W Celsius
1mon 24d ago by feddit.nl/u/blinfabian in memes from feddit.nl
Yeah, 100°C is pretty warm
0°C = outside the sauna
100°C = inside the sauna
100 degrees is uncomfortably hot for a sauna. Somewhere around 80 is good.
I feel like 90°C is like the sweet spot (or 85°C)
Being surrounded by hot air does a lot less than getting dumped into hot water, so the egg shouldn't get hard unless it sat there for a really long time.
I replied to you by accident, that's why I deleted it.
No no no... Tell us what happened to the egg
It... Got hard
Preferrable way less outside of the sauna.
100°C inside the sauna? That's not a sauna that's a cooking pot
yup, i take baths in 100C regularly bc its warm :3
Well if sauna is considered a bath then yes
The sauna you're in is 100°C? 212°F? I think you might be dead bro.
Sauna temperature is usually around 80-100°C, depending on your preference.
World Sauna Championship starting temperature was 110°C
If you told me this was a satirical Wikipedia article I would have believed you
We have also wife carrying competition and swamp football in Finland
Incredible. What a magical place
Fascinating. And now I really wonder what "small things" the prizes were.
EDIT: Also fascinating how Kaukonen and Pusa duked it out for 9 years in the men's competition.
The last competition hosted had Harvia stove for sauna as the price
"Dry" sauna rather than steam sauna. 100C at 100% humidity would very quickly be dangerous.
Lmao bless your heart
That's hard-boiled (for eggs)
came to.comment this. lol
100 warm
Yeah, I suppose that's one way to describe 100°C
"It's a bit warm today."
That's how I like my showers
That's how I like my
showerssauna
You need more wood
I didn't know my wife had an account on here! Hey, babe!
Heyyyy. it's not cheating if you think I'm your wife.
Boiling warm is still warm
On a cosmic scale 100C is practically freezing.
C is even more intuitive than the graphic.
0 = water's frozen 100 = water's boiling
I had an American explain “well you just know that 68 is long sleeve warm, 80 is shorts” or something, as if people cannot memorize that 18 is chilly and 21/22 is usual room temperature, 26 is shorts.
The only thing I dislike like about Celsius is that my thermostat supports both, but doesn’t allow half degrees Celsius, so it provides less granular control in Celsius than if you set it to Fahrenheit.
I'm in Québec, -10 is chilly, 14 is shorts :)
I was about to say, in Denmark i definitely have shorts on in the teens, else I'd barely need to own any
Same in Alberta -10 maybe put on a jacket, 14 grab the beers and fire up the BBQ it's patio time
oui, toujours :)
As you approach 0°F it is getting dangerously cold. As you approach 100°F it's getting dangerously hot. Celsius is obviously better scientifically, but fahrenheit is pretty reasonable for everyday use (unlike other imperial measurements).
Really my point is you can memorize new numbers when you look at the weather report.
When I go (went ) to the US it was not obvious to me looking at the weather in Fahrenheit what it would feel like.
Of course. I'm just adding that there is some logic to fahrenheit in day to day use.
Yeah, you just remember 0/20/40 °C close enough to 30/70/100 °F is freezing/good/heat stroke.
0°F is way colder than 100°F is hot.
There are hardly any population centers that reach the lower temperature while there's a shitton of them that reach the hotter one. That should say enough about how dangerous and inhospitable each is.
That’s not true. NYC frequently reaches 0°F and is home to 15 million people. All of northern US, and all of Canada frequently reach 0°F. It’s a fact than anything below 0°F is actively dangerous and anything above 100°F is actively dangerous.
Anything below 10°F is actively dangerous. Anything above 110°F is actively dangerous.
NYC barely ever reaches 0°F according to this site:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/new-york/lowest-temperatures-by-year
Seriously, NYC is closer to having regular 100°F weather than 0°F and it is in the Northern US!
In other terms: -18°C is extremely fucking cold, 38°C is just regular hot.
I grew up in Rochester NY, and there are many days with a zero or subzero windchill. Once it gets below 0°F, it is definitely actively dangerous. I’ve waited for a school bus in 7 to 10°F weather without issues.
Copium is real
Most metric units are designed around water in some way. Very easy to convert to different units because of this. 1mL of water is equal to 1g of water which is equal to 1 cubic cm of water, for example.
and it takes 1 calorie to heat 1g of water by 1°C, so with your daily recommended food intake of 2000kcal you could heat 2000l of water by 1°C or raise 20l of water from 0°C to 100°C.
Also a normal person can rides the bike between 0W and 100W comfortably, while trained people peak at around 1000W for short sprints.
And weight also revolves around water. 1L of water is 1KG which is 1000cm3 whereas 1cm3 is 1g. Super easy to calculate things.
Edit: correction
*cm³
I once heard an American say something "weighs as much as a 2 liter bottle" and it made me raise an eyebrow.
*at sea level, assuming pure water
It's intuitive with respect to water. Applying it to anything else is exactly the same as the Fahrenheit scale: you associate various things with numbers.
Also…
- 30 is hot
- 20 is nice
- 10 is cold
- 0 is ice
Calling the boiling point of water simply "warm" is a bit sus.
It's a warm sauna.
My water does not describe 100°C as "warm"
People who say 100°C is warm make my blood boil.
I had to look it up, TIL blood boils at the same temp as water
As a woman I also only take 100ºC showers
Any hotter wouldn't be a shower anymore, would it?
Supercriticality has entered the chat.
