Federale minimum wage doesn’t seem so bad under metric, but it’ll be a negative Freedom day in hell before that happens.
The French Revolutionaries tried to institute a decimal based clock and calender.
Cite
You can’t make a uniformly decimal clock and calendar because the mean solar day and the tropical year are incommensurate.
“Centigrade” is an adjective describing scales like Celsius and the Kelvin scale. It means “divided into 100 parts”. That’s all. Some people used to use “centigrade” to mean “Celsius” because at the time it was the only widely known centigrade scale.
Powers &8^]
We should use degrees Watchwolf … it’s 80º all the time, buck-o, quit complaining.
See I don’t understand Fahrenheit. Celcius just has a narrower range. So for me, when I hear the weather forecast…
0-5 overnight is bloody cold and means I’ll have ice on the windscreen in the morning.
<15 top temp is a jacket or jumper.
around 25, give or take a few degrees is damn near perfect for relaxing.
28-33 is swimming weather.
>35 is getting ready to turn on the air con.
> 40, air con better be going and the beer cold
>45 (which is 113 F) I’m not going outside unless it starts raining naked supermodels and then I’m only going far enough to grab the closest couple and drag them inside.
The degree Celsius is also closer than the degree Fahrenheit to the human ability to distinguish temperatures. You probably can’t tell the difference between 72 and 73 degrees, so why give the temperature to that much precision? But you can tell the difference between 25 and 26 degrees.
The problem is mixing the scales … it’s a very serious problem at the Olympics if temperature is going over 60ºC … took me a second to realize they mean 60ºF.
It’s really what you’re use to. I don’t think Fahrenheit is a terrible scale. I don’t think pounds, feet, yards, miles, and inches are terrible measurements either. Sure, I can’t tell you how many inches there are in a mile, but I don’t really care in the end. A mile is about 1000 paces. My feet are a bit over a foot long (no brag, just fact). My hand is 4" wide. A dollar bill is about 6" long. It works out quite nicely.
The big issue is being the only country in the world with this unit of measurement. Does it hinder trade? Are we hurting ourselves economically because of it. If it is, I’d say change. It’s not a religious issue.
God didn’t invent the inch and foot. He gave use the shekel weight, and the cubit. If we used those, you’d have an argument. But Inches and pounds? We just made those up just like the French made up meters and grams. It’s not an American vs. UnAmerican issue. There’s nothing in our founding documents that use these measurements. It’s simply a matter of change.
Plus, there is this.
“Can I borrow a cup of sugar?” is a lot easier to say than “Can I borrow 236.5 milliliters of sugar?”
“How much baking soda do I use?”
“4.9 milliliters”
???
“How the fuck do I measure that?”
That works both ways, you know. A quarter liter is a lot easier to say than 1.0567 cups. 5 ml is a much rounder number than 1.0144 tsp.
I couldn’t tell you the temperatures that accurately, but raising our thermostat by 1 degree F certainly makes a noticeable difference.
A cup is 8.672 x e[sup]2.013[/sup] Coulomb-second per cubic ha’league per degree Watchwolf … which impoverished third-world nation did YOU get a public education from?
I’d rather have a bit too much precision than a bit too little. The smaller Fahrenheit degree also has the advantage of meaning errors of one or two degrees don’t mean as much.
Powers &8^]
Too much precision can be harmful. Consider the completely wrong notion that the normal body temperature for human beings is 98.6°F, when it’s really 37°C.
Absolutely, it should be 99°F to keep the same number of sigfigs. But considering the F measurement is too precise because it uses tenths of a degree, that’s hardly an argument that the whole Fahrenheit degree is too precise.
Powers &8^]
Body temperature varies a lot, and it depends on where you measure it.
Internal temp is “around” 100 F
Or “about” 37.7778 C
I always heard the rhyme “Zero is freezing, 10 is not, 20 is comfortable, 30 is hot”
Most normal human beings I know keep a comfortable metabolically-correct body temperature of 310 degrees*.
*Kelvin, of course. Physiology is a science, so we should use a scientifically valid temperature scale. And nothing says “zero” like “absolute zero”.
I now want all my medical records changed to Kelvin