It’s always worth bringing this out again at times like these, while the US trots out the same old excuses for their lack of progress that every other country that used to have old measurements has made.
The US system month/day/year is pretty bad, but honestly, so is day/month/year. Pretty much everything else is written from largest to smallest unit. Regular numbers: 123, here 1 is the 100s, 2 is the 10s and 3 is the 1s. In money, when a currency also have smaller units, you always say the largest first. “3 dollars, 50 cents.” A digital clock displays the numbers ordered from largest to smallest - 10:45:31. So why are people so proud of the european date format? Writing out a full timestamp would switch from increasing to decreasing units.
I’ve seen people (ie USers) say that imperial makes more sense because it’s easily divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6 so it’s more intuitive. Yet I’ve never seen any of these people campaign to ditch their base 100 currency for a more “intuitive” £ s d style system. You already use decimal currency and find it easier than a system where 240¢ makes $1.
Oh, yeah, the pounds, shillings and pence system was just epic. One pound (money, not weight) is 20 shillings (because why not), and one shilling is 12 pence (just for maximum confusion). In order to use measurements or money, you need to memorize a bunch of arbitrary conversion factors, which was obviously loved by everyone.
That’s a fun problem, if you enjoy recreational mathematics. However, if you need to deal with this nonsense on a daily basis, it get’s old pretty fast.
I’m in agreement with everything except temperature. I’m not saying that Celsius is bad, but I do think that using the phase changes of water as the sole point of comparison is a bad argument.
For most people, the interaction with temperature is through the weather, and I don’t think Celsius is inherently better for that. I like that in Fahrenheit 0 is a cold winter’s day, and 100 is a hot summer’s day. I find that more relevant in day-to-day life than the phase changes of water. The big argument I see for preferring Celsius is that everybody else is doing it, so we may as well jump in.
However, in regards to the other systems of measurement, metric is best. The imperial system was nice when manufacturing measuring tools was difficult, so using easily divisible numbers allowed for easier creation of accurate measuring devices. But it has been quite some time since that was a reasonable argument (and that’s only really relevant for some of the units anyway).
I like that in Fahrenheit 0 is a cold winter’s day, and 100 is a hot summer’s day.
Fahrenheit fans always say stuff like this, but it just doesn’t work. 100 isn’t too bad in that respect, but 0 is just insane. If you want it to be equivalent, 0 °F would be 0 °C. Because there’s no way that -18 °C is as cold as 38 °C is hot.
Besides that, knowing about things like snow or ice outside, whether your fridge is likely to cause some stuff to frost over, etc., or whether the thing you’re cooking has reached boiling point are all just as valid things for your day-to-day experience.
But besides all that, SI is a package deal. You use Fahrenheit and now you’ve got to redefine all the other units that are derived from the Kelvin, because now you’re suddenly using Rankine.
I hard disagree with one of your positions; I think 0 F is cold but 100 F is insane. I assume we grew up in different climates. I say this only to make the point that it’s subjective, but 0-100 is still the range of what people generally find tolerable.
My point is that Fahrenheit is not like our other units of measure. 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 1760 yards or 5280 feet in a mile is ridiculous. There’s no benefit to these units with arbitrary scaling factors for conversion. That lack of consistent scaling factor is the primary difference with metric, and it is also precisely why metric is superior. The image’s assertion that these units are stupid is valid.
But for temperature, there are some aspects of Fahrenheit that work out nicely, and learning 32 and 212 for the freezing and boiling points of water is not that bad. It’s not as nice as 0 and 100, but this difference leads to certain other temperatures being in the range of 0 and 100. My enjoyment for which temperatures fall between 0 and 100 feels about as arbitrary as your enjoyment for water being liquid within this range. At the very least, the difference here is not as clear cut as it is for other units, so I don’t buy into the idea that Fahrenheit is a bad unit of measure.
