• Oxysis/Oxy@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 months ago

    While I get this is a meme, I do think the imperial measurement system deserves some credit. More the vast majority of humanity’s existence it has been an incredibly capable and powerful system. It’s only in more modern times where a system like metric is an upgrade. This is also ignoring the few ways where imperial still eke out a win, but that is besides the point.

    Imperial’s weird gaps between units are pieces that come from a variety of different systems that got layered together over the centuries it lasted. 5280 feet in a mile? Based on the Roman mile which was 5000 paces from a soldier. 12 inches in a foot? From a different way people counted on their hands.

    Length of an inch and length of a foot? From different parts of the body. Weird? Certainly. Practical? Amazing so. They were easier for day to day tasks and for measuring on the small, human scale. Metric is easier to calculate between different units and that is an amazing innovation.

    Fahrenheit is weird today, but was more practical when it was first established. Even then it has value in how it is more granular without the necessity of decimals. Celsius is still the better unit, 0° being freezing and 100° being boiling for water is very useful. It gives you two easy to remember extremes.

    Imperial had to walk, so metric could run in a way. Both systems are great in their own ways and in their own times. Imperial isn’t needed anymore, but deserves recognition for being good for its time and for being more practical historically.

    The only dud metric really has is metric time, and that is because everything we have ever done has been based on the older time keeping system. Cultures have laid claim to certain dates and times of day within the old system that just have constrained us to it.

    I definitely prefer metric overall, but I genuinely believe that imperial deserves more credit for getting us to the point where metric makes sense to swap to.

    • Caves_of_steel@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The imperial system was defined in 1824 (befoee that a mile was very different depending in the Region you came Form) The metric system was first defined in 1793… Imperial was never ‘good for its time’ cause it is actually younger than metric .

      Yes it dies habe Mord historical baggage (Roman and stuff) but that doesnt mean the system itself is old. The old meassurements eere just local customs and not a system - what a ‘foot’ was actually differed depending in where you Where which is amazingly Bad for a meassurement .

      Fahrenheit is actually a hilariously Bad design : first the original meassurements cant be reproduced (or rather: Fahrenheits meassurements were imprecice) Second : it has three points defined - you only need two - three Pointe just makes everything More momplicated Only one positiv thing here: dude was the first to create a halfway decent temperature unit

    • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      A foot doesn’t need to be standard, just an easy way to measure, just as a hand is.

      Far as I have come across only horses are measured by hand.

  • Knightfox@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I’m so confused, you didn’t have the room to write “calculator”, but you had the room to write “(calc is short for calculator btw)”

  • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    What I’ll defend, however, is fractional measurements when precision matters.

    With decimal measurements, precision can’t be nearly as granular. If your measurement is precise to one 1/8 of a unit, how do you represent that in decimal? 0.625 implies your measurement is precise to the nearest thousandth, but rounding it to 1 also isn’t precise. 5/8, however, tells you the measurement AND the precision.

    With fractional measurements, you can specify precision by changing the denominator to any number, whereas decimal is essentially fractional measurements, but with fixed denominator at powers of 10. For instance, a measurements of a half-unit with levels of precision between 0.1 and 0.10, fractional can be 6/12, 7/14, 8/16, 9/18, 10/20, 24/48, etc. Decimal can’t specify that precision without essentially writing a sentance.

    What’s simpler to record? “24/48” or “0.5 ± 0.208333…”

    • BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      With decimal measurements, precision can’t be nearly as granular. If your measurement is precise to one 1/8 of a unit,

      My metric measurents are precise to 1/10th of a unit. Like 22.7°C or 34.7cm.

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        What if you get a new ruler that’s 4 times as precise than the one you have that measures to 0.1cm? You don’t want to record it as 0.70cm, because that’s more precise than your measurement. But you could record it in 40ths with fractions.

        Another way to look at it is that decimal is already a fractional system (1/10, 1/100, 1/1000) that doesn’t allow you to use 90% of possible fractions.

        • BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          If there’s a technical need you can have your scale divided into whatever you want. There’s nothing preventing you into dividing your scale every 0.25mm to get 1/4th precision. It’s very rarely done because there’s no need, but it’s absolutely possible.

          Thermometers have sometimes division per 0.5°C instead of 1°C

    • rbos@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      This hurts my brain. Why do we care about all the weird fractions? +/- 0.1 is just another way of saying 1/10. You can still do that if you want without having to do fraction math in random denominators.

      • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        The fraction allows you to communicate length and tolerance in a single number. A decimal implies precision to the last number, a measure with a fraction can show 1/8 as more granular than 1/16. 1/8 of a cm is less precise than a mm, but if you wrote 1.125 cm, you are now implying sub mm level precision.

        This matters because the level needed in building generally doesn’t line up to 1/10 measurements. For example if you had a brick wall and a row had 1 cm height differences between bricks in a row it would be extremely obvious and look terrible. A 1mm height difference would be impossible to notice, but is also overkill to get that level. Ideal is about 5/8 cm or 6.35 mm difference over 3 meters of wall. The fractional measure often ends up easier to work with in practice.

        • rbos@lemmy.ca
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          2 months ago

          “The fraction allows you to communicate length and tolerance in a single number”

          I don’t see how that isn’t true of decimals, too. 0.1 indicates a precision of 1 digit, 0.12 indicates a precision of 2, 0.120 indicates a precision of three.

            • rbos@lemmy.ca
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              2 months ago

              In any context where it’s important, you’d note it with +/-. Not really a problem.

              I guess there’s nothing wrong with saying 1/8th metre, 1/8th centimetre, 15/16th metre either. Just as some people might use 0.356 inches.

              • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                I’d be a big fan of fractional metric.

                Although if we really wanted to go crazy (this will never happen), we’d ditch base-10. It’s a stupid base that we only use because of our fingers. Base 12 is superior and is actually the strongest defense of feet and inches (though yards can fuck right off). It has 6 divisors whereas 10 only has 4.

                Base 60 is also cool (divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60), but that would also be significantly more difficult to teach children - it takes them long enough to learn the order of 26 letters.

                And being a geographer, I adore 360 because it’s fucking awesome to work with, and you don’t get a better composite until 2520, which is just too much to deal with.

    • Programmer Belch@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      When precision matters, that precision is considered in the measurements. You would never put 0.5 ± 0.208333, you express it as 0.50 ± 0.21. The error value is just the standard deviation of the measurements and it doesn’t make sense to use more than 2 significant digits.

      Another example would be measuring large distances using a ruler with centimeter precision. In that case, a measurement would be expressed as 250 ± 1 cm. Converting the measurement from cm to mm, it is 2500 ± 10 mm. This is much more cumbersome with inches or feet as changing units means updating the precision, possibly reducing it.

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Did I defend using imperial units?

        I’m defending recording precision without having to add a qualifying statement because you can otherwose only increase precision by orders of magnitude in decimal.

    • Jesus_666@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      That does make sense when you need absolute precision like when doing abstract math. Otherwise you can just use whichever unit and number of significant digits you need and be precise to that amount. That’s what you do with imperial/American customary units as well; a 5/32" screw isn’t going to be manufactured to the precision of a Planck length; manufacturers specify their sizes to three significant digits of an inch.

      Let’s say you have a machining project and your tools are precise to 0.1 mm. So you plan things out at a precision of 0.1 mm. It doesn’t matter that a distance is 17/38 cm exactly. It doesn’t matter that it’s 4.473684210526315789… mm. You can’t set the tool to anything better than 4.5 mm anyway.

      Also note that the metric system doesn’t prevent you from using fractions. You’re perfectly free to work with fractions where useful. That’s just not how people talk about lengths because those fractions have no meaning outside your specific use case.

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        But that 5/32 screw has its precision built into the measurement. Sig figs and error ranges aren’t required for fractional, because both are built into the denominator.

        If your 5/32 measurement is super precise you can record it as 160/1024ths, because the denominator has “+/- 1/2048” built into the measurement.

        • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          As I said in another (larger) comment, you just don’t know how precision is encoded in decimals, which doesn’t mean that it isn’t. In fact, precision is encoded in decimals, just like with fractions.

          0,7 is 0,7 ± 0,05 0,7000 is 0,7 ± 0,00005

          • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            I have a set of precision digital calipers that shows decimal or fractional units. Verus a worse set of calipers that’snot 10x worse, it shows exactly the same measurements in decimal units, but with fractional units it will show a difference because that difference can be represented.

            • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              Is there anyone in this world needs a caliper of precision between 1cm and 1mm that can’t afford a 1mm of precision caliper?

                • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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                  1 month ago

                  And that is shown by the markings.

                  I just looked one up, it’s less than 20€, 0,02mm of precision. There are just 4 markings between 1mm and the next.

                  So instead of 9 markings, each marking adding 0,01mm, you just add 0,02mm. Doesn’t sound complicated at all.

