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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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For proof that this thread is just people justifying what they know as better somehow, look no further than Canada.
We do cooking temps in Fahrenheit, weather in Celsius. Human weights in pounds, but never pounds and oz. Food weights in grams, cooking weights in pounds and oz. Liquid volume in millilitres and litres, but cooking in cups, teaspoons and tablespoons. Speed & distance in kilometres, heights in feet and inches.
Try and give this any consistency and people will look at you like you’re fucked. The next town is 100km over, I’m 5ft 10in, a can of soda is 355ml, it’s 21c out and I have the oven roasting something at 400f. Tell me it’s 68f out and I will fight you.
People like what they are used to, and will bend over backwards to justify it. This becomes blatantly obvious when you use a random mix of units like we do, because you realize that all that matters is mental scale.
If Fahrenheit is “how people feel” then why are feet useful measurements of height when 90% of people are between 4ft and 6ft? They aren’t. You just know the scale in your head, so when someone says they’re 7ft tall you say “dang that’s tall”. That’s it.
This makes a lot of sense, and why I'd never survive in Canada.
Those are two different things. Hope this helps.
It doesn’t help at all, it’s being intentionally obtuse. You know what I mean, it’s unhelpful to pretend otherwise and pick a fight over it.
If an argument is being made for one thing, Fahrenheit, it's not relevant to bring up a different thing. Why is feet a useful measurement? Maybe it's not, we're talking about temperature.
Yeah like the metric system has good arguments for why it's measurements and weights are better, mainly conversion being easier, but for temperature there really isn't an argument. I would make an argument for Fahrenheit as it gives more precision without having to use decimals which at least in America isn't a thing for temperature. But those are pretty minor things and I do tend to agree it comes down to what you grew up with.
This fear of decimals is a strictly American thing. Celsius achieves more precision with decimals than fahrenheit without decimals. And this American fear of decimals is pretty funny, considering you will happily do advanced fractions as soon as you are doing length measurements.
I don't mind decimals at all, it's more that I don't trust companies to actually deal with supporting decimals when making the switch. Plus the last time I discussed this on Lemmy someone was saying that decimals aren't even universally used and it might depend on what you get whether you get that precision or not. Either way like the main point of my post was anyways these are minor arguments and at the end of the day there isn't really a reason to use Celsius vs Fahrenheit.
Can you feel the difference between 23.5° and 24? I can't. You don't often need precision to tenths.
In Australia most weather providers give you whole degrees, the bureau of meteorology gives you to one decimal in reports and whole degrees in forecasts
My coffee and beer boilers can hit high precision temperatures to variously 0.1° or 0.5° precision. The beer boiler gives 3 digits - hundredths below 10°, tenths below 100°, whole numbers 100° and over
You can choose the precision of thermometers you wish to buy for yourself
I have seen fahrenheit thermometers which are hard to read to better precision than 5 degrees
1cm3 of water weights 1 gr and needs 1 calorie to rise 1ºC.
But calories are now obsolete and the unit is Joules.
i still don't see how this is intentionally obtuse, feet are a mid point between inches and yards, it just makes sense to break down things over a certain amount to a much more palatable scale. Everyone knows roughly what 1 ft is, and everyone knows roughly what 1 inch is. Paired together you can get a pretty rough and accurate guesstimate of height. I feel like it's also pretty expected for it to be within the range of 4-6 ft. Most people don't really measure feet outside of that range, unless you're doing construction.
humans are a comparatively arbitrary height so i feel like you're just complaining about the height of humans being weirdly arbitrary? Out of all the systems you could use for height, ft and in is pretty well tuned to the human nature, you're not gonna do much better.
As a Canadian idk why your using us an an example, we are wrong to do so and we blame Americans for giving us this bad habit.
I just see it positively and choose to believe you're in the process of transitioning to enlightenment (metric). ;)
Outdoor temperature in °C, unless you're talking about an outdoor pool then it's often enough °F :-)
I think part of the reasons it's so mixed might just be due to how many Amero-centric devices and parts are common between the two countries.
Y'all can take your shitty Phillips screws though. Roberts is by far superior ;-)
Imagine weighing people as big rocks, though.
Until the UK changes that, us Americans and Canadians can rest assured that nothing we are doing is quite that ridiculous.
to be clear, we use feet and inches, and there is historical precedent for breaking things down once they get past a certain grouping, we only have 10 fingers after all. To me the difference between 200cm and 220 is literally fuck all. You ask me the difference between 4 ft and 6ft and i can pretty quickly tell you.
I find it weird that when measuring height in metric, people using cm exclusively, i've noticed this a lot actually, people will use cm or mm in places where it arguably doesn't make any sense. I could see the justification for doing math maybe, but like, that defeats the whole point of it being metric no?
Shouldn't you be using meters and cm for height specifically? Since most people are a good bit over one meter i feel like it would make sense to do it that way. But then again that's just kind of a shit bucket worth of options you have, ideally you would use decimeters, but nobody uses those things for some reason.
Most of Europe just uses metres for people’s height. 1.67m, like that. I have no mental picture of that, so it doesn’t work for me. But they don’t seem to have any trouble, further evidence that it’s all just what you know.
hm, that's weird, i've seen this first hand in a handful of cases, guess i just get the weird ones. Granted i still see it holding true in things like construction, where i guess it makes more sense, but it seems weirdly arbitrary to me.
Why is that defeating the whole point of being metric? If you know someone is 183 cm tall, you also know that they are 1.83 m tall. If its easier to say the length in cm, you do. No need for "one meter and eighty-three centimeters" or "one point eighty-three meters", just "a hundred and eighty-three centimeters". Often you just skip saying the "centimeters" part as well, because most people can see that you're not the size of a skyscraper without getting a ruler out.
yeah idk, i guess it's just weird to me, because here in the us if you measured someones height in inches alone, you would be chased out of a room. We strictly use feet and inches, and then yards if referring to a more "broad" range. So you can very safely assume something is in feet and inches if its just two numbers stuck together.
I feel like i could very easily get confused with metric if i'm not running a consistent rule for default units. Seems like an easy way to get a random x10 error in there to me.
As you pointed out previously, nobody uses decimeters, so x10 errors are not that common.
i'm just gonna say that the joke here is that it was a 10x error. But that's retroactive, so.
To you. But you are aware that this is not the case for people (almost the rest of the world) who are using metric, right?
i mean i would assume so. But i have no direct reference to what 200cm is other than it's somewhere about 6ft or 2 yards. something like 6' 5" i think. I would need to know the height of like 50 other people to be able to make a relative distinction there.
Note to self: High heat levels make Canadians cranky.