To put it simply: I don’t see any redeeming quality for our other units of measure, but I do for Fahrenheit. I’m not saying that Celsius is bad or that Fahrenheit is better. I’m merely saying that the phase changes of water are not enough to convince me that Fahrenheit is stupid.
I do think that using the phase changes of water as the sole point of comparison is a bad argument.
Why? Water is extremely important to life and very abundant. The phases changes of water are something that you are confronted with in every day life, all the time.
For most people, the interaction with temperature is through the weather, and I don’t think Celsius is inherently better for that.
I do, because the temperature being above or below freezing is a very important boundary. Freezing temperatures means slippery roads, frost on windows, car locks freezing shut, etc. A lot of our interaction with the world outside is affected by the temperature being below or above 0ºC. By comparison, 0ºF is completely arbitrary, nothing changes when you cross that boundary.
I like that in Fahrenheit 0 is a cold winter’s day, and 100 is a hot summer’s day.
10ºF is also a cold day, so is 20ºF and 30ºF. Just like 90ºF is also a hot summers day.
I find that more relevant in day-to-day life than the phase changes of water.
None of those seem relevant to me. I don’t need a round number to know that 37ºC is a hot day. There is no significance to 100ºF. 99ºF is also a hot day and so is 101ºF. Nothing interesting happens when you cross the 100ºF threshold.
When you cross the 0ºC or 100ºC, potentially dangerous things start to happen of which you need to be aware.
Right. You learn two numbers for the phase changes of water, and we do as well. It’s easy to remember two numbers and understand when you’ve crossed a boundary. Sure, learning 0 and 100 might be easier than 32 and 212, but I don’t think that understanding whether a number is smaller or larger than 32 is really harder than understanding if it’s smaller or larger than 0. Both are pretty much instantaneous recognitions for a numerically literate person.
My point was merely that the Fahrenheit defines these two points in such a way that the ambient temperatures that we experience generally fall nicely within the range of 0 to 100, and I don’t think that this fact is any less compelling an argument than having nicer numbers for the boundaries of liquid water. I’m not saying that Celsius is bad. I’m just saying that the range of liquid water is not a convincing enough argument for me.
For other units of measures, the ease of converting units in metric is a clear win over imperial (or US customary). For temperature, there are benefits to both scales, and neither has as compelling an argument as we see in the meter vs the yard or the kilogram vs the pound. The only really convincing argument for me is that the rest of the world uses Celsius, and I think that is a good enough argument.
“Freezing temperatures” mean “freezing temperatures,” though, and numbers are pretty irrelevant. American schoolkids learn that it’s around 32°F and 0°C, and we easily remember it, but the weather forecasters still say “frost warning,” or “freezing rain,” rather than “it’s going to be 32°F tomorrow,” because there are so many confounding variables. Even the temperature of the phase transition is kind of squishy, since pure water freezes at 0°C at STP (except when it gets super-cooled). And if we’re talking about the fundamental importance of water, then I might argue that 4°C is the important temperature, because it’s temperature at which water reaches its maximum density.
Anyway, not to say that Fahrenheit is great, or anything, just that Celsius is similarly arbitrary, and we lack a compelling reason to switch. (Even though virtually every thermometer I’ve ever seen in the U.S. has both scales on it.)
Basing a unit of measure on a purely subjective and variable thing like “it feels hot/cold” is a terrible idea. The metric system specifically tries to avoid that.
Plus, whether it feels hot/cold is going to be equally easy in metric and imperial, since nobody’s personal preference falls in the same place. At least with metric, there’s an additional point of reference for worrying about ice.
Fahrenheit is also based on water’s phase changes, but the 0-100 range just falls nicely around the range of common ambient temperatures. The basis in water is nice because it’s abundant and thus makes calibration of a thermometer easy. My contention is merely that the specific values of the phase changes are not so important that it makes the Celsius scale inherently better. I like that the ambient temperatures outside fall nicely throughout the 0-100 range in Fahrenheit, and I think that is just as valid an argument as water being liquid within this range.