                  I haven’t found an analog one, but a digital one with 0,01mm of precision costs 30€. Maybe an analog one costs 50€.

                  So if adding 0,02 is too complicated, you can just buy a 0,01 one for 30€ more. Which is the price of a pizza for a tool that will last years.

                  Anything more precise than 0,01. You probably have a lot of experience using a caliper. Whatever method it uses to display that precision is gonna be second nature.

    • zaphod@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      If I want to build something and I want it to be 23/48" ± 1/24" how would I write that? Because the way I understand it x/48" would imply a tolerance of ± 1/48".

    • bufalo1973@piefed.social
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      2 months ago

      If you are drawing maps, a precision of meters is enough. If you are building a house, cm it is. If you are making furniture, mm. If you are working with metal, um (micrometer)

    • rbos@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      0.625 implies your measurement is precise to the nearest thousandth

      It does. If it were precise to less than that, you’d say 0.62 or 0.6 to indicate hundredths or tenths. Why would you say 0.625 if you’re not precise to thousandths? You’d say 0.62500 if you wanted to indicate precision to hundred-thousandths.

    • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      That is not a flaw of decimals. It is a flaw of you not knowing how precision is encoded in decimals.

      0,7583 means 0,7583 ± 0,00005.

      0,758300 means 0,75833 ± 0,0000005.

      0,76 means 0,76 ± 0,005.

      That is why when in a store an item costs 7,5€, we don’t say 7,5€. We say 7,50€. Because it is precise to a hundredth of a €, not a tenth of a €.

  • FunnySalt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 month ago

    I’m accustomed to the imperial system. But agree that metric is better.

    Some metric stuff I have no trouble with. I have a good spatial sense of the distance of a mm, m, and km. And can do a rough miles to km (and vice versa) conversion in my head. I have a good sense of how much a kg is and similarly can do a rough conversion to and from lbs in my head. But while I understand that a gram is 1/1000 of a kg, if handed a small object and asked to guess how many grams it is, I’d fail miserably.

    Celsius I can’t ever remember the conversion, but I’ve had enough exposure to it that I understand if it means cold/cool/warm/hot weather.

  • Smoogs@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Soon it won’t matter anyways. Isn’t AmericaUS like…done now? We can move on with our normal shit and chuckle at it like a museum piece.

    • InFerNo@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      It’s the size of a thumb. The Dutch translation is “duim”. These smaller units use tangible things to measure. A foot and a thumb is always on you.

      • Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        Factually incorrect. That is true of metric units but not imperial. The inch is officially defined in terms of metric units.

  • LesserAbe@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Hey I’m American and think we should switch to metric. While Celsius has a more objective basis than Fahrenheit, doesn’t seem like the same slam dunk as the other measurements.

    Are there applications where we’re measuring in centicelsius or kilocelsius? There aren’t weird non-base ten increments of Fahrenheit. In Fahrenheit 0 is cold and 100 is hot as well…

    I’m still fine changing to it, just doesn’t seem to have the same “in your face” value for this graphic.

    • cattywampas@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      We do use metric in America. All the time actually. It’s taught in high school science classes. We use it in science, medicine, aerospace, military, and engineering.

      • LesserAbe@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I too live in America and grew up here. I know what metric is. But it’s not dominant, which I think you know.

          • LesserAbe@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            I’m curious, what are the areas that matter that you see metric having replaced imperial?

            I still see imperial used for building materials, tools, furniture, product dimensions, food packaging, recipes, travel distances. The doctor still tells me my weight in pounds. It’s what we use at my job when describing products to clients.

            • cattywampas@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              Medicine, any science, aerospace, military. Food packaging is in both, and nutrition information is listed in grams. Engineering is an annoying mix of both. Construction is still mostly imperial which often causes the former annoying mix. Cooking and baking is usually imperial but increasingly in metric as well. Anything international is done in metric.

        • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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          1 month ago

          But why? Binary is a better basis for numbering, when I was demo coding in assembler on the Commodore 64, I learned a technique to vastly speed up trig calculations: divide the circle into 256 degrees, you can use simple 8 bit integer math to blast out sine values. I figure the same should go with time. It’s not like we still use our fingers to count.

    • Mostly_Gristle@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Also, fix the damn calendar

      13 months, 28 days per month = 364 days. New Year’s Day can be its own holiday separate from the rest of the year, and every fourth year it can be 2 days long.

      Now we just need to get Big Calendar on board.

    • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 month ago

      Also, fix the damn calendar.

