Have you heard of cooking? It also uses temperature.
The OP is stupid, IMO. A bunch of lame arguments in favor of a lame system, I say.
Just like this lame argument. Measuring by weight is superior to volume in terms of reliably producing edible & delicious food.
Perhaps, but the $5 kitchen scales rarely produce the same result twice in a row. And who wants to buy a $100 scale for their home kitchen that still needs to be periodically tested and recalibrated for precise results?
Sure, if you’re a professional chef or running a commercial operation, that’s what you’ve got to do. But for most home chefs, that kind of hassle would be the perfect excuse to just go to the bakery.
My air conditioning operates with Celsius thermostat control and I support this Pitting.
27° is too cold and 28° too warm; there is no 27.5° option. (We’re not really sensitive to such a small temperature difference; the configuration of vents and sensors probably plays a role in our problem. Still, the flexibility of that half-degree would solve the configration problem, I think.)
You know, except for math and science class exercises in school, I can’t think of a time I’ve ever had to.
How are 2mm or 5mm any more crap than 1/4in or 1/8in? To me, non-decimal fractions like that seem extremely clunky, especially if you have to do addition or subtraction with them. And I can assure you that, in metric land, people do measure to the nearest 2mm or the nearest 5mm in situations where mm are too fine and cm too broad. Again, this is just a case of the system you’ve been taught seeming more intuitive because you’re more familiar with it.
Again, 300g is a weight measure. Measuring by weight versus measuring by volume is not the same argument as metric versus imperial units. At home, I have measuring spoons for 2.5ml, 5ml, 10ml, 15ml and 20ml, and a measuring jug with marks every 50ml. It’s just as easy to measure out 250ml of something as it is to measure out 1 cup of something.
For the most part, I agree with the OP’s thesis. The US is remarkably more metric than some non-Americans would give us crap for, and even a lot of these so-called metric countries still have their odd non-metric units floating around too. For instance, I have a few Canadian friends who seem confused by Fahrenheit and pounds, but they’re perfectly fine with miles and gallons and use them regularly. Somehow, we’re backwards for using a couple more other units.
Ultimately, its all about the utility of a unit vs. the historical momentum of the unit. And, as it comes to metric, one of the biggest advantages to it for science, and what’s touted as a good reason to convert for everyday use, just isn’t. And that’s how easy it is to convert units. Yes, converting units is WAY easier in metric, and it’s important for science, but in everyday life, it just doesn’t matter. Yes, I know there’s 5280 feet in a mile, it’s a factoid that was burned into my brain when I was 5 years old. But in practical life, I don’t need to know that; there just isn’t a reason to care, because distances measured in feet are rarely mixed with ones measured in miles. I do see some occasional feet distances on the highway, and I wish they were 1/4 mile rather than 1200 feet or whatever, but I also just assume if it says "lane ends in X ft) that it means “get over now” anyway.
Similarly, as mentioned, with miles, for large distances, the utility of miles and km is very similar, thus, because of historical momentum, we’re just not going to see many people willing to go through the effort of learning a new unit, when the everyday utility is more or less identical. It’s just effort for no reason. In fact, as an anecdote, I know a person obsessed with converting the US to metric who goes out of his way and pays extra to get stuff in metric. He even purchased a car with a speedometer marked only in km. I asked him how he knew whether or not he was speeding, and he explained that he just doubled the speed limit and did that… except that leads to speeding at highway speeds (eg, in 55 mph zone, you’d do 110km, which is ~68mph, which is >10mph over the speed limit and will get you pulled over in most places). I tried to say, why not just use mph in this one case since it actually means simpler, or in this case zero, math is required, and that’s the whole point of pushing for metric… he didn’t know how to respond.