And perhaps I’m particularly swayed by this argument because I live in a place that has cold winters and hot summers, so I see the full range of 0 to 100 in the weather. I’m also not going to pretend that growing up using Fahrenheit is not the main reason for my continuing usage of it.
I just wanted to point out that I’m convinced by the arguments in favor of the metric system for everything except Celsius. For that one, I just don’t think water is as compelling an argument as is always presented.
The water argument gets brought up all the time because it’s the only argument present on on either side.
After that, you are simply arguing about which number you would rather see, which is a pointless argument to have. You like 0 to 100, I like negative numbers, so I would rather use -18 to 38. Arguing one or the other is like arguing if grey or beige is the “better” colour.
Fahrenheit is also based on water’s phase changes,
Exactly: It puts 180 degrees between boiling and frozen, as though they were opposite conditions or something.
It’s set at 32 instead of 0 because 0 is the temperature of the most stable frigorific mixture they knew of. If you don’t have access to a reliable thermometer for your lab, the thermometer you make for Fahrenheit is going to be more accurate than the one you make for Celsius.
Basing a unit of measure on a purely subjective and variable thing like “it feels hot/cold” is a terrible idea. The metric system specifically tries to avoid that.
Plus, whether it feels hot/cold is going to be equally easy in metric and imperial, since nobody’s personal preference falls in the same place. At least with metric, there’s an additional point of reference for worrying about ice.
It’s always worth bringing this out again at times like these, while the US trots out the same old excuses for their lack of progress that every other country that used to have old measurements has made.
“It’s fine”.
The US system month/day/year is pretty bad, but honestly, so is day/month/year. Pretty much everything else is written from largest to smallest unit. Regular numbers: 123, here 1 is the 100s, 2 is the 10s and 3 is the 1s. In money, when a currency also have smaller units, you always say the largest first. “3 dollars, 50 cents.” A digital clock displays the numbers ordered from largest to smallest - 10:45:31. So why are people so proud of the european date format? Writing out a full timestamp would switch from increasing to decreasing units.
ISO-8601 is the only sensible choice.
Came to say exactly this. ISO8601 🔝🧠
I think it was just us Swedes who embraced ISO-8601
It’s been Canada’s official standard for decades. It’s just starting to hit the general population though.
And the whole of Eastern Europe
For the Time units - in terms of organizing by a list of numbers, I find year, month, day the best because it organizes itself.
If these were folders in a computer, they’d be in numerical order automatically.
It’s the international standard for a reason
How about addresses on mail going from most general to most specific?
United States Missouri, Kansas City 55555, N Lincoln Ave 1546, Apt 456 Joe Sturgeon
I was typing that as a joke because it is the opposite of the system in the US, but aren’t there places that follow this method?
I’ve seen people (ie USers) say that imperial makes more sense because it’s easily divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6 so it’s more intuitive. Yet I’ve never seen any of these people campaign to ditch their base 100 currency for a more “intuitive” £ s d style system. You already use decimal currency and find it easier than a system where 240¢ makes $1.
Oh, yeah, the pounds, shillings and pence system was just epic. One pound (money, not weight) is 20 shillings (because why not), and one shilling is 12 pence (just for maximum confusion). In order to use measurements or money, you need to memorize a bunch of arbitrary conversion factors, which was obviously loved by everyone.
When you read classic novels and you see the kids having to spend ages trying to figure out how to divide a half crown among 5 kids.
That’s a fun problem, if you enjoy recreational mathematics. However, if you need to deal with this nonsense on a daily basis, it get’s old pretty fast.
I agree with you 240%!
I’m in agreement with everything except temperature. I’m not saying that Celsius is bad, but I do think that using the phase changes of water as the sole point of comparison is a bad argument.
For most people, the interaction with temperature is through the weather, and I don’t think Celsius is inherently better for that. I like that in Fahrenheit 0 is a cold winter’s day, and 100 is a hot summer’s day. I find that more relevant in day-to-day life than the phase changes of water. The big argument I see for preferring Celsius is that everybody else is doing it, so we may as well jump in.
