That one feels kinda meh to me. It solves a handful of non-issues with our current calendar (I don't care that the month starts on the same day, nor do I care that each day of the year is always the same day of the week). Each months having the same number of days is an improvement. It persists the problem that you still can't use months or years as a real mathematical unit of measure and extends it to weeks, which is the biggest annoyance with calendars, although it reduces how often that becomes significant. Adding two days that have neither a day of the week nor month would mean significant changes to every computer system that needs to deal with dates, and is just hateful.
The 1st of a month to the 1st of the next will always be one month, but it depends on the month and year how many days that is. So a month as a duration will span either 28 or 29 days. A week is now sometimes 8 days, and a year might still have 365 or 366 days, depending on the year.
How do you even write the date for the days that don't fit? Like, a form with a box for the date needs to be able to handle Y-M-D formatting but also Y-YearDay. Probably people would just say 06-29 and 12-29, or 07-00 and 01-00, although if year day is the last day of the year it kinda gets weird to say the last day of the year is the zeroth day of the first month of the next year.
There's just a lot of momentum behind a 12 month year with every day being part of a month and week. Like, more than 6000 years. You start to run into weird issues where people's religion dictates that every seventh days is special which we've currently built into our calendar.
Without actually solving significant issues, it's just change for changes sake.
Well, this is shitpost. And I wasn't serious about this. I responded to someone that wants the whole world to switch to a global time, and since mankind existed we used some local time in our daily lives.
Also UTC is not perfect because of leap seconds. Which means you cannot calculate with a simple formula how many seconds are between two time stamps, you need a leap seconds table for that. And leap seconds are only announced under 6 months into the future. So everything farther away, you cannot say how much time is between two stamps.
So with UTC a minute can have more or less seconds that 60.
Everyone using UTC? Nah. Creates more problems than it solves (which are already solved, because you can just lookup what time it is elsewhere, and use calendars to automatically convert, etc.).
I for one do not want to do mental gymnastics /calculation just to know what solar time it is somewhere else. And if you just look up what solar time it is somewhere, we've already arrived back at what we're already doing.
Much easier just looking up what time (solar) time it is in a timezone. No need to re-learn what time means when you arrive somewhere on holiday, no need for movies to spell out exactly where they are in the world whenever they speak about time just so you know what it means. (Seriously, imagine how dumb it would be watching international films and they say: "meet you at 14 o'clock", and you have no idea what solar time that is, unless they literally tell you their timezone.)
Further, a lot more business than currently would have to start splitting their days not at 00:00 (I'm aware places like nightclubs do this already).
Getting rid of timezones makes no sense, and I do not understand why people on the internet keep suggesting it like it's a good idea.
I'm pretty sure they don't mean "give up on time zones" but "express your timezone in UTC". For example, central Europe is UTC+1. Makes almost no difference in everyday life, only when you tell someone in another zone your time. The idea is to have one common reference point and do the calculation immediately when someone gives you their UTC zone. For example, if you use pacific time and tell me that, it means nothing to me, but if you say "UTC-8" I know exactly what time it is for you.
This term is often used specifically to refer to the French Republican calendar time system used in France from 1794 to 1800, during the French Revolution, which divided the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds
Yeah. I think if someone had a sensible method for how we could switch from one to the other with minimal impact, it might work.
What would very difficult for me would be the recalibration of my internal clock. Knowing a second is slightly shorter, and a minute is longer, and an hour is much longer, would be hell for a while.
Unfortunately I think something that's pretty hard coded into the society at this point is that a day should be able to divide by so we end up with the 8hr work, 8 hr rest, 8 hr sleep. I'd be interested in a 30hr day over a 10 hr day. But that one doesn't make much sense either since it misses the mark on bringing tim fully into the 10 base metric system, but still has all the same troubles you'd encounter for getting people to switch.
It's ambiguous as to if the day or month is first.
Not if everyone is using it, as they should.
Besides, so is is yours. 2024.06.07 could be the 7th of June or (if you're an American and thus used to the months and days being in an illogical order) 6th of July.
As for writing out the month names, that's no longer shorthand. That's just taking more time and space than necessary.
Au contraire! With a three character month, period separation isn't needed, and the date is shorter. (Admittedly there's likely to be a language translation issue, depending on audience.)
Least specific -> most specific is generally better in spoken language as the first part spoken is the part the listener begins interpreting.
Like if I ask if you're free on "the 15th of March" vs "March 15", the first example is slightly jarring for your brain to interpret because at first it hears "15th" and starts processing all the 15ths it's aware of, then "March" to finally clarify which month the 15th is referencing.
The only thing practical about DD.MM.YY is that it is easier for the speaker because they can drop the implied information, or continue to add it as they develop the sentence.
"Are you free on the 15th" [oh shit, that's probably confusing, I meant a few months from now] "of July" [oh shit, I actually mean next summer not this one] "next year (or 2025)".
So the format is really a question of who is more important in spoken language: the speaker or the listener? And I firmly believe the listener is more important, because the entire point of communication is to take the idea you've formulated into your head, and accurately describe that idea in a way that recreates that same idea in the listener's head. Making it easier for the speaker to make a sentence is pointless if the sentence itself is confusing to the listener. That's literally a failure to communicate.
You're confusing your own familiarity and experience with a general human rule.
My mother tongue (Portuguese) has the same order when saying numbers as English (i.e. twenty seven) and indeed when I learned Dutch it was jarring that their number order is the reverse (i.e. seven and twenty) until I got used to it, by which point it stopped being jarring.
The brain doesn't really care beyond "this is not how I'm used to parse numbers" and once you get used to do it that way, it works just as well.
As for dates, people using year first is jarring to me, because I grew up hearing day first then month, then year. There is only one advantage for year first, which is very specifically when in text form, sorting by text dates written in year-month-day by alphabetical order will correctly sort by date, which is nice if you're a programmer (and the reason why when I need to have a date as part of a filename I'll user year first). Meanwhile the advantage of day first is that often you don't need to say the rest since if you don't it's implied as the present one (i.e. if I tell you now "let's have that meeting on the 10th" June and 2024 are implied) so you can convey the same infomation with less words (however in written form meant to preserve the date for future reference you have to write the whole thing anyway)
Personally I recognize that it's mainly familiarity that makes me favour one format over the other and logically I don't think one way is overall better than the other one as the advantages of each are situational.
Meanwhile the advantage of day first is that often you don't need to say the rest since if you don't it's implied as the present one (i.e. if I tell you now "let's have that meeting on the 10th" June and 2024 are implied) so you can convey the same infomation with less words (however in written form meant to preserve the date for future reference you have to write the whole thing anyway)
That advantage is not exclusive to the date-first system. You can still leave out implied information with month-first as well.
Personally I recognize that it's mainly familiarity that makes me favour one format over the other and logically I don't think one way is overall better than the other one as the advantages of each are situational.
This is the biggest part of it. No one wants to change what they know. I'm from the US and moved to the UK, and interact with continental Europeans on a daily basis. I've seen and used both systems day to day. But when I approach this question, my answer isn't "this one is better because that's the one I like or I'm most comfortable with", my answer is "if no one knew any system right now, and we all had to choose between one of the two options, which one is the more sensible option?"
dd-mm-yyyy has no benefit over yyyy-mm-dd, while yyyy-mm-dd does have benefits over dd-mm-yyyy. The choice is easy.
The minimal or non-existent benefits for most people in most situation of yyyy-mm-dd (no, the brain doesn't need the highest dimensional scale value to come first: that's just your own habit because of how numbers are spoken in the English language and possibly because the kind of situation where you use dates involves many things which are further than a year forwards or backwards in time, which for most people is unusual) - people sorting dates by alphabetical order in computer systems (which is where yyyy-mm-yy is the only one that works well) is just the product of either programmer laziness or people misusing text fields for dates - so don't add to enough to justify the "jarring" for other people due to changing from the date format they're used to, not the mention the costs in anything from having to change existing computer systems to having to redesign and print new paper forms with fill-in data fields with a different order.
In a similar logic, the benefits of dd-mm-yyyy are mainly the ease of shortenning it in spoken language (i.e. just the day, or just the day and month) and depend on knowing the month and year of when a shortenned date was used (which usually doesn't work well for anything but immediate transfer of information as the month and day would still need to be store somewhere if they're not coming from "present date") so they too do not justify the "jarring" for other people due to changing from the date format they're used to.
Frankly even in an imaginary situation were we would be starting from scratch and had to pick one, I don't know which one would be better since they both have flawed advantages - year first only really being advantageous for allowing misusing of text data fields or programmer laziness in computer systems whilst day first only being advantageous in immediate transfer of date information where it gives the possibility of using a shortenned date, something which is but a tiny gain in terms of time or, if in a computers system or written form, storage space.
It's really not a hill worth dying on and I only answered your point because you seemed to be confusing how comfortable it felt for you to use one or the other - a comfort which derives from familiarization - with there being some kind of general cognitive advantage for using any order (which, in my experience, there is not).
if I ask if you're free on "the 15th of March" vs "March 15", the first example is slightly jarring for your brain to interpret
Sounds like you're just used to it being said the opposite (read: wrong) way. If you told someone in my country March 15th, it would be just as jarring to the listener.
at first it hears "15th" and starts processing all the 15ths it's aware of, then "March" to finally clarify which month the 15th is referencing.
not in daily use. When you ask someone "what day is it today?", they usually have a handle on what month it is and just need the day. For making plans, it's only if you make them way in advance that you need the month first, which would be sorting and scheduling, not daily use.
I get SO frustrated when I see a date like 4/3/2024 and have to spend time trying to figure out if it's the 4th of March, or if some US company wrote the software I'm using and it has defaulted to silly format.
Try working for an American company while not living in America. I have spent years trying to convince my US colleagues to please use unambiguous date formats when sending email to a global audience. But no.... they just can't see why it would be necessary or even helpful to do that.
As a mechanical design engineer in America having dual systems creates unnecessary complexity and frustration and cost for me all day, every day. I full force embrace switching to metric
as a mechanic working in a hodgepodge US/EU factory line, I have to suffer through always carrying double the tools to service metric and SAE machines. and after so many years in the industry, I still slip up and say 3/16 when I mean 3/8 sometimes, because fractions are a shit system for wrenches.
oh, and some of our linear encoders readout decimal-feet, because fuck it, why not?
My condolences. I'm already annoyed with the times USC units are presented in Australia (our nominal pipe sizes are often talked about in inches, and sometimes valves and such have USC flow coefficients because the manufacturer is American).
So I cannot imagine the pain you must be subjected to.
There are three sizing standards used in the UK right now: metric for newer homes, imperial for older homes and farmer's sizing for fuck you, that's why.
Metric yes please. Also for fucks sake use the 24 hour clock. Some of us learned it from the military but it’s just earth time and way easier than adding letters to a number
I switched to it in my later teens when I realised how many cases it would be better in.
Conversion during conversation might be an extra step, but I'll be pushing for the next generation to have this by default.
Also, much better when using for file names.
Also, YYYY-MM-DD. There's a reason why it is the ISO
The conversion is pretty much the only hurdle I ever hear about, but that’s easy enough. How many songs/films talk about “if I could rewind the last 12+12 hours”…it’s just a matter of making it fit in context people can understand when they know a day is 24 but are used to 12.
ISO and while we’re at it, the NATO phonetic alphabet for English speakers. “A as in apple B as in boy” means fuck all when you’re grasping for any word that starts with that letter, and if English isn’t your first language fuckin forget about it.
ISO and while we’re at it, the NATO phonetic alphabet for English speakers. “A as in apple B as in boy” means fuck all when you’re grasping for any word that starts with that letter, and if English isn’t your first language fuckin forget about it.
I'm pretty sure that's an example of why you should use the chosen ones instead of going "mancy/nancy" all over the place.
Also, didn't they just make a standard for themselves and other just took it because it was probably easier than making one for their own language (oh right, NATO... but let's be honest here, NATO is just a forum for America to flaunt its power while PR-ing peaceful, so it makes sense they use English, which is also easier to be a second language than most other ones).
Though I feel like China might have made their own.
The radio words were chosen to be distinct, such that for people who trained in them, it would be easier to distinguish letters being spoken over low quality radio.
Not very relevant in the era of 2G HD audio, and now VoLTE.
But when there's a bad signal and you have to tell someone a callsign, it makes sense.
I like ISO, because in whatever cases I have interacted with it, it has made programming easier for me.
I like YYYY-MM-DD, because when files lose their metadata, if they are named using this, I can still sort by name and get results by date.
Right, and the most significant bit of the whole date is the first Y in YYYY, which we can't put at the end unless we reverse the year itself. So we can either have pure big-endian, or PDP-endian. I know which one I'm picking.
Your literal statement is also just wrong. The solitary implication of endianness is byte ordering, because individual bits in a byte have no ordering in memory. Every single one has the exact same address; they have significance order, but that's entirely orthogonal to memory. Hex readouts order nybbles on the same axis as memory so as not to require 256 visually distinct digits and because they only have two axes; that's a visual artefact, and reflects nothing about the state of memory itself. ISO 8601 on the other hand is a visual representation, so digit and field ordering are in fact the same axis.
Every single one has the exact same address; they have significance order, but that's entirely orthogonal to memory.
We are talking about transferring data, not storing it. For example SPI allows both for LSb-first and MSb-first. In date digit-number-date is like bit-byte-word.
Right, and in data transfer every byte can be placed in an absolute order relative to every other. And the digits within the respective fields are already big-endian (most significant digit first), so making the fields within the whole date little-endian is mixed-endian.
I have iterated this several times, so I worry there's a fundamental miscommunication happening here.
And to bring up a point, why did every nation that adopted the metric system require a law(s) to force people to use it? Complete with penalties if you don't. If it was such a good and great idea, people would have naturally gravitated to it don't you think?
You listed 2 twice(thrice if counting 6) for base12 and once for base10. Generally, when talking about bases better talk only about prime factors. Base12 has 2 and 3 as prime factors, while base10 has 2 and 5.
The French did try it back when they were in the process of changing to the metric system in the 1700s. Even THEY quickly determined that, much like the creation of the universe, it was a very bad idea. And it was very quietly dropped. French tried hard to scrub that moment of insanity from the history books. But well, the internet is truly forever in both directions I guess.
Metric time quickly got out of sync with the periods of light and dark. Mother Nature evidently doesn't like humans dicking around with the time periods of her celestial movements. (Dozenal for the win!)
