241–250 of 363 posts
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0°C - water turns into ice 100°C - water boils and turns into steam -30°C and below - very cold weather +30°C and above - very hot weather
But the freeze/boil numbers are arbitrary as well only being true at sea-level. Where I live in Colorado, we're 1 mile (cough, 1.6 km) above sea level meaning those formulas are meaningless.
The thing about measurements is that they don't matter in your everyday life. I get that it makes physics calculations easier and international machining companies need to interface with the world, but measuring the speed of my car in miles per hour and knowing my couch is 7 1/2 feet long are perfectly fine, and there is absolutely no compelling reason to switch to metric for those kinds of things. People don't want…
This is pretty much it, though I'd throw on that Europeans acting like they're morally superior for using metric as their native measuring system (and that Americans are intellectually slovenly for not) certainly doesn't do many favors for the cause of metricization in the U.S.
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LOL. I'm in Western Australia: 15: Winter. Probably rain and wind. 20: Cool Autumn / Spring, you might need a jumper outside. 25: Vaguely warmish, t-shirt weather. 30: Getting warm, wear shorts and t-shirt. 35: Beach weather, avoid going outside for too long if you're in office attire and don't want sweat patches. 40+: Hot beach weather, stay out of the sun (or in the water) in the middle of the day.
Interesting...I'm in the UK, for me 24°C with a light breeze makes for a perfect Summer's day: warm enough to walk around without sweating buckets. 30°C is uncomfortably hot. I guess it's all relative to what you're used to (and what you're doing e.g. day at the beach or walking in the city).
Here in Melbourne we'll have several 40-degree days each summer, and the only large city with more that I'm aware of is Phoenix. There are heaps of large cities that are warmer in general, but they don't peak quite as high. Record is 46.2, set a few years ago. Not a pleasant day, especially since it was after a few similar days...
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Well its rather easy to make your own thermometer using the Celsius scale. Put quicksilver in a small glass tube and put it outside. When water starts to freeze mark the current position with 0. Drop it in boiling water and mark it with 100. Evenly distribute now 98 markings between the two existing ones and voila you have just made your own thermometer :)
Evenly distributing 98 markings is hard. Evenly distributing 64 is easy -- just halve the range six times. That's why the distance from freezing water to body temperature is 64 Fahrenheit degrees.
Freezing point of water: 32°F Average human body temperature (oral): 98.2°F
So that's 66.2°F, not 64°F.
Those two temperatures were the original reference points for the Fahrenheit scale, and body temperature was defined as 96°.
The current definition is relative to the melting point of ice (32°F), and the boiling point of water at standard atmospheric pressure (212°F, which is exactly 180°F higher than the freezing point). Except now body temperature is 98.2°F instead of 96°.
If you want a thermometer calibrated in Fahrenheit, you have exactly the same problem as you do with Celsius. You just have to put 178 markings between the two reference points, rather than 98.
> Likewise, employer-provided health insurance was a historical accident As an European, a stance like that is near to instant execution.
What are you talking about? In some places, health care is a matter between you and the government. The US has an odd system of subsidized employer-provided health insurance. It covers most workers, except at the low end of jobs. The government, meanwhile, provides direct coverage of the very old and the very poor. The people who really get screwed in the US system are the ones in crappy jobs, who aren't poor enough…
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It makes no difference to me. If I described $2.40 as 240 cents, would you suddenly be incapable of dividing it up evenly?
Of course, but it would be a little harder, a little more to keep track of. More precision than necessary. People prefer to use dollars and not cents, don't they?
What? The precision of $2.40 and 240 cent is exactly the same. Two significant digits.
It's kinda funny, every time this debate comes around, I see that the people advocating imperial are always confused by the concept of precision, which is handled very naturally in the metric system, but people advocating metric are confused about the way the imperial system uses subdivision.
For a metric person, a measurement such as 13/64" looks weird, and for an imperial person, a measurement such as 5.2mm looks weird, when in reality they are very close, and of the same precision.
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The U.S. uses the metric system and the customary system. Even many countries that are primarily metric use non-metric units like stones for body weight or feet for airplane elevation. I agree that metric would be a better system, but your implication that we can't compete in the global economy with our mixed unit system seems hyperbolic since we have already been competing just fine.
Haha what? No one using the metric system uses "stone" for body weight. They use kilos. Even the US doesn't use "stone" - you use pounds, which is your stand-in for the kilogram. EDIT: Seriously, I cannot think of a single country which uses "stone" for bodyweight. Maybe the British? But doctors don't, definitely not in Australia, and I've never heard anyone from any other places use it either.
Here's my proposal: America goes metric, and the rest of the world starts driving on the right hand side of the road.
If you're driving a manual transmission car on the left side of the road, you'd steer with your right hand and change gears with your left. This works out nicely for right-handed people, i.e. 90% of the population.
Even though I'm an ex-physicist where nearly everything was done in metric, I'm decidedly anti-metric. Most of the metric system has no empathy for the everyday life of humans and is better suited for making scientific equations easier. It is roughly the equivalent of choosing esperanto for consistency.
The only downside is that some stats are only published in imperial units - fuel efficiency being the worst offender.
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I guess the real issue is which units get names. Yes, you can do with 12cm exactly what you can do with 12in- but the latter gets its own named unit. The Imperial system has a preference for scaling its units by some slightly more practical number of sub-units- 12, 60, etc. I can imagine someone saying, for example, "why name 1000 centimeters as another unit? Can't I say 'thousands' using the same number of syllables…
There's really only one unit for length: the meter. Centimeters aren't a different unit, they're "hundredths of a meter". You can call your lengths of timber "frobs" if you want, even in public! You could have people order them that way and sell them that way. The only requirement most places have is that you also specify what that is in meters so that people who don't know what a frob is, know what they're buying. I…