*For some definition of warm
As a European living in the US now for many years the temperature scale is the least of my annoyances. It's easy enough to memorize be ranges for what to wear. Fahrenheit is more granular, which is nice sometimes but really doesn't matter.
No, let's convert all the ridiculous weight/volume measures first. Having two kinds of ounces makes no sense. Measuring solids by volume (mostly) doesn't make sense. Having different units for different magnitudes doesn't make sense.
Fortunately things are often labeled in both metric and customary units so I can convert way easier.
Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to have my 12 fluid ounces of coffee and a 1/3 cup of oatmeal.
I very much prefer to cook/bake/prep in metric grams.
2c white flour, sifted.
1c brown sugar, packed.
1c room temperature water.
2tsp active dry yeast.
2tbsp vegetable oil.
1/2tsp baking powder.
2 egg yolks.
5 egg whites.
Pinch of cinnamon.
Fuck you. Tell me how many grams that is. I don't need five different tools to measure out my ingredients. I need a wet bowl, a dry bowl, and a scale.
Also this isn't a real recipe I just started naming shit at random.
I've had to translate recipes from Norwegian to American and this struggle is real. Never thought I'd need to look up material density tables for cooking.
“To American” … what?
We have kitchen scales, we know how to weigh ingredients.
Old recipes in English often use volume measurements, across the pond too.
Modern recipes use weights when possible.
Idk why you’d convert to ye olde style.
I accidentally a word. Converting recipes from Norwegian and metric to American and US customary units.
I'm aware. I have a scale, too. But most people didn't weigh dry ingredients. So when I translate for someone else I have to use the "normal" measures they're used to. For myself, I speak the language and just use metric, my scale, and a measuring cup with both markings.
You made cake btw.
You gotta do the cooking by the book.
A pinch 😆
Having the more granular temperature seems more practical. I often find myself adjusting my thermostat by just a single degree F. Do heating/ac thermostats in Europe use half degrees as increments? Even then I don’t think it’s as granular. But just integer values would be super annoying.
Half a C is actually quite close to a whole F in delta. I don't have a thermostat though.
I have not seen any thermostats in Europe with decimal degrees. But I also don't think a thermostat is necessarily accurate to that level anyway.
I have always wondered why electronic thermostats use 0.5°C increments and the answer seems to be Fahrenheit compatibility.
Thanks for confirming they exist. I have never seen one that precise.
lol you don’t think it’s accurate to a degree Fahrenheit? Why wouldn’t it be?
Because it's mass produced consumer goods operating on a "below x temperature turn on heat/turn off AC" and "above y temperature turn off heat/turn on AC". Old ones are just bimetallic strips where you change the trigger position with a slider, and modern ones use commodity grade temperature sensors, and neither is guaranteed to be placed particularly far from the vent.
The sensor is typically on the thermostat. Not at the vents. You would typically place the sensor in a central location in the house. A high quality multi speed motor AC is designed to keep a decently consistent temperature which is a bit more complex than just turn on / turn off. If you’re dropping $15k to $30k on central AC, they aren’t going to cheap out on a poor quality temp sensor.
It's just not that fine tuned of an instrument. The furnace also runs on intervals so it's just going to naturally fluctuate a bit. Like with anything "it depends", but I doubt it's possible to keep the room within a tenth of a centigrade just with a consumer level thermostat. Maybe in a small room with resistive heating? I'd love to see actual measurements of this.
Thermostats are not exactly calibrated machines unless you spend for a high end model. Put a few next to each other and they might differ 1°C, 2°F. Worse if you take the really cheap stuff.
The ones in the UK go by half a degree.
If they'd just standardized on one unit per measurement and apply si prefixes it's still an imperial unit but easier to work with. Say a quart for volume, and a yard for distance, because they're close to liter and meter. But I guess a kiloyard and a deciquart is taking it too far.
Yeah I think at that point it would be easier to just go metric.
Most Americans actually seem to be five with metric and probably would not mind it too much if we just switched. The objections are basically: 1) it's too expensive to switch now (okay), or 2) it's part of our identity (doubt). I swear to God everything is a culture war with some people.
More rational people, especially in STEM where it's already the standard, prefer it.
In general though, I would argue that Americans know metric better then Europeans know US customary, for what that's worth
It's mostly about what you're used to. Americans buy soda in liters, run 5km and do drugs by the gram. But we buy gasoline and milk in gallons and our recipes call for flour by volume. It's mostly inertia. At the end of the day you have to communicate with people around you so you use units they understand.
Saying its too expensive to change is bullshit. Metric is common enough that most people who care about units at all end up having one set of tools for each system so they can use both as needed. This includes industry and machinists. It wouldn't actually cost anything to change at this point we could just stop designing new things in imperial units and in a couple decades we would barely need imperial tools anymore, except to work on old stuff. Some engineers are just as pig headed as anyone though, so they just keep using imperial even though they know both, use both, and still run into problems with imperial.
But you don't switch in one go, so costs can be spread out over years. First you would do double labeling, roll that out slowly, and with time the customary units slowly fades out.
Sure, I get that, and we already have dual labeling on a lot of stuff, maybe even most of the stuff. The problem there is that nobody actually reads the other labeling, so they are also not learning.
They need to go back to what they were doing before: First decide that we're moving over so that mandates can be enforced.
Second, do what you were saying, and do dual labeling during the transition--but make metric most the prominent.
Third, educate kids in schools to use it (this already happens to a degree).
Fourth, launch massive informational campaigns to teach people how and why to use metric.
Fifth, step down the dual labeling gradually as more people are comfortable with the new units.