Cause then we’d be thinking we’re monkeys on a spherical rock in a vacuum instead of calibrating clocks to a radioactive element to make sure everyone tunes in to wheel of fortune on time while this oblate spheroid tumbles around
Also, it’s hard enough getting people to equate Km and C with known quantities, Americans can’t handle base unit shifts like that
Cause then we’d be thinking we’re monkeys on a spherical rock in a vacuum instead of calibrating clocks to a radioactive element to make sure everyone tunes in to wheel of fortune on time while this oblate spheroid tumbles around
I love the 24 hour clock and living in London, UK I used it all the time. However, I remember one time I bought movie tickets at lunch for 17:30 and my brain thought it was for 7:30pm and I called my friend at the last moment saying: "you have to leave work early if we're gonna make it!"
There was a beautiful time back when I was young where we tried to change to metric and schools taught us nothing but. Now I'm ~50 years old and don't even know how many pints are in a gallon. Or feet in a mile. Always forget whether it's 12 or 16 that's inches in a foot / ounce to pound. Always have to look that shit up. Because they didn't teach us that garbage. Ever.
Guess what I NEVER have to look up? The measurements that tell you in their fucking prefixes how many X are in Y. What a concept.
Don't worry. You likely wouldn't remember even if you were taught. 5280 feet/mile is just not worth the brain space. Neither is 8 pints/gallon. I don't think you would convert between the two often enough to make it useful information to just know.
And I do have to look up those prefixes for the less used ones. It's exa then peta or peta then exa and what's bigger than them? What's smaller than nano? I don't remember because it rarely comes up. But I'm in tech, so it's starting to more.
Metric has been legally "preferred" in the US since 1975. We just don't use it.
Also while I was looking up that year I came across this wild factoid:
In 1793, Thomas Jefferson requested artifacts from France that could be used to adopt the metric system in the United States, and Joseph Dombey was sent from France with a standard kilogram. Before reaching the United States, Dombey's ship was blown off course by a storm and captured by pirates, and he died in captivity on Montserrat.
You could always use the metric system, that was always allowed. Most food (I've seen) has both imperial and metric measurements. Most digital measuring devices and lots of analog ones will have options for both. Speedometers generally have both.
Really, the only one stopping you from using the metric system in your daily life is you. Unless of course you're saying you want other people to use it. Which is a distinctly different proposition.
I'd argue the two greatest barriers for the average, non-STEM individual adopting metric in America is the speed limits being in mph and the temperature being in °F. Both are convertible easily enough, but when you constantly have to do so to engage with critical infrastructure or safety (cooking temps, etc.) It provides a barrier against adoption for anyone without the drive to make a concerted effort to use metric.
In the UK we're mostly using metric with the odd exception (we still love a pint of beer), one of which is that speeds are measured in MPH. It's not really a big deal, there aren't many customers between miles and kilometres and anything less than a km is still usually measured in metres.
Sorry, I thought you were making a general comment. I didn't realize you we're criticizing the "metric money" statement.
But, reading over that person's comment again they also say "centidollars", which also doesn't exist, so I believe they were trying to make the point that the US was the first to make a currency that seems to adhere to the same principles as the metric system since their currently since 1 centidollars = 1 cent = 1 dollar/100.
(I'm pretty sure it was a joke though. We don't use kilodollars, etc)
Non-metric or non-decimal money is referring to systems where the multiple tiers of money, like our cents and dollars, are seperated by amounts other than 10 or 100, like the old British system of 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd
You can't have it because of peer pressure from dead people. You gotta take them seriously, motherfuckers will haunt your ass and say shit like "thirty fathoms, gold dubloons and schooners, twenty nickel shillings". We have the metric system in our country and the ghosts suck, they don't even try to come up with sensical nonsense phrases for the sake of the bit, the lazy bastards.
I dunno, it'd probably be better but there's nothing stopping people from using metric in places where it makes sense. I write most of my recipes in grams because it makes them easier to multiply or divide.
At the same time, the most common thing people use units for is a point of reference, and it really makes no difference whether your point of reference is metric or traditional units.
That's fine right up to when you're complaining about the temperature to an american.
But I am an American. To learn Celsius I came up with a quick heuristic to do “accurate enough” conversions for the months between switching off Fahrenheit and getting to the point where I knew Celsius well enough.
So I can pretty quickly go from Celsius to Fahrenheit for my ignorant compatriots.
Edit: For anyone downvoting me, if it’s because I called people who don’t know Celsius “ignorant,” please understand I’m using this definition: “lacking knowledge, information, or awareness about a particular thing.”
Not this one: “lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated,” nor this one: “discourteous or rude.”
We are all ignorant about things we don’t know about. No shame in ignorance, it’s the default state of all living beings!
Engineer here, I just use whatever's convenient. It's handy to know both.
That said, I did confuse a poor coworker of mine this week when I was using bar for tank pressure and psi for the safety reliefs. That's totally on me though.
To be clear this was a conversation over the phone, not a tech review or something. And I was explicitly naming the units, it was just jumping all around that had him confused.
Official documentation and programs should always be explicitly clear on what units are being used, especially pressure.
I'm a machinist, I don't get to choose my units. We use standard and try to avoid metric dimensioning like the plague. The difference between .005 inches and .005 millimeters is literally an order of magnitude.
Dammit people, we need to stay focused. First abolish DST THEN institute the metric system! We have to have our priorities in order and stay organized or we will never accomplish anything!
If we abolish DST, I think we should tweak some of our timezones. With dst, where I'm at the sun is currently rising before 5. If we kept standard time, it would be up before 4. Sun rise at 3 something and sunset at 7 something is really out of whack with how most people want sun allocated to their day.
I'm sorry but divided we fall. It's this kind of nonsense that impeeds progress. One thing at a time. Just get rid of it and then tweaks can be made on the state level. Arizona for example already abolished DST.
I don't give the first two half-flaccid thrusts of a reluctant pity fuck what number the clock says when the sun rises or sets. 4, 5, 6, 11, don't care. It's the practice of changing the clocks twice a year that needs to die in a fire.
The logic should be "Let's open our business from 7 to 4 instead of 8 to 5 so that we have more free time during sunlight hours in the evening" not "Let's change all the clocks everywhere so that the sun is two fingers higher in the sky when the clocks say 5 so that we have more free time during the sunlight hours in the evening." You want to vary YOUR routine with the seasonal change in sunlight hours? Great. "Summer hours 7 to 4, winter hours 8 to 5" or whatever. Managing this by changing all clocks everywhere causes more problems than it solves. I don't know if I could intentionally invent a stupider solution to the "problem."
I was a pilot in a past life. Night flight is quite different than day flight, because it's darker up there than you think. A lot of nations outright don't allow night VFR requiring night flight to be done IFR, some others have optional night flight endorsements or ratings for night VFR. But it's a training requirement for American private pilots.
Because it is a regulatory matter, there has to be a strict definition of "night time." Which is where we get the concept of "civil twilight" which IIRC is the moment when the center point of the sun's disc is between 0 and 6 degrees below the horizon. "Night time" is officially the time when the sun is 6 or more degrees below the horizon. Exactly when this happens changes every single day as the days get longer and shorter, so you still have to look it up. The exact moment of local solar noon is even less important unless you're navigating by sextant, and the way we currently solve this kind of problem is we maintain an accurate clock calibrated in GMT, UTC or Unix Timecode depending on your exact use case, and then we do the math on the fly to convert to local time. When is local solar noon today at my exact location? 18:32:40 GMT.
What anyone mean when they say get rid of dst is to stop the flipflopping.
But i guess you are technically right. Witch i have heard is the best kind of right. Even if very pedantic ;)
You think that because it's how you feel or you have different stats on opinions taken from large samples in an unbiased fashion that lead you to believe this?
The way statistical sampling works, 1000 people in a population of 300,000,000 is actually good enough for most things. You can play around with numbers here to convince yourself, but at 95% confidence 1000 people will give an answer to within 3% of the true answer for the 300,000,000 population.
I mean, yeah, 1000 people is enough assuming there's no sampling bias. But if you've got sampling bias, increasing the sampling size won't actually help you. The issue you're talking about is unrelated to how many people you talk to.
Your own suggestion of splitting up the respondents by state would itself introduce sampling bias, way over sampling low population states and way under sampling high population states. The survey was interested in the opinions of the nation as a whole, so arbitrary binning by states would be a big mistake. You want your sampling procedure to have equal change of returning a response from any random person in the nation. With a sample size of 1000, you're not going to have much random-induced bias for one location or another, aside from population density, which is fine because the survey is about USA people and not people in sub-USA locations.
I think it depends on where you are in your timezone if you prefer DST or standard time. But most people seem to not like changing the clock. It just turns into a fight if we should stay on DST or standard time year round.
Of those 62% that indicated they would like to get rid of the practice of changing the clocks entirely, exactly half of them prefer the option of later sunrises and sunsets, as in year-round daylight-saving time, compared with 31% preferring year-round standard time.
I ended up on this last year as I was exploring the South West. I found it confusing even as a Canadian.
I then later was confusion when Google Maps told me to go 80 on Hwy 10 in Texas once I came up from Big Bend NP. I thought the GPS was confused. 80 kms on the highway in the US? It was then I realized I wasn't in Oregon anymore with their 60 mph highways. Texas goes fast and even 80 mph isn't enough for most people. Even the single lane highways with construction workers was 65 mph work zones in Texas.
It was the most amount of road kill I've ever seen in all my travels. I think at one stage a herd of goats must of tried to cross the highway based on the carnage I came across. I finally understood the reason for the huge bumpers on the front of trucks in Texas now.
A few years ago I started using Celsius in my everyday life. It's been pretty easy, just remember that C scales twice as fast as F, and 32F=0C and you're set for conversations. It helps to be quick with math, but finding it difficult may make it easier to convince other people to use it instead of F near you. To acclimate yourself you'll want to change the settings on your phone to use C by default.
I haven't switched over to m in everyday use, because all the roadsigns are in Mph and doing that conversion while driving is bad juju.
I'm thinking of rewriting all my recepies in grams and liters. If I can figure out how to get our stupidly-over-designed-yet-entirely-jank oven to use C, that'd be good too. If we had one with a bimetalic strip and a knob I'd be able to just print one with the new temperature scale.
Honestly, temperature (in terms of weather preparedness, not cooking) makes WAY more sense with Fahrenheit. Largely the only temperatures you care about are 0 to 100 and generally you feel a good difference in temp every 10 degrees F.
Almost everything else I prefer metric. But that's one where Celsius is just terrible.
That's a poor argument, though, when the justification for utilizing volume, mass, and distance is because it is very "base 10"-y and is easily divisible and understood.
Celsius absolutely is shit for that.
I could use your logic to justify why imperial units are better for length, for example, but we all know it's a bit fucked. Celsius is absolutely fucked for temperature regarding human comfort and is imprecise.
Replying again because you've edited your comment and added another paragraph.
Your edit asserts that Celsius is "absolutely fucked" regarding temperature for human comfort... which is an utterly bizarre argument to make because it only makes sense to people who are used to Fahrenheit and have an intuitive sense of what 72F means to them, but have no intuitive sense of what 22C means
I'm not entirely sure that you're not just trolling now.
No negative numbers needed for most cases, 0-100 scale for the extremes MOST people need to care about with relative "feels like" every 10 degrees (but realistically every 5 is distinguishable, even smaller amounts depending). Ez pz.
IDK why you're so defensive about Celsius lol. It's okay to admit when an SI unit has a poor application. Your ONLY defense for it is "well people can get used to it" which is the exact same reason I could say "well you could just get used to feet, inches, yards, miles, pounds, ounces, fluid ounces, teaspoons, tablespoons, etc" - it's a shit argument for both.
But oh that's right this is Lemmy where "america bad" for everything.
Right, so...once again, your argument is that you feel that Fahrenheit makes more sense, because that's what you're used to
I never said that C is better because people can get used to it, you're just making that up. I said that the system people are used to is inherently going to be the one that makes the most intuitive sense to them, and that applies to both C and F.
The rest of what you said applies equally to any system of measurement.
I don't understand why you're so angry about this?
So, uh, no? In fact within the "human spectrum" you generally care at least somewhat about every tick of the number. So it's actually more useful for people.
Because I doubt you can feel the difference between 71f and 72f. But it's possible to notice the difference between 21 and 22, although you're pretty picky if you do.
Tread lightly my friend. I already won the Fahrenheit vs. Celsius debate a few months ago, but non-Americans are insanely defensive about the metric system and won't accept the truth.
I'll transcribe my best arguments because that thread was an absolute shitshow and it's hard to find my comment even with the direct link. Almost all of my most downvoted comments on Lemmy came during my defense of the Fahrenheit temperature scale, and I'm weirdly proud of that fact.
::: spoiler Fahrenheit Supremacy Gang
Celsius is adequate because it’s based on water, and all life on earth is also based on water, so it’s not totally out of our wheelhouse. But for humans specifically I think Fahrenheit is the clear answer.
One point that many may overlook is that most of us here are relatively smart and educated. There are a good number of people on this planet who just aren’t very good with numbers. Obviously a genius could easily adapt their mind to Kelvin or whatever.
You have to use negative numbers more frequently with Celsius > Celsius has a less intuitive frame of reference
Each Celsius degree is nearly two Fahrenheit degrees > Celsius is less granular
The reason I argue the more granular Fahrenheit is more intuitive is because a one degree change should intuitively be quite minor. But since you only have like 40 or 50 degrees to describe the entire gamut of human experiences with Celsius, it blends together a bit too much. I know that people will say to use decimals, but its the same flaw as negative numbers. It’s simply unintuitive and cumbersome.
B) 66F is room temperature. Halfway between freezing (32F) and 100F.
the intuition is learned and not natural.
All scales have to be learned, obviously. It’s far easier to create intuitive anchorpoints in a 0-100 system than a -18 to 38 system. Thus, Fahrenheit is more intuitive for the average person.
I should note that if you are a scientist, the argument completely changes. If you are doing experiments and making calcualtions across a much wider range of temperatures, Celsius and Kelvin are much more intuitive. But we are talking about the average human experience, and for that situation, I maintain Fahrenheit supremacy
It’s not about the specific numbers, but the range that they cover. It’s about the relation of the scale to our lived experience. Hypothetically, if you wanted to design a temperature scale around our species, you would assign the range of 0-100 to the range that would be the most frequently utilized, because those are the shortest numbers. It’s not an absolute range, but the middle of a bell curve which covers 95% of practical scenarios that people encounter. It doesn’t make any sense to start that range at some arbitrary value like 1000 or -18.