      The calendar has been intentionally mangled to obscure the solstices, equinoxes, etc. for the sake of religion. The shitty and arbitrary nature is a feature, not a bug. It’s emphasizes hegemonic control of our lives.

      A similar thing is happening with time where solar noon, sunrises, and sunsets are obscured for the sake of capitalist work clocks.

      The system doesn’t want our lives based on the natural world around us. It wants control.

      They’re never going to “fix” this because it already works as designed.

  • rayyy@piefed.social
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    2 months ago

    The US could have switched to the world-wide standard years ago but under Reagan the switch was abandoned.

    • 4am@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      No, the original “Make America Great Again” guy? The first actor elected President who presided over an unprecedented health crisis and ignored it because he hoped it would only hurt the “right” people, and plunged America into an economic disaster the likes of which we are still feeling today and may never recover from? That guy?

      God this place actually sucks

  • Tiger_Man_@szmer.info
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    1 month ago

    because celcius is about how aater feels, faranheit is about how you feel and kelvin is about how atoms feel

      • Leon@pawb.social
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        1 month ago

        Water has different boiling and freezing temperatures depending on salinity, alcohol content, and atmospheric pressure.

        The 0 is freezing 100 is boiling is a good rough estimate but it’s not a universal law.

        • reksas@sopuli.xyz
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          1 month ago

          and how many differences do people have? give me universal law on how cold or hot person feels.

          • Leon@pawb.social
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            1 month ago

            Beyond 100F you have a fever.

            I’m no proponent for the American system but that’s a decent point of reference.

            0F though? No idea.

      • CaptPretentious@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Water is not subjective? Interesting? So water will freeze exactly at 0 and boil at 100, and it won’t matter about say pressure? Or whats in the water, like say salt? And pretty sure I’ve seen videos and done it myself where you bring pure water below 0 and it doesn’t freeze. Suppose this video is just fake then? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Nse-LUpVQu8

        Seems water is a tad bit subjective. Like the rules for when it freezes and boils is… not exactly constant. I mean, they are, under ideal conditions on Earth. But… ya know, that sort of goes against the circlejerk…

        • reksas@sopuli.xyz
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          1 month ago

          i’m quite sure average person doesnt have to deal with pressure differences, salinity, distilled water and such daily to such extent it makes water bad reference point, at least considering how we are basically made from water and life here is based on water.

          • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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            1 month ago

            The average person doesn’t live at sea level. More than half of all people have a boiling point of more than two degrees lower.
            Most water that people who live near sea level live near is salt water.

            If you’re willing to accept that level of imprecision, you may as well go with average human body temperature, since it’s literally our temperature.

            Both fahrenheit and Celsius are defined by relatively arbitrary standards in relatively arbitrary ways. One decided water should freeze 100 degrees from boiling, the other 180. Should ice be 2 orders of magnitude from boiling, or half a circle?

            Celsius should be preferred because it’s the standard. Some french people decided they liked powers of ten more that others, so here we are. Thanks Napoleon.
            Neither system is adequate for the physically based goals of a modern unit system. Hence neither has any relationship to water anymore, instead being defined by actual physical invariants.

    • portuga@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Every other full spin it stops for 4h. There. We also get rid of DST because who can tell the time anymore?

    • Spezi@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      Please also lets use the International fixed calendar where every month has exactly 28 days/4 weeks and the year has 13 months. Every 1st of the month is a sunday, every 2nd is a monday and so on, so you will always know which day it is by the number.

      The leftover day is a dedicated new years day.

      • Soggy@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Sounds fun, now update every computer system simultaneously to a new date format.

        • bountygiver [any]@lemmy.ml
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          2 months ago

          time is stored as seconds since epoch anyways, the computer systems can easily survive by just converting to metric time when displaying. It’s the systems that cares about week/month that hates it

      • Crozekiel@lemmy.zip
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        2 months ago

        How do you write the date for the “leftover” day? Like, thinking about dates in Excel.

        • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          1/14. Easy

          If programs can handle February having 28 days, sometimes 29. It can handle 14 having 1 day, sometimes 2.

        • Spezi@feddit.org
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          1 month ago

          You have your dates in excel? I usually go to a restaurant or the the club with them, but I guess the youngsters today date in excel.

      • pienz@feddit.org
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        1 month ago

        Would be nice to realign September, October, November, and December as the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months respectively

      • mogoh@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        12 Month are better for dividing a year, which is often needed. I know it will never change, but I propose 12 30-day month and 5,25 extra days at the end of a year. Also 5-day weeks or 10 day weeks and every year starts with the same day.