I expect there to be a long tail of non-metric units in use (see UK), but if we can switch more things over that is still an improvement. Heck, I'll even take them just decimalizing and removing some smaller units (like lbs/oz).
The history of metrication in the US is as frustrating as it is an interesting read. It can certainly be done and many countries have shown it can be done, but it takes commitment and support from the highest levels.
I know it's all based on what's familiar, but I imagine I'd have a hard time converting to Celsius for a weather report. I've lived in tropical climates in the US for over half my life so when people say things like "it's a hot 30 degrees out there!" it just short-circuits my brain.
If accuracy is not critical you can use some simple tricks to convert between them.
30C is roughly...2 x 30 + 32 = 92F which is only 6 degrees off the actual value which is 86F.
different units for different magnitudes
I'm not sure I get what you mean? Are you saying how we use ounces for tiny weights, pounds for "human"-ish weights, and tons for huge weights?
I think they mean ounces, cups, quarts, gallons, with no intuitive sense of conversion between them. I personally use ounces for almost everything (cocktail recipes are in 0.25 ounce increments, big cups are 40 ounces, big ol buckets can be 256 ounces). I might mess with gallons for very large amounts, but anything that can be expressed in cups or pints I'm usually just talking ounces anyway.
Your assumption is correct. I meant using cups, ounces, etc separately or in combination. Especially annoying when trying to figure out portions. Serving size: 8oz, package size: 1lb 4 oz. You have to do math every time.
Measuring solids by volume (mostly) doesn't make sense.
This could be apocryphal, but I seem to recall hearing that a lot of American recipes got established during times of westward expansion, and that it made more sense for people moving out to the frontier to carry a measuring cup and a set of spoons that it did for them to carry a carefully-calibrated scale.
Yeah that makes sense. And in a pinch (no pun intended), measuring your solids by volume or even just eyeballing it is good enough for a lot of cooking (baking is a different matter).
But let's not forget that Europe was not always metric, either. They went through the same process. They had the same units (or similar units) as US has now, with a lot of the same quirks. That was the entire point of the metric system: have one consistent set of units. United States was onboard early for metrication, but backed out before it completed it, so here we are.
It's funny because all of the imperial units are mathematically based on metric anyway.
I'm an American, so I started with imperial units, but I am making the very slow progression of converting to metric. I already use metric for work, and it's already the scientific standard here and has been since the 70s. It's just turbo annoying to try and get used to a new measuring system that I use reflexively especially when surrounded by imperial units. Makes it too easy to trip up and fall back.
The original Fahrenheit system was actually pretty clever. It set 0° at the temperature of brine and 96° at internal body temperature. That made marking a thermometer really easy. Like, ridiculously easy. 96 is divisible by two many times before reaching a decimal.
Because the freezing temperature of water was really close to 32°, the later Fahrenheit system set that as the lower temperature and 212° as the boiling point instead of using body temperature. That made marking a thermometer more difficult, and basically took away Fahrenheit’s only advantage. It was more consistent though. Now Fahrenheit is formally defined based on Kelvin.
Centigrade was originally marked as 100° at the freezing temperature, going down as temperature increases to 0° at the boiling temperature. Obviously that didn’t last long. The downside is that marking a Celsius thermometer depended on atmospheric pressure. Now Celsius is defined based on Kelvin by -273.15° being absolute zero and a degree corresponding to a very specific amount of heat energy increase.
So yeah, Fahrenheit hasn’t made any sense for many many years.
...and the heat energy for 1K stemming from one 1°C
No, it’s ultimately defined in joules.
every 1 K change of thermodynamic temperature corresponds to a change in the thermal energy, kBT, of exactly 1.380649×10−23 joules.
Yeah, of course that is the case now that most definitions have been updated to be tied to physical constants rather than observations that rely on specific conditions...
But the same wiki article you linked literally says otherwise. The Kelvin's magnitude was based on the magnitude of Celcius because of Charle's Law.
I.e. the volumes of gases under the ideal gas law scaled linearly with degrees celcius by about 1/273rd between 0-100C - which led to the prediction that the lowest possible temperature a gas could be was -273C (because that would be the point where it theoretically would have absolutely zero volume).
Which is a long-winded way of saying stop being a smartass. The guy you replied to was just as technically correct as you were, given they said 1k stemmed from 1C.
I.e. the volumes of gases under the ideal gas law scaled linearly with degrees celcius by about 1/273rd between 0-100C - which led to the prediction that the lowest possible temperature a gas could be was -273C (because that would be the point where it theoretically would have absolutely zero volume).
No horse in this race, but this is cool as fuck. So that's how the first tries at measuring absolute zero were made.
But they didn’t say “stemmed”. They said “stemming”. But sure, they’re technically correct in a historical context. I wanted to be more precise about the current definition. Under that current definition, it’s actually degree Celsius that stems from Kelvin.
should be french flag because the metric system originates from france and now its used everhwhere except myanmar, us and liberia
Kilometers to miles is probably the easiest common conversion. 5 km is 3 miles, easy peasy.
Except 5km is not 3 miles... it's 3.1069 miles so off by a considerable factor. 1 mile = 1.6km is a much more accurate approximation that's easy to remember.
That's 4%, that's not a significant amount for functional purposes and it's a whole number to whole number conversion. Most of the time, if I'm converting, it's from metric to imperial so 1 km is 0.62 miles. If you tell me the speed limit is 70 km/h it's way easier for me to calculate 70 ÷ 5 x 3 = 42 mph than to calculate either 0.62 x 70 or 70 ÷ 1.6 = 43.49.