When the temperature starts to go above the human body temperature, most humans cannot survive in those environments. Thus, they would have little reason to describe such a temperature. Celsius wastes many double digit numbers between 40-100 that are rarely used. Instead, it forces you to use more negative numbers.
This winter, many days were in the 10s and 20s where I live. Using Celsius would have been marginally more inconvenient in those scenarios, which happen every winter. This is yet another benefit of Fahrenheit, it has a set of base 10 divisions that can be easily communicated, allowing for a convenient level of uncertainty when describing a temperature.
Generally -40 to 40 are the extremes of livable areas.
Sure, water is a really good system and it works well.
And for F that range is -40 to 104. See how you get 64 extra degrees of precision and nearly all of them are double digit numbers? No downside.
Furthermore F can use its base 10 system to describe useful ranges of temperature such as the 20s, 60s, etc. So you have 144 degrees instead of just 80, and you also have the option to utilize a more broad 16 degree scale that’s also built in.
You might say that Celsius technically also has an 8 degree scale(10s, 30s), but I would argue that the range of 10 degrees Celsius is too broad to be useful in the same way. In order to scale such that 0C is water freezing and 100C boiling, it was necessary for the units to become larger and thus the 10C shorthand is much less descriptive than the 10F shorthand, at least for most human purposes.
:::
What's funny is the person who brought up arguments FOR Fahrenheit over Celsius to me that I hadn't considered is actually a Brit. They lived in England and the US and your explanation here is very similar to theirs.
You certainly didn't win any arguments with those claims.
0-100f is not anywhere close to the scale people see in the weather anywhere most people live. Taking where I've ever lived as an example:
Melbourne ~ 30-120 f vs 0-45c,
Gladstone QLD ~40-120f vs 5-45c,
Pilbara ~65-130f vs 15c-50c,
Dubai ~55-120f vs 20c-45c,
Houston TX ~ 30-120f vs 0-45c,
Pittsburg PA ~10-90 vs -15-30c.
The most iimportant number with respect to the weather is freezing, it's handy knowing if you're dealing with ice. The standard range for where people live is not -40 degrees, something like 2/3 of the world live between the tropics and will never see freezing or below. The -40 number makes sense if you live in Alaska or Siberia and maybe even somewhere like Minnesota, but certainly not to someone in India or Indonesia....
Neither scale is relative to cooking (which isequally arbitrary for both), though metric is easier for things like brewing 80°C tea since you need 4/5th a cup boiling water and 1/5 a cup and no thermometer.
The "feel" of the weather is hugely impacted by humidity which is why every forecast has a "feels like" measure and why 90°f in Dubai is lovely but 90°f in Houston is miserable. The increments of 10f doesn't make sense at all, though seems to be a common perception among people who prefer fahrenheit
The comment about farenheit being more granular would be true in an alternative universe where decimals don't exist, but not in this one.
Americans literally like farenheit more because it's familiar, any other rationalisation is nonsense. Both measures make perfect sense after you've taken the time to learn them and use them daily (I know this firsthand).
The increments of 10f doesn’t make sense at all, though seems to be a common perception among people who prefer fahrenheit
What doesn't make sense about it? You can tell another person it's in the 30s outside, and you have efficiently communicated more information than is possible when using Celsius. You'd have to say it's between 4 and negative 1, which is just lame. And this remains true across every temperature, because of a variety of factors which I explained above.
In every climate which you mentioned above, it's easier to communicate how hot or cold it is outside using Fahrenheit. This is because all of the numbers being used are non-negative integers (aka natural numbers). Even the triple digit ones are one-ten or one-twenty.
I wonder why mathematicians named them that? Possibly because they come naturally? Unlike negative one point seven.
They will defend Celsius being used for everyday weather reporting with their last breath with their ONLY fallback being "well you're just used to fahrenheit durrrrrrr" as if that logic can't be applied to every unit system on earth.
as if that logic can't be applied to every unit system on earth.
Mate that's my whole point. I grew up Celsius in Australia and use Farenheit day to day now. They are literally interchangable once you learn. It takes a month or two to get used of using them and beyond that, the literal only difference in difficulty of use is that it takes about ten seconds longer to calculate a green tea brew in f, which has no bearing on the weather anyway. All of the arguments above are garbage, as they are garbage when the exact same, inverted arguments are made by metric proponents.
All measurements scales are interchangeable once you learn - that's not the point of this particular thread of comments. It's "what's most useful comparatively given the SI penchant for base 10". The answer isn't a temperature scale that, for day to day human concern, is not -18 to 38 - that's fucking stupid.
Yeah. I've had some time to ruminate and I think part of it stems from the impossibility of them not using Celsius in their lives. Like, they're not going to singlehandedly make their country start using Fahrenheit, so accepting it as better would just create cognitive dissonance.
What doesn't make sense about it? You can tell another person it's in the 30s outside, and you have efficiently communicated more information than is possible when using Celsius. You'd have to say it's between 4 and negative 1, which is just lame. And this remains true across every temperature, because of a variety of factors which I explained above.
It doesn't tell you anything that Celsius can't with a 5 degree swing. This the absolute peak of arbitrary, both 5s and 10s are easy scales to work with. Your example of between 4 and negative one is deranged. I'm in houston right, it's 90°f - if I want to comunnicate that to my yankee girlfriend I'd say "babe it's 90° outside, might get up to one hundred" and so far, you're right this is easy to articulate. If I want to communicate that same information to my mum, I'd say "hey it's 30° outside, might get up to 35°". Both cases convey information with the same accuracy, both cases I haven't mentioned humidity, which for actual temperature feel has a way higher influence then 5 degrees, the extra information I'd gain by strictly converting 31-37.8°C is junk data, the farenheit measure is approximated to begin with and because of a humidity swing carries a huge variability in actual "feel" anyway. I tried to explain this above and clearly failed, as your response doesn't touch on this at all and just insists that people who think in metric don't default to easy to work with numbers.
In every climate which you mentioned above, it's easier to communicate how hot or cold it is outside using Fahrenheit. This is because all of the numbers being used are non-negative integers (aka natural numbers). Even the triple digit ones are one-ten or one-twenty.
The only place with negative integers was Pittsburg, so that point doesn't make sense for the rest and even if it was, your argument is insane. Saying negative 5 is no harder than saying 25, plus having negatives where snow and ice come into play makes it obvious when to be careful outside. I mean your argument here just makes no sense, if there is some added complexity to saying "negative" then it is surely comparable to having to remember a random number of 32. Literal kindergardeners understand negative numbers. Neither this or remembering the 32 number add any meaningful complexity and certainly have 0 impact on anyone's actual use of either scale.
Literal adults have trouble with negative numbers. I can't do this all over again, sorry and have a nice day. Hopefully it's somewhere in the 80s wherever you are
Mate I have to reply to that, because it's such an insane claim - the US, the only country that doesn't use °C, has this huge reliance on a monstrously complex credit system (obviously the entire concept of credit is reliant on the concept of debt and negatives). It's flat out insane to suggest that the same people who live and function with such a credit system conceptually struggle with the fundamentals negative numbers. It's a mind boggling claim.
I was born in northern England in the early 90s, and I can only eyeball in imperial units, even though I now live in a country where they only use metric (and Beaufort).
Rock it like a Brit. Most things in metric except for your height (feet and inches) and your car speed (miles per hour) and when you measure your manhood (inches... Or fractions thereof).
It's even funnier when you take a look at The Highway Code: distances can be measured in miles, yards, kilometers or meters depending on what type of distance you're talking about.
How is this supposed to be considered using the metric system? If you tell someone that you weigh 80kg and he doesn't have a clue what you mean, then you're not really using the metric system, are you?
Also, another issue with what you're suggesting is that people have to memorize several conversion factors as well. Inherently, you only have to be able to convert inches -> cm and pounds -> kg, but unless you want to do even more math in your head, you also have to remember feet -> cm, yards -> cm, miles -> cm, square feet -> square meters, cubic feet -> cubic meters (phew, that's just all the length conversions), pounds -> kg, ounces -> grams, pounds -> grams, cups -> grams (for every fluid you might want to measure), litres -> gallons, litres -> pints, etc.
Or you could just go through the one-time effort of actually using the metric system so you don't have to carry this mental burden with you everywhere you go....
other people aren't going to do the math in their head
That's on them
them == everybody in this case. Practically, nobody is going to do what you suggest - instead, non-metric users will ask metric users to do the conversion for them. And why should we be responsible for doing the work when they are the ones who refuse to use the system that 96% of the world has adopted?
Technically the US is using the metric system. Per the Mendenhall Order of 1893, all customary length and mass units were redefined to be based on international metric standards. The Imperial system units commonly used in the US are just conversion factors of metric units.
The reality is that the US uses the metric system but everything is translated into freedom units for the general population. Another situation where you believe against all evidence that you have something that you really don't have.
Look I get it, but also, I like fahrenheit and miles. They are more intuitive and closer to the 'feeling'. 100 degrees is really hot. 100 mph is really fast. Maybe that's my own bias from growing up with it though
Yeah, I think it's mostly just a familiarity thing. To me 0°C is cold af, 10°C is chilly, 20°C is nice and 30°C is hot. 100 km/h is fast but not really fast, though I'm probably biased in this regard from regularly driving on the Autobahn lol
exactly! whenever anyone says imperial units are "more intuitive" and better reflect "how it feels to humans", i can only think: obviously, you grew up with it. that's what you know.
no matter what measurement system you were raised on, it will feel intuitive to you and reflect how you as a human experience the world because you are used to measuring things in those units. having said that, i'd much rather we used metric if for nothing else than the ease of unit conversion.
When it comes to Fahrenheit, there is some merit to the idea - 0 to 30 is a small scale compared to 0 to 100, and unlike Imperial vs. Metric, Celcius has no base 10 system that makes any more sense than Fahrenheit does. . The opposite is true of kilometers and miles - kilometers is more refined since each unit is a shorter distance.
I'd prefer the Metric system, but Farenheit over Celcius for temperature measurement.
The fixed points (for 0 and 100) are much more logical though and can be used to accurately recreate the scale anywhere (well.. it'll be slightly off on higher altitude since boiling temperature changes but it's still not far off).
0°C = water freezes (= it's snowing)
100°C = water boils
meanwhile:
0°F = the coldest night Mr Fahrenheit experienced, thinking it couldn't get any colder than that
100°F = Mr Fahrenheit's own body temperature (he had a slight fever apparently)
The temperature of water boiling is not a useful metric when it comes to the weather, as it's extremely far outside of where humans can live. Science uses Celcius standard, and that seems to work fine, but I see no reason why we should use it for the weather.
The temperature of ice melting, on the other hand, is hugely important for weather. 0 point is placed at a very important spot as far as weather observations go.
I think we can agree that the freezing point is super important when it comes to the weather.
So where would you place the second mark (you have to define two spots) so it "makes sense for the weather" (I don't see how it makes less sense for the weather than Fahrenheit, at least Celsius tells you if it'll snow or not while Fahrenheit tells you nothing) while still making sure that it can easily be recreated?
The temperatures are intuitive for me because Celsius is all I've known. The car going 60km/h or 100km/ h I know the difference and how it feels sitting in the car. The speed of wind in the forecast needs to be m/s to make any sense. Over 20 m/s I better tape the windows so that the storm won't break them
Anything below or around zero degrees is undershirt, shirt, sweater and warm jacket weather for me. Though it rarely gets colder than single negative digits where I live. I'll go with a light jacket from like 10-15 degrees upwards. I can't handle the cold very well lol.
In Australia we once had the imperial system and about a year after the big switch (14 Feb 1966) we became all metric like a mofo. Now 35c feels hot and 15c feels cold. Plus units of ten is so much easier than factions.
Ask the US military about the metric system, they've been using it since at least Vietnam, if not earlier.
As an army vet. No we don't. Never once in the military did I use Celsius. For distances we used both. I have pictures from inside my vehicles where the speedo was in miles.
Hard disagree on the fractional units. Using rational numbers for those things derives from the frequency with which people need to double and halve things in the fields that use those conventions. Doubling 3/8 to get 6/8 or 3/4 is much easier than doubling .375 to get .75
That one's nothing to do with the metric system vs imperial, aside from the fields that rely on the convention being largely the ones that created imperial in the first place. If they all switched to metric tomorrow they'd just say they need 3/5 meter spacing.
From everything I've heard it's a hodge podge, since the US, with the worst system, is the only one to use it consistently. Building plans would reference it by cm however.
What I was more referring to was from the perspective of the carpenter doing the work.
Fractions or decimals aren't specific to us customary or metric. You see decimal inches perfectly often, or at least I do.
Fractions are a more convenient way of dealing with multiplying or dividing numbers without a lot of mental effort. 1/3 of .125 is gonna take a second to figure out. 1/3 of 1/8 is 1/24. 5 1/8 units is just ”5/8”, rather than the .625 in decimal.
It's definitely less effective for numerical sorting in your head, but if I'm sorting screws or something, I'm probably gonna just look at them rather than compare the labels.
I understand the underlying principle, but I'm not sure if it actually shakes out that way for a few reasons:
If you asked a carpenter to cut something to 1/24", they'd be like "what?". Sure, the math was easier, but the result is unusable. No measuring instrument has divisions of 24ths. The person making a cut would need it in terms of 8ths, 16ths, etc. Any time saved at the initial stage is lost when they need to convert it again to a useable denominator.
Secondly, what's 3/32nds of 17/128ths?
The examples you give are harder in decimal form because nobody is going to make metric carpentry designs for things that are to the tenth of a millimeter, so 1.25cm isn't even real.
I admit, there are a lot of specific scenarios where fractional convention is helpful. I just personally think they don't outweigh the drawbacks.
How would you even measure "They are more intuitive and closer to the 'feeling'". It's not. You're used to it. No one else in the world that grew up with C is going to find F more intuitive. Neither miles.
I'm a European living in the UK for 9 years. I still don't know what a mile is. There's nothing intuitive about Imperial units, you're just used to them.
I also find inches easier to work with unless I'm making something with my 3d printer. Fractions are just easier when you're making something big with looser tolerances.
Doing things in 1/16ths of an inch is easier than metric for like woodworking and such IMO. Especially since most tools and materials come in inches here. Until you get into stuff that has tighter tolerances than 1/16th of an inch. Even then you could go to .010s or .001s of an inch but I'm more used to metric at that scale and that's what the applications I use for 3d printing default to.