However, in regards to the other systems of measurement, metric is best. The imperial system was nice when manufacturing measuring tools was difficult, so using easily divisible numbers allowed for easier creation of accurate measuring devices. But it has been quite some time since that was a reasonable argument (and that’s only really relevant for some of the units anyway).
Fahrenheit fans always say stuff like this, but it just doesn’t work. 100 isn’t too bad in that respect, but 0 is just insane. If you want it to be equivalent, 0 °F would be 0 °C. Because there’s no way that -18 °C is as cold as 38 °C is hot.
Besides that, knowing about things like snow or ice outside, whether your fridge is likely to cause some stuff to frost over, etc., or whether the thing you’re cooking has reached boiling point are all just as valid things for your day-to-day experience.
But besides all that, SI is a package deal. You use Fahrenheit and now you’ve got to redefine all the other units that are derived from the Kelvin, because now you’re suddenly using Rankine.
I hard disagree with one of your positions; I think 0 F is cold but 100 F is insane. I assume we grew up in different climates. I say this only to make the point that it’s subjective, but 0-100 is still the range of what people generally find tolerable.
My point is that Fahrenheit is not like our other units of measure. 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 1760 yards or 5280 feet in a mile is ridiculous. There’s no benefit to these units with arbitrary scaling factors for conversion. That lack of consistent scaling factor is the primary difference with metric, and it is also precisely why metric is superior. The image’s assertion that these units are stupid is valid.
But for temperature, there are some aspects of Fahrenheit that work out nicely, and learning 32 and 212 for the freezing and boiling points of water is not that bad. It’s not as nice as 0 and 100, but this difference leads to certain other temperatures being in the range of 0 and 100. My enjoyment for which temperatures fall between 0 and 100 feels about as arbitrary as your enjoyment for water being liquid within this range. At the very least, the difference here is not as clear cut as it is for other units, so I don’t buy into the idea that Fahrenheit is a bad unit of measure.
To put it simply: I don’t see any redeeming quality for our other units of measure, but I do for Fahrenheit. I’m not saying that Celsius is bad or that Fahrenheit is better. I’m merely saying that the phase changes of water are not enough to convince me that Fahrenheit is stupid.
Why? Water is extremely important to life and very abundant. The phases changes of water are something that you are confronted with in every day life, all the time.
I do, because the temperature being above or below freezing is a very important boundary. Freezing temperatures means slippery roads, frost on windows, car locks freezing shut, etc. A lot of our interaction with the world outside is affected by the temperature being below or above 0ºC. By comparison, 0ºF is completely arbitrary, nothing changes when you cross that boundary.
10ºF is also a cold day, so is 20ºF and 30ºF. Just like 90ºF is also a hot summers day.
None of those seem relevant to me. I don’t need a round number to know that 37ºC is a hot day. There is no significance to 100ºF. 99ºF is also a hot day and so is 101ºF. Nothing interesting happens when you cross the 100ºF threshold.
When you cross the 0ºC or 100ºC, potentially dangerous things start to happen of which you need to be aware.
Right. You learn two numbers for the phase changes of water, and we do as well. It’s easy to remember two numbers and understand when you’ve crossed a boundary. Sure, learning 0 and 100 might be easier than 32 and 212, but I don’t think that understanding whether a number is smaller or larger than 32 is really harder than understanding if it’s smaller or larger than 0. Both are pretty much instantaneous recognitions for a numerically literate person.
My point was merely that the Fahrenheit defines these two points in such a way that the ambient temperatures that we experience generally fall nicely within the range of 0 to 100, and I don’t think that this fact is any less compelling an argument than having nicer numbers for the boundaries of liquid water. I’m not saying that Celsius is bad. I’m just saying that the range of liquid water is not a convincing enough argument for me.