Are we talking about British, American or sea miles?
kilometers to nautical miles are easier tbf
A mile is 8 furlongs.
The US could have switched to the world-wide standard years ago but under Reagan the switch was abandoned.
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
We could have had it as early as 1793, but the ship carrying the metric standards was attacked by pirates.
Those patriots dumped the metric system into Boston harbor, take that brits
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.
Metric time ❤️
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.
Sounds fun, now update every computer system simultaneously to a new date format.
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
"Sol" is a terrible month name, but the general idea is cool.
Would be nice to realign September, October, November, and December as the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months respectively
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.
Just treat the center month as summer break, then we are back to quarters.
How do you write the date for the "leftover" day? Like, thinking about dates in Excel.
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.
1/14. Easy
If programs can handle February having 28 days, sometimes 29. It can handle 14 having 1 day, sometimes 2.
Every other full spin it stops for 4h. There. We also get rid of DST because who can tell the time anymore?
The one thing that bothers me about the metric system is how much of it is never actually used. No one says "1 megameter", for example. They say "1,000 kilometers". When you think about it, most metric prefixes are never used with most metric units.
I think I never saw using Deca- and deci- in real life
Deciliters are used in cooking
We use decimetres in chemistry a fair bit. 1 mole of any gas will occupy 24 dm³ at rtp
thats just liters
Lo be unto the metric users, that the units of length and volume conveniently sync up!
How many cubic inches is a gallon btw?
"deci" is very popular. Just not in the "correct" form "decimeter".
In Spanish it's normal to say "8 décimas", which means 8 tenths. It is context dependent though. For example if speaking in a context where millimeters are used, it will be 8 tenths of a milimiter. That is, 0,8mm.
But yeah, it is very uncommon to use deci and deca. Because they're just not very useful. We are used to 2 digit numbers, or numbers with 2 decimal places. So 87m is not harder to use than 8,7dam.
It's probably also the reason there is no prefix between kilo and mega, or milli and micro. (They are x1000 increments instead of x10).
For the same reason, when in a context of millimeters, it's preferred to say "87mm" instead of "8,7cm".
decigrams are quite common in cooking/trading food
I've thought that was weird too. Decimeter's seems like a good unit for measuring a person's height, for instance.
Idk I prefer 174 cm over 17.4 dm. 17 dm is not nearly precise enough, either.
Yeah, I hear you. There's really no practical difference between saying 174cm and 17.4dm I think from the American perspective where 6ft is a sort of benchmark for adult male height, so psychologically that 6 looms large. CMs obviously work fine, but I'm trained to see the bigger 17 as a sort of benchmark/goal. None of that is healthy or rational, though.
Maybe it's easier to say "Oh, they're 17dm" or "15dm" and get a general sense for the height of a person. When you need to get precise, it's not useful.
Similarly, how the kilogram is the SI unit for weight, not the gram.
It's because metric sucks at anything on a human scale and most people deal with things on a human scale. Imperial was developed over hundreds of years to be extremely narrow and scope in a specific two things at a human scale.
It's a big reason why imperial makes far more sense. If you actually need to talk about anything on a human scale, everything no matter how nonsensical makes sense the moment, it's explained because it's all extremely intuitive.
While metric is basically a tiny fraction of a technically Superior system that basically makes no f****** sense in 99% of cases for a day-to-day life.
Try metric is the measurement of science, engineering and other fields of study because they actually do with things outside of day-to-day human scope
As the saying goes, use the right tool for the right job and only a dumb f*** uses the wrong tool for the wrong job
Could you give an example of a situation where metric makes less sense than imperial? I will then explain to you that it only appears to you like that, because those are the units you've lived your whole life using. Without that baggage, the adaptability and easy conversions make SI-units objectively superior in every situation.
Hell naw…what do you mean human scale, my foot is probably smaller than yours
Don’t get me started with thumbs…
I have no idea what you're talking about... humans are around 1-2m tall, weigh about 40-80kg, have a body temperature of about 37 C, and need to drink a couple litres of water per day. How are these units not the proper order of magnitude for measuring things "on a human scale"?
Found the US-American. Go vote Trump or whatever it is y'all do over there lol.
212 warm / 100 warm
warm
Meme was made by a space shuttle tile.
Tbf as someone who grew up with the imperial system due to being raised by a British boomer its fairly easy if you're familiar with it, I still often cook in imperial due to a load of old cook books I have.
Having said that anyone who wants the imperial system in the modern day is a absolute idiot, metric is objectively superior.
A brit once told me that the imperial system makes sense if you look at it from the perspective of a peasant at the market - units of 12 was a lot easier to work with in the olden days because it's easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6.
I guess it makes sense from a historical viewpoint.
I just wish it was always 12 instead of 3, 12, 1760 and whatever the eff they come up with.
Farenheit on the other hand does not make sense at all
Fahrenheit makes more sense as a unit in use. 100 equals hot, but doesn't equal death, 0 equals cold. In a lot of the world freezing is only kind of cold, not actually cold. Metric makes sense for science while imperial is more of a common persons unit; that's also why Americans in science use metric.
Best way to use Fahrenheit is to consider it as a percentage of how hot it is. 0 degrees is zero percent hot, and 100 is fully hot. Beyond that you’re in super cold/hot territory.
But yeah, Celsius is still better.
Fahrenheit is better at describing weather in reference to human interaction with temperature Celsius is better for everything else.