  • red_tomato@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Celsius makes most sense in places that experience proper winter.

    Is it above 0? Then the snow is melting. Is it below 0? Then the melted snow has turned into slippery ice. Have fun!

    • cattywampas@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Anybody who’s lived anywhere that has a proper winter knows that it isn’t as simple as below freezing = ice and above freezing = water.

      • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 months ago

        Well yeah but you know that yesterday it was +3 and some snow melted, and froze overnight when it was -5. That tells you it’s going to be slippery in the morning

      • CyberEgg@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 months ago

        The Fahrenheit scale has only one point of reference for people and that is not 100.

        Fahrenheit (the scientist) determined 0° at the coldest stable temperature he could achieve with a mixture of water, ice and ammonium chloride, then set the mean healthy body temperature (as it was known at that time, modern measuring equipment is more precise) at 96° and then as a third reference set 32° as the freezing point of water.
        The reference points were later changed to 32° for water freezing and 180° higher at 212° for water boiling due to Anders Celsius work and influence.

        Everything about this looks just random and devoid of any logic. Celsius for his scale referenced the temperatures at which water changes state and Kelvin uses the Celsius scale but sets 0 at the point of literally no energy. Behind both is an idea easily to grasp.

        • Soggy@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          looks just random and devoid of any logic.

          You literally just described the non-random logic.

        • MufinMcFlufin@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          They’re talking about using Fahrenheit in a day to day capacity like for the weather, not as a scientifically rigorous definition. 0°F is very cold and 100°F is very hot. If you treat it as almost a percentage of how “very hot” it is then it can be a pretty good indicator.

          Don’t get me wrong if I had to choose between all of metric and all of imperial then I’d ditch Fahrenheit in a heartbeat, but it’s not often in my day to day life that I think I’d ever use any temperature outside of (approximately) -15°C and 35°C. Therefore Fahrenheit in that specific regard offers more granularity and a nice 0-100 type of temperature scale for the temperatures I’d see on a day to day basis.

          • CyberEgg@discuss.tchncs.de
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            2 months ago

            On a day-to-day base it’s really just about what you’re being used to. Who cares about granularity in weather forecast? You get out of the shadow and it’s too hot for a jacket.
            Also, weather is not the only daily use of tenperature, look at cooking and baking where younhave much higher temperatures and always go beyond 100°F.

            • MufinMcFlufin@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              In terms of distance and weight I feel that both systems offer equally arbitrary (to daily use) units. There’s no fairly universal thing most everyone would experience in terms of either weight or distance that could be usefully measured on a similar 0-100 scale.

              People working more industrial jobs are probably going to be more frequently dealing with things that weigh a significant amount than people working office types of jobs so no standard would satisfy both groups. The closest I can really think of is the weight of an average person, but that’s variable based on region, has changed significantly over a short amount of time, and is very rarely ever a weight that most anyone would need to deal with, therefore wouldn’t be very useful or relatable to most people.

              Distances offer the same problem, since there’s no singular distance that the majority of people are going to experience by which we could base a scale on.

              That being said, I feel that weather is a fairly universal experience for everyone and a scale that fits all of the most frequently used values (for the weather) in the 0-100 range is quite nice.

              I’m fully aware that the weather isn’t the only use of temperature in a day to day context, however it’s not often that I need to know how hot the inside of an oven feels. Therefore how far exactly it lies beyond the 0-100 very cold to very hot spectrum that Fahrenheit offers doesn’t really matter.

    • lethargicpuppy14@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      I actually really like Fahrenheit for proper winter. You’ve got the freezing temperature, sure, but that’s it’s own notable point that exists without a special number. But on those especially cold days, you get to say that it’s below 0, and that means something for Fahrenheit.

  • Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    The cold/warm at the bottom doesn’t make sense unless you’re water.

    Fahrenheit is like asking a person how it feels, Celsius is like asking water how it feels.

    Also everyone loves metric until you have to ask for a third of something…

    • Spezi@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      I’m not sure if you noticed, but we are literally mostly made out of water, the stuff we eat is mostly water, we drink water, we cook water, we freeze water, we shower in water, we piss water and even our shit contains water.

      Also, guessing temperature in fahrenheit is only simpler to americans because they are used to fahrenheit. For everyone using celcius when they grow up, its perfectly normal to think “Oh it feels like 13 degrees celcius outside.”. For us its weird to guess Fahrenheit because we are not used to it.

      And wheres the problem in asking for a third of something?