I feel similarly with F vs C. Not only is there historical momentum, but I think there’s actually a little bit more utility to Fahrenheit. Sure, Celsius works, and if I’d grown up with it, I’d be fine, but I generally hear rules of thumb like <0 Really cold, 0-10 Cold, 10-20 Cool, 20-30 Warm, 30+ Hot, and as such it’s fine, but as Fahrenheit was based on numbers closer to temperatures we actually encounter, I think seeing the scale 0-100 over the course of a year for most areas is fine. Sure, that freezing is 32 is a little odd and it’d be nice if it were, say, exactly at 30, but over the course of an average year, I’ll tend to see temperatures from the single digits to the high 90s, pretty much perfect for the scale, and I know if its >100 or <0, which we do see sometimes, it’s dangerously extreme. I just don’t see us getting away from Fahrenheit anytime soon.
But that said, I can more or less work in kg as easily as lbs, and I will, in general, prefer grams over ounces. Similarly, I can work just fine in gallons or liters, and same for ounces vs ml. In that case, it’s more or less just whatever application I’m used to. So I buy gas and milk in gallons, but soda bottles and oil in liters. If the US converted fully to kg and liters, I’d have a little adjustment for those places where I’m used to the imperial version, but I’d be fine with it.
Just, for the love of God, don’t metricize sports. Football needs to be yards, changing it to meters would actually have a pretty large and negative effect on the game, not to mention infrastructure. Basketball hoops are exactly 10 ft, baseball diamonds have 90 ft sides, etc. Maybe the US obsession with these sports is part of the reason we’ve resisted some metric changes. Sure, all but football would still work fine in metric, they just wouldn’t be nice round numbers, but meh.
Ha. I have an Aga gas-fired range cooker. It has a hot oven, a not so hot oven and a less than than hot oven. I have pretty much no idea what the specific temperatures are in C or F. Bet I can cook anything that you can.
“And it’s trivially easy for you convert yards to miles off the top of your head, right?”
This.
This is what the whole thing boils down to in my head. Since I was a kid (53 now) the metric system was viewed as nirvana do to all of the rapid fire calculations I could do. But the thing was, I never need to do them.
All the simple stuff, is just really simple. A quarter of an inch, is well, one quarter of an entire inch. Easy peasy. The harder stuff, well, I never do that anyway.
Seemed like a solution in search of a problem
I’m not suggesting Celsius is better for cooking than Fahrenheit. I’m saying there’s more uses for temperature measurement than just the weather.
On the other hand, a fastball that hits 170 on the gun sounds *really *impressive. 
Sorry. My bad!
All our speedometers have kmh on them, and I had no trouble controlling my speed when I drove in Kuwait and had to read speed limit signs in kmh. I’m not too familiar with Celsius, but I generally know “30 is hot, 20 is nice, 10 is chilly and 0 is cold” and when I’m cooking I could just as easily type the temperatures in as C rather than F. All our packaged foods are labeled both ways, I know 453g is a pound and 330 mL is about 12 ounces. We all know what a liter or two of soda looks like, and that it’s about a quart. 750mL is a “fifth”. Anything electrical is already in metric units, volts, amps, watts, ohms. We’ve already converted 90% of the way, including all the important places, and anything left is just local flavor. As far as I’m concerned, this is a non-problem.
go look at some old American cookbooks where they tell you to bake in a “slow” or “moderate” oven.
I can admit I may be wrong on the whole cooking by weight thing!
You’ve got it backwards: having a broad enough scale allows you to say things like “it will be in the 70s” and have them be meaningful.
Saying “it will be in the 20s” today in C doesn’t have a lot of meaning because that overlaps three different comfort levels.
F wasn’t designed to be perfect in this way, and it’s not perfect in this way–just better. We still have to say, for example “high 80s” to distinguish them from the “low 80s.” The latter is fairly comfortable, the former not.
The thing that makes C a “joke” to me as I originally said is that making 0 freezing and 100 boiling is a totally useless distinction and only serves to contract the granularity of F. C has absolutely no advantage over F for daily (weather, cooking) or industrial use, and barely any in science (only insofar as it is related to Kelvin, which is better). Thinking that boiling point of water is particularly relevant shows some of the misguided thinking behind the creation of the original metric system (most of the thinking was good–some stuff was not).