But that's the same for everything imperial. It's always better when it comes to actual human elements. How big is that stick? How many things in that piece of bread? How much weight is that rock? I need to move.
While metric is basically better anytime you have tooling you need to be extremely exact. You need to know something that is less human and more mathematical or abstract.
Well each system can do the thing. They're not great at it quickly falls apart. That's a big reason why people tend to say imperial sucks. Most people no longer actually interact with the natural world anymore. Everything is computers, exact measurements, quantifiable numbers from shops. The only thing left that most people deal with on a day-to-day basis is the weather and why Fahrenheit may be better than Celsius. It's only vaguely better since weather is already such an imprecise thing that really doesn't matter.
Well yes the granularity of Fahrenheit is far more useful. If you actually want to be like specific about things Celsius when it comes to weather it's close enough f****** does the job
It makes a lot more sense if you know about chains. A chain is 22 yards, and there are 80 chains in a mile. There are also rods (a quarter of a chain) and furlongs (10 chains)
So: 3 Barleycorn in an inch 4 inches in a hand 3 hands in a foot 3 feet in a yard 5.5 yards in a rod 4 rods in a chain 10 chains in a furlong 8 furlongs in a mile
... And of course there's the overlapping systems of length for manufacturing, agriculture, maritime, and horse racing, which have their own, separate subdivisions and largest units, but usually you can get away with just the nail, the fathom, the nautical mile, and the span.
Its basically entirely this, its not for no reason much of the world wound up using something akin to it. Honestly for small scale stuff such as cooking I do genuinely quite like using it but especially in the digital age its simply become obsolete I can't imagine having to code something which requires employing imperial measurements.
Imperial is FAR more human and "natural" then metric. Metric fails frequently at being quantifiable with natural experiences and objects.
But imperial falls apart the second your trying to do something at a large scale, super small scales or literally anything that isn't "human scale"
And basically every test I've ever seen. If you don't have tools or some reference point, people will nine times out of 10 be able to more accurately gauge something using imperial measurements then using metric measurements.
Metric relies far too much on reference in tooling, but that's also its greatest strength. It's absurdly, exact and reliable while imperial is loosey-goosey
The biggest issue with imperial recipes is the constant use of measures by volume. If everything was in weight ounces it would be alright, but a lot of recipes insist on measuring solids by volume, like a cup of flour, a teaspoon of sugar etc, making them a lot harder to replicate consistently. My flour could be denser, my sugar could be finer, if things were measure by the actual mass such things would not matter but instead I have to fill a cup and pray to the gods that my cup of Ecuadorian flour has the same density as the one on the recipe (it almost never is)
in this thread: USAians consooming epic amounts of copium.
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.
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.
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
If you think Imperial is a better system, you're the perfect example of the American education system at work.
In case those were too many words...
You stupid.
I don't think that freedom units are better, I think they're more fun, and I like having a bit of whimsy in these trying times.
This. There is nothing more immersive in a story set in the past than old-timey measurements. I want my potions in drams, I want my house measured in paces, I want to know how many leagues the city is across. I want cubits and spans for construction and stones, pounds, and smelt for weights.
It makes the world more real, less sterile to have these human-centric measures.
The American education system taught us metric and was quite clear that's the standard. I'm pretty sure it's the only unit we used. It's also the standard within our government, as I'm sure you've heard plenty of times in threads like this.
The thing that entrenches Imperial units in our culture is the familiarity from us steeping in it in everyday usage. And we are exposed to both there, too. It's not about being stupid. It's just about inertia, and that's at least in part because the two systems do have their little trade-offs.
This always appears to come up from people who most likely are at least familiar with multiple languages. Why not just standardize on English? Did your education system just fail you? Was that too many words for you? (Obviously not. All intended rhetorically.)
I know US culture is struggling with a current of anti-intellectualism, but if you indulge in reducing nuanced topics to "America stupid", you're just watering the weeds in your own garden.
0 C being the temperature water freezes is useful for knowing if there is ice outside, which has practical use. If we keep going the way we are, soon 100 will be an indicator that there is no water outside. Practical if you're a hydrophobe or hydrophile.
Never got this. I saw one fucking dumb american actually defend the rrtarded system by saying "It's actually more precise" - what a fucking stupid thing to say, when you don't even have a smaller unit than freaking Inches. Atleast we have mm. You guys use 1\4 Inch. Wtf is that??
Fractions are pretty good for quick ratios, which is why it's popular in carpentry, but I'd never call it "more precise" than decimal numbers. Anything that needs tighter tolerances than 1/16" is probably going to use metric measurements.
I will say that for most people it doesn't impact their life either way. If the Imperial system (or the modern American system based on it) were truly inferior they would have been replaced but it's mostly an issue in laboratories and engineering.
They’ll use 1/1000th of an inch, a “thou”. But at that point it’s basically metric but worse.
I fully forgot about thousandths even though I see them all the time as "mils". Definitely metric but worse.
It's a fraction. So like if you had one apple to split between four people then we would all get one quarter of a whole apple.
1 apple per 4 people = 1 per 4 = 1/4 = 0.25
I don't know that I would say that fractions are more or less precise than decimal.
Precision has nothing to do with the unit system. Or notation of fractions.
0,001m is as precise as 1mm
1/1000m is as precise as 1mm
In SI you don't even have prefixes, you use scientific notation with base units. You don't say neither 1mm nor 0,001m. You say 1x10-3. Which is exactly the same as the other magnitudes of this comment.
If you want precision in imperial, you could as easily say 0,00000000001 inch. It would be as precise as 0,000000000255 mm, or whatever the conversion is.