For other units of measures, the ease of converting units in metric is a clear win over imperial (or US customary). For temperature, there are benefits to both scales, and neither has as compelling an argument as we see in the meter vs the yard or the kilogram vs the pound. The only really convincing argument for me is that the rest of the world uses Celsius, and I think that is a good enough argument.
“Freezing temperatures” mean “freezing temperatures,” though, and numbers are pretty irrelevant. American schoolkids learn that it’s around 32°F and 0°C, and we easily remember it, but the weather forecasters still say “frost warning,” or “freezing rain,” rather than “it’s going to be 32°F tomorrow,” because there are so many confounding variables. Even the temperature of the phase transition is kind of squishy, since pure water freezes at 0°C at S
TP (except when it gets super-cooled). And if we’re talking about the fundamental importance of water, then I might argue that 4°C is the important temperature, because it’s temperature at which water reaches its maximum density.Anyway, not to say that Fahrenheit is great, or anything, just that Celsius is similarly arbitrary, and we lack a compelling reason to switch. (Even though virtually every thermometer I’ve ever seen in the U.S. has both scales on it.)
Well, there is a significance to 100f, it’s the human body temperature. Hotter days = potential danger maybe?Either way, it’s another base 10, not 12!
Edit: ignore me, my memory is terrible.
Human body temperature is 98.6f
I seem to remember they didn’t get it quite right by modern standards.
Edit: ok, I remembered wrongly. 96 was as close as they could measure human body temperature. I always thought it was the other way.
I’m still not clear on why 100f was chosen.
Basing a unit of measure on a purely subjective and variable thing like “it feels hot/cold” is a terrible idea. The metric system specifically tries to avoid that.
Plus, whether it feels hot/cold is going to be equally easy in metric and imperial, since nobody’s personal preference falls in the same place. At least with metric, there’s an additional point of reference for worrying about ice.
Fahrenheit is also based on water’s phase changes, but the 0-100 range just falls nicely around the range of common ambient temperatures. The basis in water is nice because it’s abundant and thus makes calibration of a thermometer easy. My contention is merely that the specific values of the phase changes are not so important that it makes the Celsius scale inherently better. I like that the ambient temperatures outside fall nicely throughout the 0-100 range in Fahrenheit, and I think that is just as valid an argument as water being liquid within this range.
And perhaps I’m particularly swayed by this argument because I live in a place that has cold winters and hot summers, so I see the full range of 0 to 100 in the weather. I’m also not going to pretend that growing up using Fahrenheit is not the main reason for my continuing usage of it.
I just wanted to point out that I’m convinced by the arguments in favor of the metric system for everything except Celsius. For that one, I just don’t think water is as compelling an argument as is always presented.
The water argument gets brought up all the time because it’s the only argument present on on either side.
After that, you are simply arguing about which number you would rather see, which is a pointless argument to have. You like 0 to 100, I like negative numbers, so I would rather use -18 to 38. Arguing one or the other is like arguing if grey or beige is the “better” colour.
Exactly: It puts 180 degrees between boiling and frozen, as though they were opposite conditions or something.
It’s set at 32 instead of 0 because 0 is the temperature of the most stable frigorific mixture they knew of. If you don’t have access to a reliable thermometer for your lab, the thermometer you make for Fahrenheit is going to be more accurate than the one you make for Celsius.
Basing a unit of measure on a purely subjective and variable thing like “it feels hot/cold” is a terrible idea. The metric system specifically tries to avoid that.
Plus, whether it feels hot/cold is going to be equally easy in metric and imperial, since nobody’s personal preference falls in the same place. At least with metric, there’s an additional point of reference for worrying about ice.
Temperature is so much more than weather
Also it’s very relative. For me. 0 celsius is a cold winter day. Which is about 17f
100f is also a degree that never occurs here.
Aren’t there places in Europe that do Street then Address # then City (I have to do this for OSMAnd)? That’s just as cursed as Month Day Year