1/16 of an inch is slightly smaller than a millimeter, you'd just end up using a millimeter or half again as your tolerance limit.
The big issue with imperial is all the fractions and strange conversions. On more then one occasion I've caught myself mixing up eighths and quarters, because my brain views them more as concepts then as numbers. Which is bigger, 11/16 or 3/4? Now, you'll get the answer, sure, but you had to think about it and it goes against the natural intuition that larger numbers are bigger. Compare that with, which is bigger 0.6875 or 0.75 and it should be trivial to see which is easier to learn and use.
0.6875 is basically a meaningless concept to me when I try to picture it in my head and what if you need to add it to another dimension? It's not easy to work 4 decimal places in your head. .75 only works because I automatically convert it to 3/4. Maybe it's just something that comes with experience but I don't have trouble with knowing what's what. If your not sure you can always make the denominator equal and figure it that way. 3/4=12/16 for instance. Easy math to do in your head.
Sure, but your measuring system dictates what lengths you actually design things to be. You would never actually use 0.6875, but if some jerk designed something with that length, it will be easy to tell exactly how big it was. If you switched to metric, your smallest practical unit for woodworking would almost certainly be a millimeter.
The problem is everything is already built using the imperial measurements. Even if we switched all the new tools and materials over to metric we'd be stuck having to do a bunch of conversions when we're integrating it into existing construction and we'd probably be dealing with that for the rest of our lives.
No, you're not getting it. 1/16 isn't a function of a decimal system. It's base 2. Primarily because you don't really deal with 1/10th of something, but half of a half sort of stuff.
1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16...
2^-1^, 2^-2^, 2^-3^, 2^-4^...
And base-2 functions make sense in wood working in general because of it's imprecise nature. It's more useful to compare things in halves. A 2x2 piece of wood is not literally 2inches x 2inches. Even in Europe you guys follow weird numbers for finished wood dimensions. It doesn't make sense to have such precision when nothing about it is precise.
So I have to throw out all my stuff and spend $1000s on new tools?
You don't work in 1/10ths of an inch. It's 1/16ths and that that's where the math ends. You don't need to convert it to decimal. Unless you're doing machining which you do work in .0001ths due to the tighter tolerances and I've already agreed you might as well use metric for that.
you're talking about two or three different, unrelated things.
decimals vs fractions - you're whining that 1/16 gives you more leeway, but too stupid to realise that 1/10 is less precise and is the same as 0.1
So either you're happy with less precision - and decimals are good, or you want more precision - and decimals are still good.
Again - absolutely nothing to do with metric. You can convert 3 3/4 inches to 3.75 inches, 3 12/16ths or 3 7.5/10ths of an inch. They're all the same thing and all imperial.
Tools. The topic is "using metric". Once you have all metric tools, then it doesn't matter. You're trying to change the topic to buying new tools. Unrelated. Using a tool vs shopping like a princess for new toys. We're talking about using tools.
but hey, while we're on the topic of how dumb you are, let's keep using what you say against you. You keep saying "it doesn't have to be that accurate" well, okay then. then get a sharpie, write the approximate metric conversion on the side and get on with your life. A 5 minute job for someone who I presume can write numbers and count to ten?
I knew there were more. What you don't get, what you keep missing, is that 1/16 is smaller than 1/10. that means your bitching about "tighter tolerances" applies more to dicking about with 1/16ths instead of 1/10s (which again, is decimals, nothing to do with metric)
If you can't have a civil conversation without insults I'm not going to bother with you anymore. We're talking about units of measurement, there's no reason to be an asshole. Go fuck yourself.
Yeah, and the benefits of switching does not out weigh the costs, like redoing all the signage and re-educating everyone and inevitable higher accident rate.
If we switched to metric, everything we currently have built will suddenly have weird measurements. I don't want my 10 foot even high ceiling to be 3.048 meters. 😩 ^/s^
I'll preface this by saying that this isn't an argument in favor of the imperial system, nor is it an argument intending to detract from the usefulness of the metric system. But I have wondered if there is some merit to having a simple, colloquial, "human friendly" system of measurement — something that's shown to be the best system for people to grok, and is the most convenient to use in day-to-day life. If you need precision, and well defined standards, then certainly use the metric system, but is the metric system easy for people to grok? Say you ask someone to estimate a length. Would they be more likely to accurately estimate the length using the metric system, the imperial system, or some other system? Likewise for telling someone a length and asking them to physically reproduce it. Would they be more likely to do so with the metric system, the imperial system, or some other? It's an interesting problem, imo, and it doesn't seem to get much attention.
It could very well be that people can, indeed, grok measurements the best when using the metric system, but I currently am unaware of any research that has been done to show that. If anyone is aware of any research that has looked into this, then please let me know! I'd be very interested to read it.
That's a feature supporters of imperial thinks it has. Even if imperial/some special third option is better for guessing, the difference has to be big enough that it's worth the hassle of having multiple systems or converting everyone again. If it's not worth having two systems but it is worth converting everything , then you still have to keep or prove that it's worth losing the conveniences of metric like 1 km = 1000 m , 1 L of water weighing 1 kg , water freezing and boiling at 0 and 100 °C
Again, who’s gonna pay for the conversion? Sure we could switch like the Aussies did, but no one wants to pay for new shit when the shit that already exists serves its purpose well enough.
Just start doing it now and eventually things will have converted. It may take a while, but it will happen eventually if you do it consistently.
But there are too many contrarian Americans out there who'll take inconvenience over logic just because it "the American way" or "America is special." Have several of those people in my extended family.
It's here Sunshine. And it's been the law, for what 50 years now?
So go to the store and buy a 2 liter of your favorite soda pop, 454g of butter, 2 1/4kilos of potatoes, a half kilo of tomatoes, and a 750ml bottle of whisk(e)y. Then get out your wrenches and use the 10mm to tighten that wobbly leg on that chair. Oh, your 10mm wrench is missing too? Well, do you have a 160mm adjustable wrench? No? I have one here in my tool box use that one.
Oh, you want it in your car? You either just need to read the other scale printed on the speedometer or just push a button. Instant metric system.
The metric system is here. You use it and your too blind to see it.........Most 'Muricans are either trying too hard to be edgy or they are just dumb I guess.
This comment is bizarre to me. Is 35 mph fast or slow? Because it is the same as 55 kph ( km/h ).
55 km/h is an odd speed though it is true. Most towns in Canada for example, the default speed limit is 50 km/h. Highway speeds are more like 100 km/h.
Why are there angry European posts and comments on this every freaking day as if each and every one of us who live under the American system of weights and measurements are personally responsible for implementing and keeping the system?
I'm comfortable in either format.
It doesn't chafe my balls to talk in metric or to see signs or containers in metric. Why does every god damned European feel like they're missing out on diaper powder every time an American talks about miles or fahrenheit?
Who hurt you? What damage does this really cause you?
Are there no other fucking issues that matter? We're gonna blow this whole fucking planet up if Jim Bob in Missouri doesn't start talking in liters God damnit!
then you can't claim you're not responsible for keeping the system. the fact that you get exhausted by merely seeing someone say "hey metric would be nice" is why you won't change. not just this but a ton of archaic stuff everyone else in the world has moved on from.
Each and every time this comes up. I say that I am familiar with the metric system and use it for quite a few things, but I specifically prefer woodworking in fractional inches because working in base 12 and power-of-two fractions is closer to the tasks I need to perform in the wood shop than base ten decimal math does.
I give real-world examples like "divide 19mm, a commonly used stock thickness, by three to make a tenon, you get something point 3333 repeating of course" and they 1. downvote and 2. Invent sizes that we don't conventionally mill stock to thinking they found a "gotcha." "Well what's 2 inches divided by three?" we don't mill stock to 2 inches thick, we'd use 1 1/2", a third of which is 1/2". Y'all actually do use 19mm.
But Americans use inch fractions so inch fractions must be dumb and bad, right?
You don't need a tape to find a third. Just like you don't need one to find a half. If you're a woodworker, you'll be using a centre finder. And it's not hard to make one to find thirds. Just take a plank of wood and put four holes at equal distances, then insert two short dowels into the furthest holes.
Yeah it really only matters what you are comfortable with, if you get units you aren't comfortable with then it gets confusing. I almost feel like metric folk don't realize that the USA is like 50 EU states in size, and this disconnect causes them some rage at seeing imperial units. At the human level I still can't comprehend Celsius, mostly cuz those numbers have meanings in fahrenheit, sure makes for some cognitive dissonance to heard 35 degrees thinking you would need snow gear to hearing it's unbearably hot.
I would not mind if americans used whatever. As long as anything exported from america always!! used metric. As it is now we need 2 complete sets of nuts and bolts, pipes and fittings, tools and gizmos, csbles and connectors. Just imagine the space we could save in our shops and storages if we could /2 the requires spare part storage. Not to mention the time and frustration avoided when doing basically anything on almost anything.
The metric system is fine in a lab. But, in terms of basic human living the imperial system, which wasn't designed so much as developed over years of usage, is simply superior. It works better and is generally more convenient and flexible.
While we are at it, let's all (as in the entire planet) switch to 24hour UTC and the YYYY.MM.DD date format.
ISO8601 gang
Represeeeeent!
Some ISO8601 formats are good, but some are unreadable (like 20240607T054831Z for date and time).
The ones without separators tend to be for server/client exchange though.
I agree but they're hard to read at a glance when debugging and there's lots of them :)
Having said that, a lot of client-server communications use Unix timestamps though, which are even harder to read at a glance.
At least it’s human readable and not protobuf 😬 * though the transport channel doesn’t really matter it could be formatted this way anyhow.
I mean I like this one without the separations
While we at that, lets switch to the international fixed calendar as well.
That one feels kinda meh to me. It solves a handful of non-issues with our current calendar (I don't care that the month starts on the same day, nor do I care that each day of the year is always the same day of the week). Each months having the same number of days is an improvement. It persists the problem that you still can't use months or years as a real mathematical unit of measure and extends it to weeks, which is the biggest annoyance with calendars, although it reduces how often that becomes significant. Adding two days that have neither a day of the week nor month would mean significant changes to every computer system that needs to deal with dates, and is just hateful.
The 1st of a month to the 1st of the next will always be one month, but it depends on the month and year how many days that is. So a month as a duration will span either 28 or 29 days. A week is now sometimes 8 days, and a year might still have 365 or 366 days, depending on the year.
How do you even write the date for the days that don't fit? Like, a form with a box for the date needs to be able to handle Y-M-D formatting but also Y-YearDay. Probably people would just say 06-29 and 12-29, or 07-00 and 01-00, although if year day is the last day of the year it kinda gets weird to say the last day of the year is the zeroth day of the first month of the next year.
There's just a lot of momentum behind a 12 month year with every day being part of a month and week. Like, more than 6000 years. You start to run into weird issues where people's religion dictates that every seventh days is special which we've currently built into our calendar.
Without actually solving significant issues, it's just change for changes sake.
Well, this is shitpost. And I wasn't serious about this. I responded to someone that wants the whole world to switch to a global time, and since mankind existed we used some local time in our daily lives.
Also UTC is not perfect because of leap seconds. Which means you cannot calculate with a simple formula how many seconds are between two time stamps, you need a leap seconds table for that. And leap seconds are only announced under 6 months into the future. So everything farther away, you cannot say how much time is between two stamps.
So with UTC a minute can have more or less seconds that 60.
Since we're breaking everything, I want to use dozenal with the Pitman symbols and "deck/el" pronunciations.
Move New Years back to march 1st, then the Latin roots will be accurate again.
YYYY.MM.DD and 24 hour for sure.
Everyone using UTC? Nah. Creates more problems than it solves (which are already solved, because you can just lookup what time it is elsewhere, and use calendars to automatically convert, etc.).
I for one do not want to do mental gymnastics /calculation just to know what solar time it is somewhere else. And if you just look up what solar time it is somewhere, we've already arrived back at what we're already doing.
Much easier just looking up what time (solar) time it is in a timezone. No need to re-learn what time means when you arrive somewhere on holiday, no need for movies to spell out exactly where they are in the world whenever they speak about time just so you know what it means. (Seriously, imagine how dumb it would be watching international films and they say: "meet you at 14 o'clock", and you have no idea what solar time that is, unless they literally tell you their timezone.)
Further, a lot more business than currently would have to start splitting their days not at 00:00 (I'm aware places like nightclubs do this already).
Getting rid of timezones makes no sense, and I do not understand why people on the internet keep suggesting it like it's a good idea.
I'm pretty sure they don't mean "give up on time zones" but "express your timezone in UTC". For example, central Europe is UTC+1. Makes almost no difference in everyday life, only when you tell someone in another zone your time. The idea is to have one common reference point and do the calculation immediately when someone gives you their UTC zone. For example, if you use pacific time and tell me that, it means nothing to me, but if you say "UTC-8" I know exactly what time it is for you.
Oh right, yeah. We do this at my company which has operations world-wide. If we say timezone we say UTC±. Apologies for the misunderstanding
What about a format where we only have multiples of 10?
You mean base-10? My totally unrealistic pipe dream would be to have the world switch to base-12.
I mean something like 1 day = 10 hours = 1 000 minutes = 100 000 seconds (currently 86 400 seconds so a second would only get slightly faster).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
Oh, nice! It's funny how it's the same as the one I just made up which further proves that it simply makes sense.
Yeah. I think if someone had a sensible method for how we could switch from one to the other with minimal impact, it might work.
What would very difficult for me would be the recalibration of my internal clock. Knowing a second is slightly shorter, and a minute is longer, and an hour is much longer, would be hell for a while.
Unfortunately I think something that's pretty hard coded into the society at this point is that a day should be able to divide by so we end up with the 8hr work, 8 hr rest, 8 hr sleep. I'd be interested in a 30hr day over a 10 hr day. But that one doesn't make much sense either since it misses the mark on bringing tim fully into the 10 base metric system, but still has all the same troubles you'd encounter for getting people to switch.
That's good for file/record sorting, so let's just use it for that
For day to day, DD.MM.YY is much more practical.
It's not though... It's ambiguous as to if the day or month is first. With the year first, there's no ambiguity.
If you want to use d-m-y then at least use month names (eg. 7-June-2024).
Not if everyone is using it, as they should.