Yeah, but let's see if they get the apple example before we throw all that at them.
I think "decimal" is a loaner word in European, as it's yet another thing America invented. Don't laugh at them for being slow on the uptake.
So that guy was an idiot, but you're wrong about the smaller units.
Fractionals commonly go all the way down to the 32nd. If you need to be even more precise than that we have the thou, which is defined as 1/1000 of an inch or 0.0254mm.
... Is anyone going to tell him we use millimeters too if the need is that small?
That is even more stupid. Then why not just use centimeter then?
We do, but centimeters are in a weird spot. In general they are just a bit too small to be used in place of inches and too big to be used when you need millimeters. Also, inches easily go into feet which then go into yards. Probably the closest function to that would either be decimeters or fractions/decimals of a meter but that doesn't really feel great either. There's also something to be said about functional accuracy; for measurements that don't have to be exact imperial units feel pretty good. For example, I might say that a cardboard box is about 1cubic foot if it looks about 1 ft in length on each side. If I instead used meters, 1 ft is about 30 cm (30.48 cm) or 0.3 m which would translate to 27,000 cubic cm or 0.027 cubic m. You might round that 0.027 to 0.025 or 0.03 cubic m depending on if it's more or less than but it's still feels like a weird unit for our rough approximation.
Another quick example, my foot size is approximately a foot in length and I paced off a room at 10ft x 20ft so the area is about 200 sq ft. The equivalent would be that my foot is approximately 0.3 m so 10 steps x 0.3 m x 20 steps x 0.3 m = 18 sq m.
Imperial units work well when you want to use relatively small whole numbers and high accuracy isn't super necessary, but ultimately it just comes down to preference.
We have even less than mm
through the power of the decimal separator!
we have fucking picometers how is an inch more precise
The only argument they have is for temperature, because they're afraid of decimal points.
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.
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.
I too live in America and grew up here. I know what metric is. But it's not dominant, which I think you know.
It is in all the areas that matter. Who cares if our road signs and weather reports aren't.
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.
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.
And drug dealing
centicelsius or kilocelsius?
In physics at these scales kilo Kelvins are used.
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!
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.
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
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.
On a scale of 0 to 100.
Celsius is water Fahrenheit is people
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.
looks just random and devoid of any logic.
You literally just described the non-random logic.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, I live somewhere with proper winter, just because it's snowing doesn't mean it's cold yet.
I've personally been in -37C before, so yeah maybe 0C isn't so cold to me anymore.
Yes... Thank you British Empire, French Empire, and Spanish Empire for your contributions to the system.
-British: Mile, Foot, Inch, Yard
-Spanish: Dollar, from the Spanish Pieces of 8
-French: You know what you did
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)"
.....
Come up with a metric time system then. Also, fix the damn calendar.
Milk bottles in the supermarkets in the UK are now using weird sizes like 1.136l, because apparently that easier for some old cunt to read.
I'm guessing that the 1.136 L comes from not wanting to change actual package size when switching to metric. Can't be a coincidence that 1.136L is 2 imperial pints.
It's not too uncommon for that to happen. The smaller glass Coke bottles are something like 290ml from being converted from flozzies (I think some places have a 355ml one)
You really recognize these weirdly precise numbers in packaging.
355ml. 454g. 25.4mm.
Yeah, suuuuure your chocolate bar is precise to 3 sig figs..
I wouldn't actually be surprised if chocolate bars are that exact. The equipment to do it is easily available, and they would be motivated to buy it to save having even 1 extra gram in the package.
True that, especially as they shrinkflate it. A chocolate bar is usually 50-60g these days. Used to be 71g as I was a kid. Gee I wonder where that number came from...
I've heard that one of the reasons that metrification didn't take off in the States was that when they converted highway signs, they rounded down instead of up, so people got mad at "losing" a couple km/h. Tactical error, there.
12 fl oz, 1 pound, 1 inch for us Americans or those curious about the imperial system.
Also, are you buying a pound of chocolate?
Sometimes!
But yeah, no, chocolate bars are usually 50-60g. Which is also a thing, because they used to be 72g. I remember that number specifically because that's two of your "ounces", except on a second Tuesday during the ides of march when an ounce is like 85 grams. But only for red things. There's a whole separate system for blue things.
It's like this in Canada for years, everything in groceries is strange numbers in ml or g, converted from pounds/qt/whatever units
LMAO.
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.
1 mile is 5 tomAtoes (5280)
my kid
Edit: formatting
Another mnemonic, "ailing office" is 5280 in the major system.
There was something I read once upon a time that was like:
F is how hot/cold people are C is how hot/cold water is K is how hot/cold matter is
I feel like that's pretty accurate.
How do you define inch without metric units? How much is that?
The funnuest argument for farenheit that i keep seeing is: celsius is good for scientific things, but in everyday life, farenheit is better, because it tells you how it FEELS. 60F feels pleasant while 40 is too cold.
The delusion is real, even tge dumbest american can learn new numbers, i believe in you the same way you velive a pedo is gonna save you
This is the same level as "everyone has an accent except for me"
Yes but 69F is nice while 69C is not
69C is hot
It is a very tepid temperature for tea.
69C is hawt.
Fahrenheit is just a metric measurement of human experience. Why do you hate base ten?
Celsius isn't even used in science. Kelvins are used.
They're the same, except shifted by 273
273 .15
I think it's sort of useful for weather, since in most places you're not gonna see temperatures under 0F or above 100F much if at all, so the scaling seems a bit easier. Other than that though, yeah, it's pretty terrible.
