:rolleyes:
In my country, digital kitchen scales that are accurate enough to produce reliable results can be had for far less than $100 and are even available to home cooks. Testing and recalibration costs do not threaten to bankrupt me.
These threads always devolve into arguments that sound like they came from infomercials. “Your Celsius degrees aren’t granular enough! You can’t say the weather will be in the twenties!”. No, but we can say the forecast is 25 degrees today. Isn’t that enough information?
who cares, since aquariums are usually sold by gallons capacity anyway?
I challenge you to find someone in this country who doesn’t know 1 foot=12 inches.
no, that’s from the world of dynamometers which measure torque and rotational speed. They calculate horsepower. Power is simply the derivative of Work with respect to time.
Besides, why aren’t you bitching at DIN for holding onto PS (a.k.a. “metric horsepower?”)
we don’t use “stone,” but the UK still does. I challenge you to find someone in the US who even knows what a poundal is.
yes it is. “Standardized” means the units and conversion factors are known. It’s simply a different set of standards from SI units.
I agree about digital scales not being a big deal to buy. I have one I use regularly, mostly for making herbal preparations (I’m not referring to pot!).
I agree that the argument about F and C comes down to personal preference and minor things like the “user interface,” so to speak. But that’s really the point: there was no good scientific or usability reason to switch from F to C in the first place. For everything else metric, there was, though some of the units could have been designed a bit better or perhaps made allowances for daily usability (a meter about the size of a foot would have been better, proportion of earth’s radius or whatever it was be damned).
Similarly, I would not recommend countries now used to C to switch back to F. Any advantage in usability would not justify the switching costs.
Someone who has an old aquarium lying around that doesn’t still have the store label on it.
Why would you challenge me to that, given that I said in the very spot you quoted that that conversion is known?
My apologies; I meant to say “slug”, there, not “stone”. And if you don’t know slugs or poundals, then you’re missing a major chunk of the unit system.
The scientific reason to switch from F to C is so that your intuitive temperature measurements are in the same units as your scientific measurements, i.e. 1 °C = 1 K. It’s not an insurmountable disadvantage when they don’t, but having that intuition does make a difference in some settings.
In 1848, Lord Kelvin wrote in his paper, On an Absolute Thermometric Scale, of the need for a scale whereby “infinite cold” (absolute zero) was the scale’s null point, and which used the degree Celsius for its unit increment.
There was never any good reason for Celsius to replace F, and Kelvin could just as easily based his scale on the F degree (I’m not saying he should have, however; he should have gone with whatever was predominant at the time).
In any case, there’s no reason for the US to switch to C now for weather and cooking purposes other than the need for “foolish consistency.”
I don’t think it’s reaching. You’re asking why I’m proposing that some government forced metrification effort would be a first amendment violation. The first amendment (as a reminder for non-Americans, not you specifically) protects our freedom of speech.
If the government were to prohibit me from publishing a cookbook using US Customary Units, that would be an abridgment of my rights. Similarly if I met FTC/FDA labelling requirements in grams (or whatever), it would be an abridgment of my rights to prohibit me from also adding the customary measurements to my label. If I own a bank with a big temperature sign outside, it would be a violating of my rights to force me to display that sign in centigrade.
There’s not really a legal basis to legislate forced use of the metric system, is my meaning, all the way to the Constitutional level.
Maybe that’s your theory. I don’t buy it. The government can, and does, regulate a standard of measures. It would be interesting, though, to see it end up in court.
Well, yeah, sure they do. They might tell Coca Cola that they have to label individual cans in ml. Now we get 354 ml cans to comply with the government. But you know, people want 12 oz cans, so Coca Cola continues to write “12 fl. oz” on their cans. There’s no much the government can do to prevent it.
We’d also be preserving the heritage of all of us by keeping slaves, treating women as property, treating disease by exorcism, and dying young.
(I’m not saying the imperial system is as bad as any of those things, of course - just that ‘preserving heritage’ is not in and of itself necessarily a good thing).
I pretty regularly need to do quick and dirty volume calculations. So it would have to be metric all the way for me, there is no way in hell I want to try and work out the volume of 56 boxes that are each 2’6" by 2’2" by 2’8", on the other hand, while I need a calculator 56 boxes each 58cm by 50cm by 62cm is rather easier - and if no calculator is handy I can still get close by mental arithmetic.
I could live with either but I do get annoyed when some companies (in my case motorcycles) mix and match. On my 04 Harley the majority of the bike is SAE but a lot of the trim and some of the add-on parts are metric. A friends Ducati is just the opposite. I usually write it off as an evil plot by Snap-On and Craftsman to suck more dollars out of my pocket but --------
Nope, but the fact that you have to switch to a different system you’re unfamiliar with when in science class is in itself a disadvantage.
You can argue that the advantage of using the metric system isn’t worth the pain of switching to units unfamiliar to you personnally, but you can’t argue that the American system is as convenient as the metric system.
But your weather does not always remains within a neat window of temperature that never overlaps a multiple of ten.
So as often as not you are going to have to say something like “high sixties to low seventies” which is no easier or neater than saying “19-22 Celsius”.
I grew up with both scales and find each perfectly easy to comprehend.
Not sure how to put this but there is ZERO advantage in usability of F vs C.
This is what I mentioned earlier about ignorant arguments. Only an argument based on the ignorance of the experience of being raised in a different scale would conclude that F is better than C in any way.
Sure it has higher usability for people raised with F but it has zero to negative advantage for people raised in C (e.g. they could claim “unnecessary granularity”)
I find it sad that such arguments are being made on the SDMB.
Or just use cups and tablespoons, these aren’t imperial-only measures, they’re the same for metric as for imperial (speaking as someone who uses an actual teacup for ‘cup’ when I bake. That that particular one’s actually 250ml is a happy coincidence. It could as easily be the US or UK cup and I doubt my baking would suffer. Only the Japanese cup is too far off (200ml))