Besides, so is is yours. 2024.06.07 could be the 7th of June or (if you're an American and thus used to the months and days being in an illogical order) 6th of July.
As for writing out the month names, that's no longer shorthand. That's just taking more time and space than necessary.
Au contraire! With a three character month, period separation isn't needed, and the date is shorter. (Admittedly there's likely to be a language translation issue, depending on audience.)
Hard disagree.
Least specific -> most specific is generally better in spoken language as the first part spoken is the part the listener begins interpreting.
Like if I ask if you're free on "the 15th of March" vs "March 15", the first example is slightly jarring for your brain to interpret because at first it hears "15th" and starts processing all the 15ths it's aware of, then "March" to finally clarify which month the 15th is referencing.
The only thing practical about DD.MM.YY is that it is easier for the speaker because they can drop the implied information, or continue to add it as they develop the sentence.
"Are you free on the 15th" [oh shit, that's probably confusing, I meant a few months from now] "of July" [oh shit, I actually mean next summer not this one] "next year (or 2025)".
So the format is really a question of who is more important in spoken language: the speaker or the listener? And I firmly believe the listener is more important, because the entire point of communication is to take the idea you've formulated into your head, and accurately describe that idea in a way that recreates that same idea in the listener's head. Making it easier for the speaker to make a sentence is pointless if the sentence itself is confusing to the listener. That's literally a failure to communicate.
You're confusing your own familiarity and experience with a general human rule.
My mother tongue (Portuguese) has the same order when saying numbers as English (i.e. twenty seven) and indeed when I learned Dutch it was jarring that their number order is the reverse (i.e. seven and twenty) until I got used to it, by which point it stopped being jarring.
The brain doesn't really care beyond "this is not how I'm used to parse numbers" and once you get used to do it that way, it works just as well.
As for dates, people using year first is jarring to me, because I grew up hearing day first then month, then year. There is only one advantage for year first, which is very specifically when in text form, sorting by text dates written in year-month-day by alphabetical order will correctly sort by date, which is nice if you're a programmer (and the reason why when I need to have a date as part of a filename I'll user year first). Meanwhile the advantage of day first is that often you don't need to say the rest since if you don't it's implied as the present one (i.e. if I tell you now "let's have that meeting on the 10th" June and 2024 are implied) so you can convey the same infomation with less words (however in written form meant to preserve the date for future reference you have to write the whole thing anyway)
Personally I recognize that it's mainly familiarity that makes me favour one format over the other and logically I don't think one way is overall better than the other one as the advantages of each are situational.
That advantage is not exclusive to the date-first system. You can still leave out implied information with month-first as well.
This is the biggest part of it. No one wants to change what they know. I'm from the US and moved to the UK, and interact with continental Europeans on a daily basis. I've seen and used both systems day to day. But when I approach this question, my answer isn't "this one is better because that's the one I like or I'm most comfortable with", my answer is "if no one knew any system right now, and we all had to choose between one of the two options, which one is the more sensible option?"
dd-mm-yyyy has no benefit over yyyy-mm-dd, while yyyy-mm-dd does have benefits over dd-mm-yyyy. The choice is easy.
The minimal or non-existent benefits for most people in most situation of yyyy-mm-dd (no, the brain doesn't need the highest dimensional scale value to come first: that's just your own habit because of how numbers are spoken in the English language and possibly because the kind of situation where you use dates involves many things which are further than a year forwards or backwards in time, which for most people is unusual) - people sorting dates by alphabetical order in computer systems (which is where yyyy-mm-yy is the only one that works well) is just the product of either programmer laziness or people misusing text fields for dates - so don't add to enough to justify the "jarring" for other people due to changing from the date format they're used to, not the mention the costs in anything from having to change existing computer systems to having to redesign and print new paper forms with fill-in data fields with a different order.
In a similar logic, the benefits of dd-mm-yyyy are mainly the ease of shortenning it in spoken language (i.e. just the day, or just the day and month) and depend on knowing the month and year of when a shortenned date was used (which usually doesn't work well for anything but immediate transfer of information as the month and day would still need to be store somewhere if they're not coming from "present date") so they too do not justify the "jarring" for other people due to changing from the date format they're used to.
Frankly even in an imaginary situation were we would be starting from scratch and had to pick one, I don't know which one would be better since they both have flawed advantages - year first only really being advantageous for allowing misusing of text data fields or programmer laziness in computer systems whilst day first only being advantageous in immediate transfer of date information where it gives the possibility of using a shortenned date, something which is but a tiny gain in terms of time or, if in a computers system or written form, storage space.
It's really not a hill worth dying on and I only answered your point because you seemed to be confusing how comfortable it felt for you to use one or the other - a comfort which derives from familiarization - with there being some kind of general cognitive advantage for using any order (which, in my experience, there is not).
Sounds like you're just used to it being said the opposite (read: wrong) way. If you told someone in my country March 15th, it would be just as jarring to the listener.
not in daily use. When you ask someone "what day is it today?", they usually have a handle on what month it is and just need the day. For making plans, it's only if you make them way in advance that you need the month first, which would be sorting and scheduling, not daily use.
You're still allowed to exclude implied information, no matter which method of dating you want to go with. You can just say "the 15th".
I can't speak for you, but for me I am making plans, sorting, and scheduling every single day.
Sounds exhausting tbh, I'm sorry..
Seconded.
Americans use 9 millimeters at school all the time.
How many football fields is that
About 82 nanofields
What’s the ratio of nanofields to millimeters?
About 82 to 9
There is a business opportunity there for 0.35 inches Freedom Guns
Hilarious.
I am once again asking for yyyy-mm-dd
ISO8601 crew represent!
I get SO frustrated when I see a date like 4/3/2024 and have to spend time trying to figure out if it's the 4th of March, or if some US company wrote the software I'm using and it has defaulted to silly format.
Try working for an American company while not living in America. I have spent years trying to convince my US colleagues to please use unambiguous date formats when sending email to a global audience. But no.... they just can't see why it would be necessary or even helpful to do that.
I'll take metric gladly, but I can't go that direction sir.
So dd-mm-yyyy?
yyyy-dd-mm 😀
YMYDYMYD
YTMND
INFIDELS
As a mechanical design engineer in America having dual systems creates unnecessary complexity and frustration and cost for me all day, every day. I full force embrace switching to metric
as a mechanic working in a hodgepodge US/EU factory line, I have to suffer through always carrying double the tools to service metric and SAE machines. and after so many years in the industry, I still slip up and say 3/16 when I mean 3/8 sometimes, because fractions are a shit system for wrenches.
oh, and some of our linear encoders readout decimal-feet, because fuck it, why not?
My condolences. I'm already annoyed with the times USC units are presented in Australia (our nominal pipe sizes are often talked about in inches, and sometimes valves and such have USC flow coefficients because the manufacturer is American).
So I cannot imagine the pain you must be subjected to.
There are three sizing standards used in the UK right now: metric for newer homes, imperial for older homes and farmer's sizing for fuck you, that's why.
We even like combining them in one thing. Tyres are measured using inches for one dimension and millimetres for the other two.
Metric yes please. Also for fucks sake use the 24 hour clock. Some of us learned it from the military but it’s just earth time and way easier than adding letters to a number
I switched to it in my later teens when I realised how many cases it would be better in.
Conversion during conversation might be an extra step, but I'll be pushing for the next generation to have this by default.
Also, much better when using for file names.
Also, YYYY-MM-DD. There's a reason why it is the ISO
Anti Commercial-AI license
The conversion is pretty much the only hurdle I ever hear about, but that’s easy enough. How many songs/films talk about “if I could rewind the last 12+12 hours”…it’s just a matter of making it fit in context people can understand when they know a day is 24 but are used to 12.
ISO and while we’re at it, the NATO phonetic alphabet for English speakers. “A as in apple B as in boy” means fuck all when you’re grasping for any word that starts with that letter, and if English isn’t your first language fuckin forget about it.
err... didn't get what you're trying to say
We standardized an alphabet among all countries for clear communication.
Here is an example of it going wrong.
I knew this would be the video. 😂
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
wrong.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I'm pretty sure that's an example of why you should use the chosen ones instead of going "mancy/nancy" all over the place.
Also, didn't they just make a standard for themselves and other just took it because it was probably easier than making one for their own language (oh right, NATO... but let's be honest here, NATO is just a forum for America to flaunt its power while PR-ing peaceful, so it makes sense they use English, which is also easier to be a second language than most other ones).
Though I feel like China might have made their own.
Anti Commercial-AI license
The radio words were chosen to be distinct, such that for people who trained in them, it would be easier to distinguish letters being spoken over low quality radio.
Not very relevant in the era of 2G HD audio, and now VoLTE.
But when there's a bad signal and you have to tell someone a callsign, it makes sense.
I like ISO, because in whatever cases I have interacted with it, it has made programming easier for me.
I like YYYY-MM-DD, because when files lose their metadata, if they are named using this, I can still sort by name and get results by date.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Conversion is always extra step, but you don't need it if you use same timezone as other participant.
Big-endian is big. Alternatively DD.MM.YYYY or DD.MM.YY for little-endian lovers.
Except no because the digits themselves are still big-endian. That's nUxi.
It's more along the lines of most signigicant bit/least significant bit, rather then byte order.
Right, and the most significant bit of the whole date is the first Y in YYYY, which we can't put at the end unless we reverse the year itself. So we can either have pure big-endian, or PDP-endian. I know which one I'm picking.
Your literal statement is also just wrong. The solitary implication of endianness is byte ordering, because individual bits in a byte have no ordering in memory. Every single one has the exact same address; they have significance order, but that's entirely orthogonal to memory. Hex readouts order nybbles on the same axis as memory so as not to require 256 visually distinct digits and because they only have two axes; that's a visual artefact, and reflects nothing about the state of memory itself. ISO 8601 on the other hand is a visual representation, so digit and field ordering are in fact the same axis.
We are talking about transferring data, not storing it. For example SPI allows both for LSb-first and MSb-first. In date digit-number-date is like bit-byte-word.
Right, and in data transfer every byte can be placed in an absolute order relative to every other. And the digits within the respective fields are already big-endian (most significant digit first), so making the fields within the whole date little-endian is mixed-endian.
I have iterated this several times, so I worry there's a fundamental miscommunication happening here.
Why no base10 clock?
base12 has the advantage of being divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6, while base10 is only divisible by 2 and 5.
So you're arguing in favor of feet and inches?
The Dozenal system does have some advantages over base10. Feel free to poke around []https://dozenal.org/drupal/content/brief-introduction-dozenal-counting.html to learn a bit about Donzenal/Duodecimal counting and maths.
And to bring up a point, why did every nation that adopted the metric system require a law(s) to force people to use it? Complete with penalties if you don't. If it was such a good and great idea, people would have naturally gravitated to it don't you think?
Ahh, another connoisseur of the Dozenal system! Everyone should add a little dek and el to their life!
You listed 2 twice(thrice if counting 6) for base12 and once for base10. Generally, when talking about bases better talk only about prime factors. Base12 has 2 and 3 as prime factors, while base10 has 2 and 5.
You don't need to add or multiply time very often. Division is super important tho, and base60 is better than base10 for that.
Too easy. Plus we put in the 3/5 “compromise” so you can’t expect old white racists to learn proper math
The French did try it back when they were in the process of changing to the metric system in the 1700s. Even THEY quickly determined that, much like the creation of the universe, it was a very bad idea. And it was very quietly dropped. French tried hard to scrub that moment of insanity from the history books. But well, the internet is truly forever in both directions I guess.
Metric time quickly got out of sync with the periods of light and dark. Mother Nature evidently doesn't like humans dicking around with the time periods of her celestial movements. (Dozenal for the win!)
The 12 hour one is just so wildly dumb and inconsistent.
Why does it go from 11 AM to 12 PM to 1 PM?
Why would you demand metric everything and not metric time?
Cause then we’d be thinking we’re monkeys on a spherical rock in a vacuum instead of calibrating clocks to a radioactive element to make sure everyone tunes in to wheel of fortune on time while this oblate spheroid tumbles around
Also, it’s hard enough getting people to equate Km and C with known quantities, Americans can’t handle base unit shifts like that
Just a little sodium chloride
If America is going to go through the trouble to convert everything to metric, might as well switch to base 10/decimal time as well lol
I love the 24 hour clock and living in London, UK I used it all the time. However, I remember one time I bought movie tickets at lunch for 17:30 and my brain thought it was for 7:30pm and I called my friend at the last moment saying: "you have to leave work early if we're gonna make it!"
There was a beautiful time back when I was young where we tried to change to metric and schools taught us nothing but. Now I'm ~50 years old and don't even know how many pints are in a gallon. Or feet in a mile. Always forget whether it's 12 or 16 that's inches in a foot / ounce to pound. Always have to look that shit up. Because they didn't teach us that garbage. Ever.
Guess what I NEVER have to look up? The measurements that tell you in their fucking prefixes how many X are in Y. What a concept.
Don't worry. You likely wouldn't remember even if you were taught. 5280 feet/mile is just not worth the brain space. Neither is 8 pints/gallon. I don't think you would convert between the two often enough to make it useful information to just know.
And I do have to look up those prefixes for the less used ones. It's exa then peta or peta then exa and what's bigger than them? What's smaller than nano? I don't remember because it rarely comes up. But I'm in tech, so it's starting to more.
I remember 5280 despite being Australian because I saw that stupid mnemonic tweet. I remember the SI prefixes because of xkcd.
We should have gone metric in the 70s. This year will be the 45th anniversary of the Metric Conversion Act, which was signed on December 23, 1975, by President Gerald R. Ford. You may have even seen a map that has been incriminatingly illustrated to show how they are out of step with the rest of the world. It’s a compelling story and often repeated, but you might be surprised to learn that it’s simply untrue!
Metric has been legally "preferred" in the US since 1975. We just don't use it.
Also while I was looking up that year I came across this wild factoid:
So
pitatespirates are why America uses freedom units.Damn those ruthless pitates!
Here I thought you made a typo...but no, you typed it exactly right :D
If you pretend to be a confused foreigner you can make them do math
Suddenly trying to convince all my friends and family I'm from France.
The irony is a real foreigner could probably do maths better than them.
You could always use the metric system, that was always allowed. Most food (I've seen) has both imperial and metric measurements. Most digital measuring devices and lots of analog ones will have options for both. Speedometers generally have both.
Really, the only one stopping you from using the metric system in your daily life is you. Unless of course you're saying you want other people to use it. Which is a distinctly different proposition.