Where I live temperature in celsius is symmetric about 0. -40 to +40. I think that scaling is easier than -40 to +100.
Yeah, obviously isn't the case everywhere, but I think such extreme temperature ranges are kind of rare (excluding random one-off days that are super cold or hot for whatever reason).
For places that get super cold (like below 0F a lot), generally Celsius probably makes more sense in terms of scaling.
The delusion is real, even tge dumbest american can learn new numbers, i believe in you the same way you velive a pedo is gonna save you
Do not overestimate US Americans: they didn't manage to prevent him becoming president, twice - with all kind of insane justifications on all sides....
Exactly, its just cope. Someone who grew up entirely on metric temperature will have exactly the same intuition. For example myself:
<0 = freezing 0-10 = Cold 11-17 = Warming up 18-24 = Comfortably warm 25-29 = Tropical 30-40 = Uncomfortably hot >40 = Dangerously hot
Besides which, all of this goes out the window once wind chill and other external effects that absolute temperature cannot account for come into play.
It's the usual American exceptionalism that causes them to throw a tantrum every time they're asked to conform to a worldwide standard. There's a reason most of the world uses metric measurements for most things in every day life, and its because it just works once you get used to it.
because celcius is about how aater feels, faranheit is about how you feel and kelvin is about how atoms feel
Fun fact Americans do both
I got used to Celsius while living abroad in Europe and Japan and prefer it to Fahrenheit. The extra granularity of the latter scale doesn't really add much more utility.
However, while 32 F and 212 F are pretty arbitrary, so is calibrating to the freezing and boiling temperatures of water. I'd rather have a scale that's calibrated to humans rather than H2O.
Burgerperson here, metric should be standard
mg, g, kg
What are the others meant to represent?
h = hecto da = deca (had to look that one up) d = deci c = centi
×100, ×10, ÷10, ÷100, respectively
You'll know centi from centimetres. Decimetres are somewhat common because 1dm³ = 1L. Hectopascal is a common unit of pressure.
no one uses hg or dag or dg... wouldve been better to put kg, mg, ug, ng on here...
- Hectograms - 100 grams
- Dekagrams - 10 grams
- Decigrams - .1 grams
- Centigrams - .01 grams
Nobody uses those in every day conversation.
They will be used in specific contexts, like measuring fluids with syringes where space is limited and accuracy needs to be high.
I had a running gag once with my cheese guy where i would order in hectograms. I probably found it more amusing than he did.
Your cheese guy? You may be doing life better than me.
hahah, there's a small deli up the road and the same guy runs the counter most of the time.
Certain ones get used a lot, like centimeters and dekapascals.
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...."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Is there anyone in this world needs a caliper of precision between 1cm and 1mm that can't afford a 1mm of precision caliper?
No, but between 0.1mm and 0.10mm is absolutely a thing.
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.
Yes, but by recording your measurements as being precise to the neareat 1/5th you're saying they're precise to the nearest 1/10 if you record it with decimals unless you add a qualifying statement.
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.
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.
"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.
Exactly like my example above. 1/8 implies +or- 1/16. While .125 implies +or- .0005, but it was only measured to +or- .0625, which is 2 orders of magnitude different.
How do you account for doubling precision? Decimal only records 10-fold steps.
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.
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.
yeah, a duodecimal metric system would have been better. Still, it's more important to have a standard system than it is for it to be ideal. It's the strongest argument for US customary system within the USA, as well - but that argument breaks down when you widen the scope to the world.
In the 18th century context, and its dozens of competing measurement systems, something like the metric system was sorely needed just for standardization. We're just lucky that it was something more or less sensible. Had the US customary system won out, I think we'd be objectively worse off.
So it could have been better, but it could also have been MUCH much much worse.
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)
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.
But what if your precision is greater than 1/100 but not 10 times as precise?
If you have 0,7 that is more precise than 0,7 and less precise than 0,7. You can just say 0,7 ± 0,02.
That's my point. You essentially need to add a qualifying statement to make decimal work, and even then people don't naturally understand the precision. In your example, most people think the precision is the last bit (.02), whereas it's actually .04 since it represents the error on either side of the measurement.
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".
If your tolerance is 1/24 your precision isn't fine enough enough to record 23/48.
23/48 has a built in tolerance of +/- 1/96, because outside of that range the measurement would read as either 22/48 or 24/48.
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 €.
I understand sig figs. That's my entire point. What I'm saying is that fractions don't require the use of sig figs, and especially don't need any "+/-" bullshit at the end when precision isn't measures at a granularity that isn't a perfect power of 10.
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.
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.
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
Yes, but how do you record that precision without needing a qualifying statement. When precision matters, "0.25" represents a measurement that is known to be closer to 0.25 than it is to either 0.24 or 0.26. Something that is only precise to 1/4 of a unit isn't that precise. The decimal way to record a precision of 1/4 is "0.25 +/- 0.125".
The thing to understand about decimals and precision is that you're still recording a fractional measurement, but your denominator is fixed to powers of 10. 0.1 is 1/10. 0.01 is 1/100. So when increasing precision by less than a factor of 10 is difficult to represent.
This matters a lot for things like digital calipers, where a cheap set will show the same measurement as a nice set that's more precise because the good ones aren't 10 times as precise. But if they have a fractional setting, the nicer ones will read more precisely because that increased precision can be represented on the display.
The metric system isn't stopping you from using fractions though
It isn't.