There are three main disadvantages to the American system:
1: Nobody, not even most Americans, knows the conversion factors for the American system. Sure, we all know how many inches there are in a foot and how many ounces in a pound, but what’s an acre? If I have a piece of land that’s so many feet on one side and so many feet on the other, how many acres is that? If I have a fish tank that’s 18 inches by 24 inches by 48 inches, how many gallons will it hold? And even when you do know the conversion factors, it makes calculations needlessly hard: If an amusement park ride requires a minimum of 56 inches, and my kid is 4’9", should we bother going to the park, or wait until next year?
2: The American system of units is incoherent. Automobile mechanics, for instance, will learn that the power of an engine is equal to its RPMs times its torque times some magic number that you just have to memorize. Except that, in any sane system of units, power is just rotational speed times torque. These magic numbers are all over the place in the American system, and they’re never necessary. And don’t even get me started on pounds, stones, poundals, and pounds.
3: The American system of units is nonstandard. Units are useless if they’re not standardized, and while America might be the most powerful and important nation in the world, we’re not more powerful and important than the rest of the world combined, and international trade and other interactions are more important than ever. Even those nations that still use something resembling American units, use their own units, often with the same names, which just makes things even worse.
In short, American units work just fine, so long as you never need to actually use them. And most people never do need to use them, and so they don’t see the problem. But if you ever do need to use a system of units, the whole thing explodes in your face.
Now, for temperature, I’ll grant that the first two points are mostly moot, since very few people ever need to convert temperature to anything else, or combine temperature units with any other sort of unit. There’s no fundamental reason to prefer Celsius or Fahrenheit. The biggest difference is that the units are different sizes… but Celsius degrees are a more convenient size. Nobody ever actually uses individual Fahrenheit degrees: People speak of temperatures being “low 70s”, or “mid 70s”, or “high 70s”, and very seldom use any more precision than that. Which indicates that the degree size you need is only about 3.3 Fahrenheit degrees. In fact, even Celsius degrees are smaller than is needed, but at least they’re closer.
I love the way these threads always seem to devolve into irrelevant complaints about scales of temperature. celsius isn’t particularly ‘metric’. There aren’t ‘centidegrees’ or ‘kilodegrees’.
For what it’s worth, almost all American kids DO use the metric system in their school science classes. In lab, we measure out water in milliliters, not in ounces. We measure out chemicals in grams, not pounds.
We DO use metric where it matters. Is it really that important whether we sell milk by the quart rather than the liter, or measure football fields in yards?
First, I agree with you about the disadvantages of the system as a system. I have simply said that we do use metric to a large extent, and the reason not to convert completely is that there is no real advantage in doing so for the remaining units that people still use.
We know the basics for what we still use, and that’s enough.
True, although I write for the automotive industry for marketing from time to time, and I see PS, N•m, kg•m, etc., for torque.
Oh! And why can’t fucking Japanese companies GET that the SI unit and the number it follows have a space between them! I also seem absurd shit like “Max power XYZ kW/1,000 rpms.” Divided by rpms?!
Oh and rpms are not SI either. It should be radians per second, but that’s another metric thing that no one uses, while we’re on the topic.
I agree that for industry, international trade, government use (in most cases), metric is the way to go.
Bit of an exaggeration, lol. In terms of US units, I use pounds, feet (not so much yards), miles, acres (for real estate only, really), and F. For baking I go with the recipe–I even use grams and weigh sometimes! I don’t really “use” other units like oz. or gallon except insofar as products are sold that way.
Nope, you’ve got this exactly backward, per many previous posts, lol.
The imperial system is based on humanity, as such for all it’s quirkiness, makes sense for us and has a ‘at home’ feel to it. There is also lots of culture and history behind it so it ties us to our past. So all and all we are preserving the heritage of all of us by using it, but it did cost us a martian probe, I’m sure the metric nations will one day realize this and buy us a new probe to replace that one.