I'd argue the two greatest barriers for the average, non-STEM individual adopting metric in America is the speed limits being in mph and the temperature being in °F. Both are convertible easily enough, but when you constantly have to do so to engage with critical infrastructure or safety (cooking temps, etc.) It provides a barrier against adoption for anyone without the drive to make a concerted effort to use metric.
Between the two, I think temperature is the harder one. But strangely, it also brings weight and volume back into it: Cookbooks.
So many recipes are finely tuned balances of measurements that just look plain alien when converted to metric.
In the UK we're mostly using metric with the odd exception (we still love a pint of beer), one of which is that speeds are measured in MPH. It's not really a big deal, there aren't many customers between miles and kilometres and anything less than a km is still usually measured in metres.
thanks to shrinkflation, all pints are now schooners. Tomorrow, middies.
I think we were the first with metric money? We still pay for things in centidollars.
Why do Americans call the decimal system "metric"?
They're different things. The metric system uses decimal. All metric units are decimals, but not all decimals are metric measurements.
You're right that money is decimal, not metric.
Because that's it's name
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system
But if you wanna get all specific about it we can call it SI
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units
It's certainly not the Decimal system
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal
There's no such thing as metric money. What are you talking about?
Sorry, I thought you were making a general comment. I didn't realize you we're criticizing the "metric money" statement.
But, reading over that person's comment again they also say "centidollars", which also doesn't exist, so I believe they were trying to make the point that the US was the first to make a currency that seems to adhere to the same principles as the metric system since their currently since 1 centidollars = 1 cent = 1 dollar/100.
(I'm pretty sure it was a joke though. We don't use kilodollars, etc)
Non-metric or non-decimal money is referring to systems where the multiple tiers of money, like our cents and dollars, are seperated by amounts other than 10 or 100, like the old British system of 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd
My Megadollar says otherwise.
You can't have it because of peer pressure from dead people. You gotta take them seriously, motherfuckers will haunt your ass and say shit like "thirty fathoms, gold dubloons and schooners, twenty nickel shillings". We have the metric system in our country and the ghosts suck, they don't even try to come up with sensical nonsense phrases for the sake of the bit, the lazy bastards.
I dunno, it'd probably be better but there's nothing stopping people from using metric in places where it makes sense. I write most of my recipes in grams because it makes them easier to multiply or divide.
At the same time, the most common thing people use units for is a point of reference, and it really makes no difference whether your point of reference is metric or traditional units.
I switched all my devices to Celsius, learned it, and haven’t looked back since.
That's fine right up to when you're complaining about the temperature to an american.
But I am an American. To learn Celsius I came up with a quick heuristic to do “accurate enough” conversions for the months between switching off Fahrenheit and getting to the point where I knew Celsius well enough.
So I can pretty quickly go from Celsius to Fahrenheit for my ignorant compatriots.
Edit: For anyone downvoting me, if it’s because I called people who don’t know Celsius “ignorant,” please understand I’m using this definition: “lacking knowledge, information, or awareness about a particular thing.”
Not this one: “lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated,” nor this one: “discourteous or rude.”
We are all ignorant about things we don’t know about. No shame in ignorance, it’s the default state of all living beings!
Knowledge is the light in the darkness of ignorance.
Stuck up asshole because I learned Celsius and like it? Alright.
Take a look in the mirror, dude...jeeze..
Congrats!
I'm a scientist. I've used the metric system since grade school. In fact, I convert Imperial measurements to metric to do estimates.
Engineer here, I just use whatever's convenient. It's handy to know both.
That said, I did confuse a poor coworker of mine this week when I was using bar for tank pressure and psi for the safety reliefs. That's totally on me though.
and that's why challenger blew up. or was that the hubble screw up?
It was a Mars lander.
To be clear this was a conversation over the phone, not a tech review or something. And I was explicitly naming the units, it was just jumping all around that had him confused.
Official documentation and programs should always be explicitly clear on what units are being used, especially pressure.
Be the change you want to see in the world. Use the metric system.
I'm a machinist, I don't get to choose my units. We use standard and try to avoid metric dimensioning like the plague. The difference between .005 inches and .005 millimeters is literally an order of magnitude.
I did it all the time. But I'm not american.
Dammit people, we need to stay focused. First abolish DST THEN institute the metric system! We have to have our priorities in order and stay organized or we will never accomplish anything!
Why not just metric, so we can get those metric seconds, then daylight time wouldn't matter anymore.
If we abolish DST, I think we should tweak some of our timezones. With dst, where I'm at the sun is currently rising before 5. If we kept standard time, it would be up before 4. Sun rise at 3 something and sunset at 7 something is really out of whack with how most people want sun allocated to their day.
I'm sorry but divided we fall. It's this kind of nonsense that impeeds progress. One thing at a time. Just get rid of it and then tweaks can be made on the state level. Arizona for example already abolished DST.
I'd honestly rather the switching than ending up on standard time year round.
Why do you want the sun to set early?
I'd rather have an extra hour of sun after work than an hour of sun before work
I think most people enjoy DST. Most complain when it's dark at 5 pm.
I don't give the first two half-flaccid thrusts of a reluctant pity fuck what number the clock says when the sun rises or sets. 4, 5, 6, 11, don't care. It's the practice of changing the clocks twice a year that needs to die in a fire.
The logic should be "Let's open our business from 7 to 4 instead of 8 to 5 so that we have more free time during sunlight hours in the evening" not "Let's change all the clocks everywhere so that the sun is two fingers higher in the sky when the clocks say 5 so that we have more free time during the sunlight hours in the evening." You want to vary YOUR routine with the seasonal change in sunlight hours? Great. "Summer hours 7 to 4, winter hours 8 to 5" or whatever. Managing this by changing all clocks everywhere causes more problems than it solves. I don't know if I could intentionally invent a stupider solution to the "problem."
This has been the thought in my head when the argument comes up. Glad I'm not alone.
Preach on brother!
noon is when the sun is highest in the sky.
for half the year, we are going to collectively lie about where the ball of fire in the sky is.
it's insanity.
I was a pilot in a past life. Night flight is quite different than day flight, because it's darker up there than you think. A lot of nations outright don't allow night VFR requiring night flight to be done IFR, some others have optional night flight endorsements or ratings for night VFR. But it's a training requirement for American private pilots.
Because it is a regulatory matter, there has to be a strict definition of "night time." Which is where we get the concept of "civil twilight" which IIRC is the moment when the center point of the sun's disc is between 0 and 6 degrees below the horizon. "Night time" is officially the time when the sun is 6 or more degrees below the horizon. Exactly when this happens changes every single day as the days get longer and shorter, so you still have to look it up. The exact moment of local solar noon is even less important unless you're navigating by sextant, and the way we currently solve this kind of problem is we maintain an accurate clock calibrated in GMT, UTC or Unix Timecode depending on your exact use case, and then we do the math on the fly to convert to local time. When is local solar noon today at my exact location? 18:32:40 GMT.
that's why I said noon, since that doesn't (really) change through the year (much).
It's the one real constant with time.
So people changing their clocks are like saying "the sky is green today, and I refuse to look to actually know"
You can make summer time the regular time you know. Removing dst is about getting rid of changing the clocks twice a year.
"Summer time" is DST
If you removed DST, we would always be on standard time.
What you are saying is make DST permanent, not removing DST
What anyone mean when they say get rid of dst is to stop the flipflopping.
But i guess you are technically right. Witch i have heard is the best kind of right. Even if very pedantic ;)
You think that because it's how you feel or you have different stats on opinions taken from large samples in an unbiased fashion that lead you to believe this?
If it's the former please see https://paylesspower.com/blog/beyond-the-clock-exploring-the-nations-pulse-on-daylight-saving-time/
If the latter, please consider sharing your data.
Ahh, yes, 1002 people is a large sample size, like .003% of the population.
Your article is also about switching. Doesn't say anything about if people would prefer to stay on DST or standard time.
The way statistical sampling works, 1000 people in a population of 300,000,000 is actually good enough for most things. You can play around with numbers here to convince yourself, but at 95% confidence 1000 people will give an answer to within 3% of the true answer for the 300,000,000 population.
If the 300m people lived in the same area and you got a true random sample.
Sunsets at 9:09 today in Michigan
Sunsets at 8:04 today in California
Sunsets at 8:34 today in North Carolina
Sunsets at 7:57 today in Alabama
Sunsets at 7:38 today in Arizona (They are on standard time)
Sunsets at 7:13 today in Hawaii
Sunsets at 11:36 today in Alaska
Someone in Arizona might want the sun to set at 7:38. It's blazing hot all day.
Someone in Michigan might be fine with sunsetting at 8:08 with standard time.
Someone in Alabama might not want the sun to set at 6:57.
Someone in Hawaii probably doesn't want the sun to set at 6:13.
Even if you split up the 1000 people to equally represent all states, that's only 20 people per state.
I mean, yeah, 1000 people is enough assuming there's no sampling bias. But if you've got sampling bias, increasing the sampling size won't actually help you. The issue you're talking about is unrelated to how many people you talk to.
Your own suggestion of splitting up the respondents by state would itself introduce sampling bias, way over sampling low population states and way under sampling high population states. The survey was interested in the opinions of the nation as a whole, so arbitrary binning by states would be a big mistake. You want your sampling procedure to have equal change of returning a response from any random person in the nation. With a sample size of 1000, you're not going to have much random-induced bias for one location or another, aside from population density, which is fine because the survey is about USA people and not people in sub-USA locations.
I think it depends on where you are in your timezone if you prefer DST or standard time. But most people seem to not like changing the clock. It just turns into a fight if we should stay on DST or standard time year round.
https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-polling-shows-americans-utterly-divided-2023-3
DST is good actually. Fite me.
DST is bad, byte me
Sun tracking locally is good actually. Smyte me.
You could drive this one stretch https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/i19-americas-only-metric-interstate
I ended up on this last year as I was exploring the South West. I found it confusing even as a Canadian.
I then later was confusion when Google Maps told me to go 80 on Hwy 10 in Texas once I came up from Big Bend NP. I thought the GPS was confused. 80 kms on the highway in the US? It was then I realized I wasn't in Oregon anymore with their 60 mph highways. Texas goes fast and even 80 mph isn't enough for most people. Even the single lane highways with construction workers was 65 mph work zones in Texas.
It was the most amount of road kill I've ever seen in all my travels. I think at one stage a herd of goats must of tried to cross the highway based on the carnage I came across. I finally understood the reason for the huge bumpers on the front of trucks in Texas now.
that's technically I-30.5
Natural Gas companies: No, MMBTU/scf or bust!
A few years ago I started using Celsius in my everyday life. It's been pretty easy, just remember that C scales twice as fast as F, and 32F=0C and you're set for conversations. It helps to be quick with math, but finding it difficult may make it easier to convince other people to use it instead of F near you. To acclimate yourself you'll want to change the settings on your phone to use C by default.
I haven't switched over to m in everyday use, because all the roadsigns are in Mph and doing that conversion while driving is bad juju.
I'm thinking of rewriting all my recepies in grams and liters. If I can figure out how to get our stupidly-over-designed-yet-entirely-jank oven to use C, that'd be good too. If we had one with a bimetalic strip and a knob I'd be able to just print one with the new temperature scale.
Honestly, temperature (in terms of weather preparedness, not cooking) makes WAY more sense with Fahrenheit. Largely the only temperatures you care about are 0 to 100 and generally you feel a good difference in temp every 10 degrees F.
Almost everything else I prefer metric. But that's one where Celsius is just terrible.
The reason you feel that way is because you're used to it.
Similarly, Celsius feels natural to me, as I've lived with it all my life.
That's a poor argument, though, when the justification for utilizing volume, mass, and distance is because it is very "base 10"-y and is easily divisible and understood.
Celsius absolutely is shit for that.
I could use your logic to justify why imperial units are better for length, for example, but we all know it's a bit fucked. Celsius is absolutely fucked for temperature regarding human comfort and is imprecise.
Replying again because you've edited your comment and added another paragraph.
Your edit asserts that Celsius is "absolutely fucked" regarding temperature for human comfort... which is an utterly bizarre argument to make because it only makes sense to people who are used to Fahrenheit and have an intuitive sense of what 72F means to them, but have no intuitive sense of what 22C means
I'm not entirely sure that you're not just trolling now.
No negative numbers needed for most cases, 0-100 scale for the extremes MOST people need to care about with relative "feels like" every 10 degrees (but realistically every 5 is distinguishable, even smaller amounts depending). Ez pz.
IDK why you're so defensive about Celsius lol. It's okay to admit when an SI unit has a poor application. Your ONLY defense for it is "well people can get used to it" which is the exact same reason I could say "well you could just get used to feet, inches, yards, miles, pounds, ounces, fluid ounces, teaspoons, tablespoons, etc" - it's a shit argument for both.
But oh that's right this is Lemmy where "america bad" for everything.
Right, so...once again, your argument is that you feel that Fahrenheit makes more sense, because that's what you're used to
I never said that C is better because people can get used to it, you're just making that up. I said that the system people are used to is inherently going to be the one that makes the most intuitive sense to them, and that applies to both C and F.
The rest of what you said applies equally to any system of measurement.
I don't understand why you're so angry about this?
The entire point of this post under which we are all commenting is insinuating a superior system of measure. Jesus you actually are this stupid.
So... in your opinion, Celsius is shit because you're not used to it ?
Tell me you didn't read the argument without telling me you didn't read the argument.
Ah yes, more insults. Your argument of 'the system I use is better because I abuse people who disagree with me' is very compelling indeed.
Saying that you didn't read my argument because your point ignored it entirely is an insult? It's abuse? LMAO.
Are you fucking stupid? <- that is an insult
So, uh, no? In fact within the "human spectrum" you generally care at least somewhat about every tick of the number. So it's actually more useful for people.
Because I doubt you can feel the difference between 71f and 72f. But it's possible to notice the difference between 21 and 22, although you're pretty picky if you do.
no.
Brilliant response.
🤷♂️ it was as much as it deserved.
Could just admit you're a stupid cunt and move along
oh, sweetie, no.
no.
Oh, honey, yeah.
Yeah.
Tread lightly my friend. I already won the Fahrenheit vs. Celsius debate a few months ago, but non-Americans are insanely defensive about the metric system and won't accept the truth.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/9757434
I'll transcribe my best arguments because that thread was an absolute shitshow and it's hard to find my comment even with the direct link. Almost all of my most downvoted comments on Lemmy came during my defense of the Fahrenheit temperature scale, and I'm weirdly proud of that fact.