F and C are both made up points, not absolute values. C is great, if what you care about is what water is doing. F is great, if you care about how something feels to a human (not saying you can't memorize new numbers, but 0 and 100 being dangerous is simple).
If you want an actual "best" temperature scale, use Kelvin. 0 is no energy. It actually has a fundamental base. If you argue that temperatures that are useful to humans are too hard to memorize, then you're making the argument against C too (or F when dealing with water).
F has nothing to do with how a human feels. 0 f was literally just a very cold day that happened once. You're just used to it, the same way people who use c are used to it and feel it very intuitively. A scale that actually was human would probably be logarithmic since we dont feel temperature linearly, and the 0 would be at 20c ~68 f since that is the temperature that's most comfortable for people, with positive numbers being hot temperatures and negative numbers being cold
Yes both are made up. As everything we use to count or measure is.
However it depends how they were made up.
Fahrenheit was set to 0 on the lowest temperature someone could achieve at time. And 100 was set to the body temperature of the human body. Totally two comparable points of measurement.
Celsius uses the melting point of water as 0.and then uses, revolutionary, the same water when it changes its state from liquid to gas.
Fahrenheit was set to 0 on the lowest temperature someone could achieve at time. And 100 was set to the body temperature of the human body. Totally two comparable points of measurement.
It's not the coldest someone could achieve at the time. It was chosen because it's a reliable low temperature that will consistently be produced by a particular brine solution.
Celsius uses the melting point of water as 0.and then uses, revolutionary, the same water when it changes its state from liquid to gas.
That doesn't really make it better, does it? How does that make it better? It sounds like it makes it better, but functionally what's better about it? What functionally is made superior by defining it as two stages of one thing rather than stages of different things? As long as the temperatures are reliably reproduced, it's functionally the same. Sure, being a measure of water does make it more useful when you care about water (at sea level, and only at sea level), as I said before. It doesn't generally make it better though.
It is better because it uses 2 times water as reference point.
Not one thing and then a completely different one.
We could for example set the 0 degrees at the freezing point of alcohol and 100 at the boiling point.
Or 0 at the boiling point of argon and 100 at the temperature it turns into plasma.
Both of these fictional scales are better than Fahrenheit.
You didn't answer why that makes it better. What functionality does it give us that we don't have if we use two reference points from different things. I'm pretty confident there aren't any. This is proven especially true because that's not how Celsius is defined anymore, and it didn't lose any functionality. It sounds more "pure", or whatever, but that doesn't make it better. Do you have an actual reason that it improves its functionality?
They are both made up but what is the fahrenheit? Where does the scale start? How much does it increment by? How does it relate to other units?
Celcius starts at the melting point of water at sea level and each increment is 1% of the required change to turn water from frozen to boiling. This is arbitrary yes, but the importance is not if it's arbitrary but that it is a description of a physical property in our world that can be experimentally repeated, tested and verified. No authority can arbitrarily decide that a degree Celcius is actually different from what it was last year.
There's a reason that all imperial units are scientifically described by their relation to their metric counterpart and it's because metric units are based on physical properties of the universe around us and so we can measure them as opposed to just define them.
They are both made up but what is the fahrenheit? Where does the scale start? How much does it increment by? How does it relate to other units?
0F is the same, but for brine. 100F was what was believed to be body temperature (still, close enough).
This is arbitrary yes, but the importance is not if it's arbitrary but that it is a description of a physical property in our world that can be experimentally repeated, tested and verified.
They both can. Notably, the definitions that you and I both gave aren't actually how they're defined anymore. They're both defined using Kelvin, because that's the one that's actually more valid. C and F are just defined as points on that scale. An authority literally did decide it's a different value than years before, as the pressure at sea level is somewhat variable. They decided to use universal constants, that K is defined with, to define both of these scales.
There's a reason that all imperial units are scientifically described by their relation to their metric counterpart and it's because metric units are based on physical properties of the universe around us and so we can measure them as opposed to just define them.
See above. You're thinking of SI units, not metric. They're mostly the same, except notably the SI unit for temperature is Kelvin, not Celsius.
100F was what was believed to be body temperature
I always thought that was funny fixing point. It makes sense in a medical setting, but in everyday use?
Oh sure, let me just describe the weather outside by comparing to the temperature inside my butthole.
Let's cook this roast in an oven that's as hot as 4 buttholes.
0 is absolute cold, any other system is wrong.
In my opinion, Fahrenheit is a much better system for weather. Anything below 0°F and above 100°F is actively dangerous for a person to exist in. Anything in between is just normal weather. For anything scientific, I think K makes more sense than C. To me, C is actually only rarely useful.
Edit, because people seem to be offended by the suggestion that the system they don’t use is more practical in a very specific context:
What you are used to is definitely best for you, but I’m talking about the general practicality and usefulness in specific contexts. C in the context of states of water makes sense, and is practical and useful. F in the context of weather makes sense, because 0 to 100 is just normal weather in places with four seasons. In the context of weather, it is both practical and useful. K is practical and useful in pretty much every scientific context. To say memorizing -17 to 38 vs memorizing 0 to 100 is the same is silly, because 0 and 100 are very meaningful to the human mind. Of course, what you are used to will be what your mind immediately goes to, it does not change the fact that 0°F to 100°F for weather is more understandable, 0°C to 100°C for freezing and boiling water is more understandable, and 0°K being truly no thermal energy with units the same size as C is better for scientific contexts.
L nationality and its system its trying to uphold, barbaric concept about to or at the finishing line to end our very existence through its "interests"
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...
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?