessarily accurate to that level anyway.
lol you don’t think it’s accurate to a degree Fahrenheit? Why wouldn’t it be?
Because it’s mass produced consumer goods operating on a “below x temperature turn on heat/turn off AC” and “above y temperature turn off heat/turn on AC”. Old ones are just bimetallic strips where you change the trigger position with a slider, and modern ones use commodity grade temperature sensors, and neither is guaranteed to be placed particularly far from the vent.
The sensor is typically on the thermostat. Not at the vents. You would typically place the sensor in a central location in the house. A high quality multi speed motor AC is designed to keep a decently consistent temperature which is a bit more complex than just turn on / turn off. If you’re dropping $15k to $30k on central AC, they aren’t going to cheap out on a poor quality temp sensor.
It’s just not that fine tuned of an instrument. The furnace also runs on intervals so it’s just going to naturally fluctuate a bit. Like with anything “it depends”, but I doubt it’s possible to keep the room within a tenth of a centigrade just with a consumer level thermostat. Maybe in a small room with resistive heating? I’d love to see actual measurements of this.
Thermostats are not exactly calibrated machines unless you spend for a high end model. Put a few next to each other and they might differ 1°C, 2°F. Worse if you take the really cheap stuff.
The ones in the UK go by half a degree.
If they’d just standardized on one unit per measurement and apply si prefixes it’s still an imperial unit but easier to work with. Say a quart for volume, and a yard for distance, because they’re close to liter and meter. But I guess a kiloyard and a deciquart is taking it too far.
Yeah I think at that point it would be easier to just go metric.
Most Americans actually seem to be five with metric and probably would not mind it too much if we just switched. The objections are basically: 1) it’s too expensive to switch now (okay), or 2) it’s part of our identity (doubt). I swear to God everything is a culture war with some people.
More rational people, especially in STEM where it’s already the standard, prefer it.
In general though, I would argue that Americans know metric better then Europeans know US customary, for what that’s worth
It’s mostly about what you’re used to. Americans buy soda in liters, run 5km and do drugs by the gram. But we buy gasoline and milk in gallons and our recipes call for flour by volume. It’s mostly inertia. At the end of the day you have to communicate with people around you so you use units they understand.
Saying its too expensive to change is bullshit. Metric is common enough that most people who care about units at all end up having one set of tools for each system so they can use both as needed. This includes industry and machinists. It wouldn’t actually cost anything to change at this point we could just stop designing new things in imperial units and in a couple decades we would barely need imperial tools anymore, except to work on old stuff. Some engineers are just as pig headed as anyone though, so they just keep using imperial even though they know both, use both, and still run into problems with imperial.
But you don’t switch in one go, so costs can be spread out over years. First you would do double labeling, roll that out slowly, and with time the customary units slowly fades out.
Sure, I get that, and we already have dual labeling on a lot of stuff, maybe even most of the stuff. The problem there is that nobody actually reads the other labeling, so they are also not learning.
They need to go back to what they were doing before: First decide that we’re moving over so that mandates can be enforced.
Second, do what you were saying, and do dual labeling during the transition–but make metric most the prominent.
Third, educate kids in schools to use it (this already happens to a degree).
Fourth, launch massive informational campaigns to teach people how and why to use metric.
Fifth, step down the dual labeling gradually as more people are comfortable with the new units.
I expect there to be a long tail of non-metric units in use (see UK), but if we can switch more things over that is still an improvement. Heck, I’ll even take them just decimalizing and removing some smaller units (like lbs/oz).
The history of metrication in the US is as frustrating as it is an interesting read. It can certainly be done and many countries have shown it can be done, but it takes commitment and support from the highest levels.
Measuring solids by volume (mostly) doesn’t make sense.
This could be apocryphal, but I seem to recall hearing that a lot of American recipes got established during times of westward expansion, and that it made more sense for people moving out to the frontier to carry a measuring cup and a set of spoons that it did for them to carry a carefully-calibrated scale.
Yeah that makes sense. And in a pinch (no pun intended), measuring your solids by volume or even just eyeballing it is good enough for a lot of cooking (baking is a different matter).
But let’s not forget that Europe was not always metric, either. They went through the same process. They had the same units (or similar units) as US has now, with a lot of the same quirks. That was the entire point of the metric system: have one consistent set of units. United States was onboard early for metrication, but backed out before it completed it, so here we are.
It’s funny because all of the imperial units are mathematically based on metric anyway.
I’m an American, so I started with imperial units, but I am making the very slow progression of converting to metric. I already use metric for work, and it’s already the scientific standard here and has been since the 70s. It’s just turbo annoying to try and get used to a new measuring system that I use reflexively especially when surrounded by imperial units. Makes it too easy to trip up and fall back.
different units for different magnitudes
I’m not sure I get what you mean? Are you saying how we use ounces for tiny weights, pounds for “human”-ish weights, and tons for huge weights?
I think they mean ounces, cups, quarts, gallons, with no intuitive sense of conversion between them. I personally use ounces for almost everything (cocktail recipes are in 0.25 ounce increments, big cups are 40 ounces, big ol buckets can be 256 ounces). I might mess with gallons for very large amounts, but anything that can be expressed in cups or pints I’m usually just talking ounces anyway.
Your assumption is correct. I meant using cups, ounces, etc separately or in combination. Especially annoying when trying to figure out portions. Serving size: 8oz, package size: 1lb 4 oz. You have to do math every time.