::: spoiler Fahrenheit Supremacy Gang Celsius is adequate because it’s based on water, and all life on earth is also based on water, so it’s not totally out of our wheelhouse. But for humans specifically I think Fahrenheit is the clear answer.
One point that many may overlook is that most of us here are relatively smart and educated. There are a good number of people on this planet who just aren’t very good with numbers. Obviously a genius could easily adapt their mind to Kelvin or whatever.
You have to use negative numbers more frequently with Celsius > Celsius has a less intuitive frame of reference
Each Celsius degree is nearly two Fahrenheit degrees > Celsius is less granular
The reason I argue the more granular Fahrenheit is more intuitive is because a one degree change should intuitively be quite minor. But since you only have like 40 or 50 degrees to describe the entire gamut of human experiences with Celsius, it blends together a bit too much. I know that people will say to use decimals, but its the same flaw as negative numbers. It’s simply unintuitive and cumbersome.
B) 66F is room temperature. Halfway between freezing (32F) and 100F.
All scales have to be learned, obviously. It’s far easier to create intuitive anchorpoints in a 0-100 system than a -18 to 38 system. Thus, Fahrenheit is more intuitive for the average person.
I should note that if you are a scientist, the argument completely changes. If you are doing experiments and making calcualtions across a much wider range of temperatures, Celsius and Kelvin are much more intuitive. But we are talking about the average human experience, and for that situation, I maintain Fahrenheit supremacy
It’s not about the specific numbers, but the range that they cover. It’s about the relation of the scale to our lived experience. Hypothetically, if you wanted to design a temperature scale around our species, you would assign the range of 0-100 to the range that would be the most frequently utilized, because those are the shortest numbers. It’s not an absolute range, but the middle of a bell curve which covers 95% of practical scenarios that people encounter. It doesn’t make any sense to start that range at some arbitrary value like 1000 or -18.
When the temperature starts to go above the human body temperature, most humans cannot survive in those environments. Thus, they would have little reason to describe such a temperature. Celsius wastes many double digit numbers between 40-100 that are rarely used. Instead, it forces you to use more negative numbers.
This winter, many days were in the 10s and 20s where I live. Using Celsius would have been marginally more inconvenient in those scenarios, which happen every winter. This is yet another benefit of Fahrenheit, it has a set of base 10 divisions that can be easily communicated, allowing for a convenient level of uncertainty when describing a temperature.
Sure, water is a really good system and it works well.
And for F that range is -40 to 104. See how you get 64 extra degrees of precision and nearly all of them are double digit numbers? No downside.
Furthermore F can use its base 10 system to describe useful ranges of temperature such as the 20s, 60s, etc. So you have 144 degrees instead of just 80, and you also have the option to utilize a more broad 16 degree scale that’s also built in.
You might say that Celsius technically also has an 8 degree scale(10s, 30s), but I would argue that the range of 10 degrees Celsius is too broad to be useful in the same way. In order to scale such that 0C is water freezing and 100C boiling, it was necessary for the units to become larger and thus the 10C shorthand is much less descriptive than the 10F shorthand, at least for most human purposes. :::
What's funny is the person who brought up arguments FOR Fahrenheit over Celsius to me that I hadn't considered is actually a Brit. They lived in England and the US and your explanation here is very similar to theirs.
You certainly didn't win any arguments with those claims.
0-100f is not anywhere close to the scale people see in the weather anywhere most people live. Taking where I've ever lived as an example:
The most iimportant number with respect to the weather is freezing, it's handy knowing if you're dealing with ice. The standard range for where people live is not -40 degrees, something like 2/3 of the world live between the tropics and will never see freezing or below. The -40 number makes sense if you live in Alaska or Siberia and maybe even somewhere like Minnesota, but certainly not to someone in India or Indonesia....
Neither scale is relative to cooking (which isequally arbitrary for both), though metric is easier for things like brewing 80°C tea since you need 4/5th a cup boiling water and 1/5 a cup and no thermometer.
The "feel" of the weather is hugely impacted by humidity which is why every forecast has a "feels like" measure and why 90°f in Dubai is lovely but 90°f in Houston is miserable. The increments of 10f doesn't make sense at all, though seems to be a common perception among people who prefer fahrenheit
The comment about farenheit being more granular would be true in an alternative universe where decimals don't exist, but not in this one.
Americans literally like farenheit more because it's familiar, any other rationalisation is nonsense. Both measures make perfect sense after you've taken the time to learn them and use them daily (I know this firsthand).
What doesn't make sense about it? You can tell another person it's in the 30s outside, and you have efficiently communicated more information than is possible when using Celsius. You'd have to say it's between 4 and negative 1, which is just lame. And this remains true across every temperature, because of a variety of factors which I explained above.
In every climate which you mentioned above, it's easier to communicate how hot or cold it is outside using Fahrenheit. This is because all of the numbers being used are non-negative integers (aka natural numbers). Even the triple digit ones are one-ten or one-twenty.
I wonder why mathematicians named them that? Possibly because they come naturally? Unlike negative one point seven.
They will defend Celsius being used for everyday weather reporting with their last breath with their ONLY fallback being "well you're just used to fahrenheit durrrrrrr" as if that logic can't be applied to every unit system on earth.
Mate that's my whole point. I grew up Celsius in Australia and use Farenheit day to day now. They are literally interchangable once you learn. It takes a month or two to get used of using them and beyond that, the literal only difference in difficulty of use is that it takes about ten seconds longer to calculate a green tea brew in f, which has no bearing on the weather anyway. All of the arguments above are garbage, as they are garbage when the exact same, inverted arguments are made by metric proponents.
All measurements scales are interchangeable once you learn - that's not the point of this particular thread of comments. It's "what's most useful comparatively given the SI penchant for base 10". The answer isn't a temperature scale that, for day to day human concern, is not -18 to 38 - that's fucking stupid.
Yeah. I've had some time to ruminate and I think part of it stems from the impossibility of them not using Celsius in their lives. Like, they're not going to singlehandedly make their country start using Fahrenheit, so accepting it as better would just create cognitive dissonance.
It doesn't tell you anything that Celsius can't with a 5 degree swing. This the absolute peak of arbitrary, both 5s and 10s are easy scales to work with. Your example of between 4 and negative one is deranged. I'm in houston right, it's 90°f - if I want to comunnicate that to my yankee girlfriend I'd say "babe it's 90° outside, might get up to one hundred" and so far, you're right this is easy to articulate. If I want to communicate that same information to my mum, I'd say "hey it's 30° outside, might get up to 35°". Both cases convey information with the same accuracy, both cases I haven't mentioned humidity, which for actual temperature feel has a way higher influence then 5 degrees, the extra information I'd gain by strictly converting 31-37.8°C is junk data, the farenheit measure is approximated to begin with and because of a humidity swing carries a huge variability in actual "feel" anyway. I tried to explain this above and clearly failed, as your response doesn't touch on this at all and just insists that people who think in metric don't default to easy to work with numbers.
The only place with negative integers was Pittsburg, so that point doesn't make sense for the rest and even if it was, your argument is insane. Saying negative 5 is no harder than saying 25, plus having negatives where snow and ice come into play makes it obvious when to be careful outside. I mean your argument here just makes no sense, if there is some added complexity to saying "negative" then it is surely comparable to having to remember a random number of 32. Literal kindergardeners understand negative numbers. Neither this or remembering the 32 number add any meaningful complexity and certainly have 0 impact on anyone's actual use of either scale.
Literal adults have trouble with negative numbers. I can't do this all over again, sorry and have a nice day. Hopefully it's somewhere in the 80s wherever you are
Mate I have to reply to that, because it's such an insane claim - the US, the only country that doesn't use °C, has this huge reliance on a monstrously complex credit system (obviously the entire concept of credit is reliant on the concept of debt and negatives). It's flat out insane to suggest that the same people who live and function with such a credit system conceptually struggle with the fundamentals negative numbers. It's a mind boggling claim.
Anyway, have a good one.
The UK continues to use miles when discussing speed and distance. The road signs use imperial units.
I was born in northern England in the early 90s, and I can only eyeball in imperial units, even though I now live in a country where they only use metric (and Beaufort).
Rock it like a Brit. Most things in metric except for your height (feet and inches) and your car speed (miles per hour) and when you measure your manhood (inches... Or fractions thereof).
Also, milk is pints.
Land is acres.
And the ponies run furlongs.
... and our weight is in Stones.
Right you are g'vnor
It's even funnier when you take a look at The Highway Code: distances can be measured in miles, yards, kilometers or meters depending on what type of distance you're talking about.
Actually, we're on the metric system. The foot and inch are defined exactly by their metric conversion values, and so is the pound
We're actually just using conversion factors
How is this supposed to be considered using the metric system? If you tell someone that you weigh 80kg and he doesn't have a clue what you mean, then you're not really using the metric system, are you?
That's on them, the pound is exactly 0.45359237 kg
So the conversion is trivial: 176lbs
Also, another issue with what you're suggesting is that people have to memorize several conversion factors as well. Inherently, you only have to be able to convert inches -> cm and pounds -> kg, but unless you want to do even more math in your head, you also have to remember feet -> cm, yards -> cm, miles -> cm, square feet -> square meters, cubic feet -> cubic meters (phew, that's just all the length conversions), pounds -> kg, ounces -> grams, pounds -> grams, cups -> grams (for every fluid you might want to measure), litres -> gallons, litres -> pints, etc.
Or you could just go through the one-time effort of actually using the metric system so you don't have to carry this mental burden with you everywhere you go....
The problems with that are:
hardly anyone knows the conversion factor
other people aren't going to do the math in their head
them == everybody in this case. Practically, nobody is going to do what you suggest - instead, non-metric users will ask metric users to do the conversion for them. And why should we be responsible for doing the work when they are the ones who refuse to use the system that 96% of the world has adopted?
Technically the US is using the metric system. Per the Mendenhall Order of 1893, all customary length and mass units were redefined to be based on international metric standards. The Imperial system units commonly used in the US are just conversion factors of metric units.
Top text: Why metric system is needed
Middle text is mostly blurred, but "easier to count - less time to waste" is seen.
Bottom text: for all times and for all people
Fine, fine, Ill use celsius.
"Fuck me it's hot today"
"Yeah it's at least four washing machines Celsius bro"
We measure in whales, giraffes, and hamburgers around here homie.
We have it in Canada. Do you want to borrow ours?
The reality is that the US uses the metric system but everything is translated into freedom units for the general population. Another situation where you believe against all evidence that you have something that you really don't have.
Are you under the impression that Canada doesn't use imperial measurements for anything?
You were so sure you got me. Sorrry.
I didn't realize Canadians measured things in 240p
Seriously I'm not sure if you messed something up or if Lemmy is messing up but I can't read any of that text other than the title
Good news, everyone!
There is no text.
Look I get it, but also, I like fahrenheit and miles. They are more intuitive and closer to the 'feeling'. 100 degrees is really hot. 100 mph is really fast. Maybe that's my own bias from growing up with it though
Yeah, I think it's mostly just a familiarity thing. To me 0°C is cold af, 10°C is chilly, 20°C is nice and 30°C is hot. 100 km/h is fast but not really fast, though I'm probably biased in this regard from regularly driving on the Autobahn lol
exactly! whenever anyone says imperial units are "more intuitive" and better reflect "how it feels to humans", i can only think: obviously, you grew up with it. that's what you know.
no matter what measurement system you were raised on, it will feel intuitive to you and reflect how you as a human experience the world because you are used to measuring things in those units. having said that, i'd much rather we used metric if for nothing else than the ease of unit conversion.
When it comes to Fahrenheit, there is some merit to the idea - 0 to 30 is a small scale compared to 0 to 100, and unlike Imperial vs. Metric, Celcius has no base 10 system that makes any more sense than Fahrenheit does. . The opposite is true of kilometers and miles - kilometers is more refined since each unit is a shorter distance.
I'd prefer the Metric system, but Farenheit over Celcius for temperature measurement.
The fixed points (for 0 and 100) are much more logical though and can be used to accurately recreate the scale anywhere (well.. it'll be slightly off on higher altitude since boiling temperature changes but it's still not far off).
0°C = water freezes (= it's snowing)
100°C = water boils
meanwhile:
0°F = the coldest night Mr Fahrenheit experienced, thinking it couldn't get any colder than that
100°F = Mr Fahrenheit's own body temperature (he had a slight fever apparently)
How would you recreate that??
The temperature of water boiling is not a useful metric when it comes to the weather, as it's extremely far outside of where humans can live. Science uses Celcius standard, and that seems to work fine, but I see no reason why we should use it for the weather.
The temperature of ice melting, on the other hand, is hugely important for weather. 0 point is placed at a very important spot as far as weather observations go.
Can't say that of Fahrenheit.
We'll just keep things as they are becuase it seems to be working fine.
I think we can agree that the freezing point is super important when it comes to the weather.
So where would you place the second mark (you have to define two spots) so it "makes sense for the weather" (I don't see how it makes less sense for the weather than Fahrenheit, at least Celsius tells you if it'll snow or not while Fahrenheit tells you nothing) while still making sure that it can easily be recreated?
I am not water.
The temperatures are intuitive for me because Celsius is all I've known. The car going 60km/h or 100km/ h I know the difference and how it feels sitting in the car. The speed of wind in the forecast needs to be m/s to make any sense. Over 20 m/s I better tape the windows so that the storm won't break them
Out of curiosity, what would you consider "too cold to go out"? Not really about the metric/celcius system, but 0c is light jacket weather for me.
Anything below or around zero degrees is undershirt, shirt, sweater and warm jacket weather for me. Though it rarely gets colder than single negative digits where I live. I'll go with a light jacket from like 10-15 degrees upwards. I can't handle the cold very well lol.
That's an artefact of the "now".
In Australia we once had the imperial system and about a year after the big switch (14 Feb 1966) we became all metric like a mofo. Now 35c feels hot and 15c feels cold. Plus units of ten is so much easier than factions.
Ask the US military about the metric system, they've been using it since at least Vietnam, if not earlier.
As an army vet. No we don't. Never once in the military did I use Celsius. For distances we used both. I have pictures from inside my vehicles where the speedo was in miles.
Fair enough, I'm an Australian vet, and the US guys we worked with used kilometres. I must have generalised.i withdraw my comment. 🙂
Not only is 100C is also really hot, it's the boiling point of water. Now that's a 100 degrees that really stands for something.
