Day-to-day the inches/feet dance is more annoying to me than the celsius-farenheit thing though.
But yeah haha, imperial units of distance, weight and volume are trash; we all know it. I still have to Google how to convert feet to miles, and I was born here. Ounces to gallons? Oof.
Related picture: https://i.imgur.com/MQ7LVC3.jpg
The value in a standardized system of measurement is that other people are using the same thing. As an individual American, I essentially never deal with non-Americans, so no issue there. As a country, we're a big enough market that companies importing here will go through the effort to add imperial measurements to their products.
If anything, you have less granularity with celsius, as each degree of temperature represents a wider range of values.
I agree that it may not be the most useful thing, but it's worth pointing out.
Also- "2 degrees" of global warming doesn't sound so bad to a lot of fahrenheit folks, its actually closer to 4 degrees in F
I always get confused going to the US, but I do like that they have more values as you mentioned. Or, Celsius only has 40 numbers that tell you how things are.
20.2°C = 202d°C
Yes, but why should this be amazing?
Listen, the metric system had some great ideas - using only one metric for all spatial divisions is one - but you got ahead of yourself, got half-assed, and have this insane obsession with a useless scaling factor (10).
The meter isn't bad; it's basically a yard. But then you went crazy and tried to related all of your measurements to the Earth, which is just this unnecessary obsession that has no actual intrinsic value. Why is it important that a unit volume of water have a unit mass of weight? Why is it important that there be an even 100 degrees between the freezing and boiling points of water? It's not! You could have chosen any arbitrary weight and temperature baselines and it would have been basically the same.
And then you did a shit job of it! The density of water is 0.997 g/ml! Measuring the Earth to determine the meter was silly all along, and you ended up redefining the triple point of water to 0.01 degree Celsius because it was too hard to fix the discrepancy by then! You started off with these supposedly noble goals, and then got half-assed because it was too hard to correct your earlier mistakes. Sound familiar?
Meanwhile, you've abandoned the archaic units of measure's reliance on powers of two to fetishise powers of ten! (On a computer programming forum, how can you defend this?) Common units are littered in powers of two because factors of two and four make for really convenient subdivisions. Four cups in a quart, four quarts in a gallon, those are very useful subdivisions. Eight furlongs in a mile, sixteen ounces in a pound. Binary divisions produce very useful natural units at human scales. Decimal divisions let an idiot multiply one number by a very large powers of ten easily. Which do you think is really more important?
As I see it, since the vast majority of the world is using metric/SI units it behooves the US to change sooner or later.
I think tech/silicon valley should be using their influence with Washington to lobby for these changes. We should be asking each of the presidential candidates in elections what is their stand on this. IIRC, Bernie Sanders had promised that he would take US to metric system if elected.
https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/table3.html
I'm not saying we shouldn't have switched over decades ago, but I think it's good to understand the context of such decisions.
For starters, if you arbitrarily round Fahreinheit numbers up or down (which you did to get that 0-100 range), you need to do the same with Celsius. So it'd be -20-40, which is a lot less un-intuitive.
But also, that this range is what "most people regularly experience" is also rather arbitrary. I have regularly experienced winters below -20 C, for example, but I've only seen +40 C once. The truth is, most people will experience a range of temperatures that's not going to be nice and round numbers in either scale, so why fixate on it?
I'm not really saying this is better than Celsius, just that it's understandable why it's not changing as quickly as some would like. I will say that the industries that have specific reason switched fairly quickly. For instance, aviation uses feet, inHg, statute+nautical miles but does temperature in Celsius because pilots overwhelmingly care about whether it's above or below freezing outside.
>what does it have to do with space probes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...
Note to downvoters: This is an objective answer to an objective question. It is not an opinion on the US's use of imperial units.
It's an answer to a question that no one asked. The question was:
>How is Fahrenheit more difficult to calculate with than Celsius, and what does it have to do with space probes?
From the link you provided:
>Specifically, software that calculated the total impulse produced by thruster firings produced results in pound-force seconds. The trajectory calculation software then used these results – expected to be in newton seconds – to update the predicted position of the spacecraft.
It has nothing to do with Farenheit or Celsius. The error was with the representation of force, not temperature.
We just want to know if its hella hot (100) or hella cold (0)
Or use US dollars.
Or (yikes) Microsoft Windows.
America’s quaint and annoying reliance on feet, inches, miles, and pounds is culturally important, even if it makes engineering a pain.
> Or use US dollars.
Both those things basically happened.
And the same space probe loss could have happened just the same with pure SI units, the problem was somebody didn't put a unit label and somebody else didn't get clarification and made an assumption. If someone used decimeters without labeling and someone else read it as centimeters, you still failed.
Also sometimes wonder if the weather reports should be tell ing wet bulb temperatures, because it also gives an indication of humidity.