"intuitive" in the sense you described just means "familiar". One feels like one. Ten feels like ten.
The magic of metric isn't that each base unit is somehow more valuable in metric. It isn't. One will always feel like one.
The magic is how easy it is to convert from the "small one", the "medium one" and the "big one".
Also, the convention of fractional inches is ridiculous.
It should be trivial to order 27/64, 3/8, and 7/16. Don't make me do that math.
Hard disagree on the fractional units. Using rational numbers for those things derives from the frequency with which people need to double and halve things in the fields that use those conventions. Doubling 3/8 to get 6/8 or 3/4 is much easier than doubling .375 to get .75
That one's nothing to do with the metric system vs imperial, aside from the fields that rely on the convention being largely the ones that created imperial in the first place. If they all switched to metric tomorrow they'd just say they need 3/5 meter spacing.
Does Germany use 3/5m spacing?
I looked it up and they use 2/5 meter spacing. Some other countries nearby use 3/5th though.
And it's described locally as 2/5 and 3/5, rather than 40 or 60 cm?
If so, I'm shocked, but delighted to have learned something unexpected
From everything I've heard it's a hodge podge, since the US, with the worst system, is the only one to use it consistently. Building plans would reference it by cm however.
What I was more referring to was from the perspective of the carpenter doing the work.
Fractions or decimals aren't specific to us customary or metric. You see decimal inches perfectly often, or at least I do.
Fractions are a more convenient way of dealing with multiplying or dividing numbers without a lot of mental effort. 1/3 of .125 is gonna take a second to figure out. 1/3 of 1/8 is 1/24. 5 1/8 units is just ”5/8”, rather than the .625 in decimal.
It's definitely less effective for numerical sorting in your head, but if I'm sorting screws or something, I'm probably gonna just look at them rather than compare the labels.
I understand the underlying principle, but I'm not sure if it actually shakes out that way for a few reasons:
If you asked a carpenter to cut something to 1/24", they'd be like "what?". Sure, the math was easier, but the result is unusable. No measuring instrument has divisions of 24ths. The person making a cut would need it in terms of 8ths, 16ths, etc. Any time saved at the initial stage is lost when they need to convert it again to a useable denominator.
Secondly, what's 3/32nds of 17/128ths?
The examples you give are harder in decimal form because nobody is going to make metric carpentry designs for things that are to the tenth of a millimeter, so 1.25cm isn't even real.
I admit, there are a lot of specific scenarios where fractional convention is helpful. I just personally think they don't outweigh the drawbacks.
I feel the same way about Fahrenheit, but boy do people hate it when you say it out loud.
I've never had to use Kilometers much but I'm sure I wouldn't have much trouble adapting to that as much.
How would you even measure "They are more intuitive and closer to the 'feeling'". It's not. You're used to it. No one else in the world that grew up with C is going to find F more intuitive. Neither miles.
I'm a European living in the UK for 9 years. I still don't know what a mile is. There's nothing intuitive about Imperial units, you're just used to them.
I also find inches easier to work with unless I'm making something with my 3d printer. Fractions are just easier when you're making something big with looser tolerances.
3 2/10 cm is easier than 3.2cm?
Doing things in 1/16ths of an inch is easier than metric for like woodworking and such IMO. Especially since most tools and materials come in inches here. Until you get into stuff that has tighter tolerances than 1/16th of an inch. Even then you could go to .010s or .001s of an inch but I'm more used to metric at that scale and that's what the applications I use for 3d printing default to.
1/16 of an inch is slightly smaller than a millimeter, you'd just end up using a millimeter or half again as your tolerance limit.
The big issue with imperial is all the fractions and strange conversions. On more then one occasion I've caught myself mixing up eighths and quarters, because my brain views them more as concepts then as numbers. Which is bigger, 11/16 or 3/4? Now, you'll get the answer, sure, but you had to think about it and it goes against the natural intuition that larger numbers are bigger. Compare that with, which is bigger 0.6875 or 0.75 and it should be trivial to see which is easier to learn and use.
0.6875 is basically a meaningless concept to me when I try to picture it in my head and what if you need to add it to another dimension? It's not easy to work 4 decimal places in your head. .75 only works because I automatically convert it to 3/4. Maybe it's just something that comes with experience but I don't have trouble with knowing what's what. If your not sure you can always make the denominator equal and figure it that way. 3/4=12/16 for instance. Easy math to do in your head.
Sure, but your measuring system dictates what lengths you actually design things to be. You would never actually use 0.6875, but if some jerk designed something with that length, it will be easy to tell exactly how big it was. If you switched to metric, your smallest practical unit for woodworking would almost certainly be a millimeter.
The problem is everything is already built using the imperial measurements. Even if we switched all the new tools and materials over to metric we'd be stuck having to do a bunch of conversions when we're integrating it into existing construction and we'd probably be dealing with that for the rest of our lives.
you don't get it.
your tools and materials will come in metric when everything is metric.
doing things on 1/10 of an inch or 1/10 of a cm is the same as 0.1 inches or 0.1 cm.
1/16 = 0.0625
3/16 of an inch = 0.1875 inches
as in "1/16th" literally means "one divided by sixteen, so do extra math instead of just giving you the real number"
decimal doesn't mean, nor have anything to do with metric.
No, you're not getting it. 1/16 isn't a function of a decimal system. It's base 2. Primarily because you don't really deal with 1/10th of something, but half of a half sort of stuff.
1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16...
2^-1^, 2^-2^, 2^-3^, 2^-4^...
And base-2 functions make sense in wood working in general because of it's imprecise nature. It's more useful to compare things in halves. A 2x2 piece of wood is not literally 2inches x 2inches. Even in Europe you guys follow weird numbers for finished wood dimensions. It doesn't make sense to have such precision when nothing about it is precise.
So I have to throw out all my stuff and spend $1000s on new tools?
You don't work in 1/10ths of an inch. It's 1/16ths and that that's where the math ends. You don't need to convert it to decimal. Unless you're doing machining which you do work in .0001ths due to the tighter tolerances and I've already agreed you might as well use metric for that.
you're talking about two or three different, unrelated things.
So either you're happy with less precision - and decimals are good, or you want more precision - and decimals are still good.
Again - absolutely nothing to do with metric. You can convert 3 3/4 inches to 3.75 inches, 3 12/16ths or 3 7.5/10ths of an inch. They're all the same thing and all imperial.
Tools. The topic is "using metric". Once you have all metric tools, then it doesn't matter. You're trying to change the topic to buying new tools. Unrelated. Using a tool vs shopping like a princess for new toys. We're talking about using tools.
but hey, while we're on the topic of how dumb you are, let's keep using what you say against you. You keep saying "it doesn't have to be that accurate" well, okay then. then get a sharpie, write the approximate metric conversion on the side and get on with your life. A 5 minute job for someone who I presume can write numbers and count to ten?
I knew there were more. What you don't get, what you keep missing, is that 1/16 is smaller than 1/10. that means your bitching about "tighter tolerances" applies more to dicking about with 1/16ths instead of 1/10s (which again, is decimals, nothing to do with metric)
If you can't have a civil conversation without insults I'm not going to bother with you anymore. We're talking about units of measurement, there's no reason to be an asshole. Go fuck yourself.
Yeah, and the benefits of switching does not out weigh the costs, like redoing all the signage and re-educating everyone and inevitable higher accident rate.
https://youtu.be/JYqfVE-fykk
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Freedom units!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(No, we really should get it over with at some point....)
I'll measure in miniature Jack Daniel bottles before I give up mph
If we switched to metric, everything we currently have built will suddenly have weird measurements. I don't want my 10 foot even high ceiling to be 3.048 meters. 😩 ^/s^
Yep, this is why all the buildings spontaneously exploded in places that changed to metric. /s
Things get phased out. Certain buildings will adhere to old code and new ones would adhere to new codes in metric.
I'll preface this by saying that this isn't an argument in favor of the imperial system, nor is it an argument intending to detract from the usefulness of the metric system. But I have wondered if there is some merit to having a simple, colloquial, "human friendly" system of measurement — something that's shown to be the best system for people to grok, and is the most convenient to use in day-to-day life. If you need precision, and well defined standards, then certainly use the metric system, but is the metric system easy for people to grok? Say you ask someone to estimate a length. Would they be more likely to accurately estimate the length using the metric system, the imperial system, or some other system? Likewise for telling someone a length and asking them to physically reproduce it. Would they be more likely to do so with the metric system, the imperial system, or some other? It's an interesting problem, imo, and it doesn't seem to get much attention.
It could very well be that people can, indeed, grok measurements the best when using the metric system, but I currently am unaware of any research that has been done to show that. If anyone is aware of any research that has looked into this, then please let me know! I'd be very interested to read it.
Lol, I'm sorry you're getting downvoted for speculating about improving weights and measures in a thread about wanting better weights and measures.
That's a feature supporters of imperial thinks it has. Even if imperial/some special third option is better for guessing, the difference has to be big enough that it's worth the hassle of having multiple systems or converting everyone again. If it's not worth having two systems but it is worth converting everything , then you still have to keep or prove that it's worth losing the conveniences of metric like 1 km = 1000 m , 1 L of water weighing 1 kg , water freezing and boiling at 0 and 100 °C
I'm not, but I'm old as shit, and don't really give a fuck.
Old people using inches: https://youtu.be/EUpwa0je6_Y
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Again, who’s gonna pay for the conversion? Sure we could switch like the Aussies did, but no one wants to pay for new shit when the shit that already exists serves its purpose well enough.
Get the financing, and then come back.
just make all new things metric as the primary unit and US imperial as the secondary. eg. reverse the display on a speedometer
Who's gonna pay for not converting (which is much more expensive)?
Just start doing it now and eventually things will have converted. It may take a while, but it will happen eventually if you do it consistently.
But there are too many contrarian Americans out there who'll take inconvenience over logic just because it "the American way" or "America is special." Have several of those people in my extended family.
Celsius is how hot water feels. Fahrenheit is how hot humans feel.
One is clearly more applicable for day-to-day life.
It's here Sunshine. And it's been the law, for what 50 years now?
So go to the store and buy a 2 liter of your favorite soda pop, 454g of butter, 2 1/4kilos of potatoes, a half kilo of tomatoes, and a 750ml bottle of whisk(e)y. Then get out your wrenches and use the 10mm to tighten that wobbly leg on that chair. Oh, your 10mm wrench is missing too? Well, do you have a 160mm adjustable wrench? No? I have one here in my tool box use that one.
Oh, you want it in your car? You either just need to read the other scale printed on the speedometer or just push a button. Instant metric system.
The metric system is here. You use it and your too blind to see it.........Most 'Muricans are either trying too hard to be edgy or they are just dumb I guess.
Metric speeds are stupid tho. Is 55kph fast or slow? Who tf knows. Meters, liters, celsius and grams are all chad units though.
This comment is bizarre to me. Is 35 mph fast or slow? Because it is the same as 55 kph ( km/h ).
55 km/h is an odd speed though it is true. Most towns in Canada for example, the default speed limit is 50 km/h. Highway speeds are more like 100 km/h.
Speeds in mph seem more intuitive to you?
Depends on context. Usually road signs.
Penis length number in centimeters > inches.
Just because the numbers are different doesn't make it any longer. It's still short.......
Makes everything sound small I've got a 23 centimeter long penis
for a bullet? slow.
for a snail? fast.
Why are there angry European posts and comments on this every freaking day as if each and every one of us who live under the American system of weights and measurements are personally responsible for implementing and keeping the system?
I'm comfortable in either format.
It doesn't chafe my balls to talk in metric or to see signs or containers in metric. Why does every god damned European feel like they're missing out on diaper powder every time an American talks about miles or fahrenheit?
Who hurt you? What damage does this really cause you?
Are there no other fucking issues that matter? We're gonna blow this whole fucking planet up if Jim Bob in Missouri doesn't start talking in liters God damnit!
I kinda thought the title made it clear I was an American.
The subject in and of itself is just exhausting
then you can't claim you're not responsible for keeping the system. the fact that you get exhausted by merely seeing someone say "hey metric would be nice" is why you won't change. not just this but a ton of archaic stuff everyone else in the world has moved on from.
Each and every time this comes up. I say that I am familiar with the metric system and use it for quite a few things, but I specifically prefer woodworking in fractional inches because working in base 12 and power-of-two fractions is closer to the tasks I need to perform in the wood shop than base ten decimal math does.
I give real-world examples like "divide 19mm, a commonly used stock thickness, by three to make a tenon, you get something point 3333 repeating of course" and they 1. downvote and 2. Invent sizes that we don't conventionally mill stock to thinking they found a "gotcha." "Well what's 2 inches divided by three?" we don't mill stock to 2 inches thick, we'd use 1 1/2", a third of which is 1/2". Y'all actually do use 19mm.
But Americans use inch fractions so inch fractions must be dumb and bad, right?
Did you know you can use fractions with metric units? 1/3m is a thing.
You want to show me a tape measure, caliper or micrometer marked in thirds of a millimeter?
You don't need a tape to find a third. Just like you don't need one to find a half. If you're a woodworker, you'll be using a centre finder. And it's not hard to make one to find thirds. Just take a plank of wood and put four holes at equal distances, then insert two short dowels into the furthest holes.
Yeah it really only matters what you are comfortable with, if you get units you aren't comfortable with then it gets confusing. I almost feel like metric folk don't realize that the USA is like 50 EU states in size, and this disconnect causes them some rage at seeing imperial units. At the human level I still can't comprehend Celsius, mostly cuz those numbers have meanings in fahrenheit, sure makes for some cognitive dissonance to heard 35 degrees thinking you would need snow gear to hearing it's unbearably hot.
I would not mind if americans used whatever. As long as anything exported from america always!! used metric. As it is now we need 2 complete sets of nuts and bolts, pipes and fittings, tools and gizmos, csbles and connectors. Just imagine the space we could save in our shops and storages if we could /2 the requires spare part storage. Not to mention the time and frustration avoided when doing basically anything on almost anything.
you must hate the towel of babel story in the bible.
Nah, let's stick to Freedom Units! 🗽
The metric system is fine in a lab. But, in terms of basic human living the imperial system, which wasn't designed so much as developed over years of usage, is simply superior. It works better and is generally more convenient and flexible.
[Citation needed]
You neef their ass?
Nah, what're you talking about?
Case in point: whose foot?