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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 14 2021, @06:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the accuracy-vs-precision dept.

https://www.zmescience.com/other/fahrenheit-vs-celsius-did-the-u-s-get-it-right-after-all/

At face value, measuring the temperature using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit seems to make a lot of face sense. After all, the freezing point of water is a perfect 0 degrees Celsius — not the inexplicable 32 degrees in Fahrenheit. Also, the boiling point of water in Celsius is right at 100 degrees (Okay, 99.98, but what's a couple hundredths of a degree among friends?) — instead of the awkward 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

Celsius is also part of the much-praised metric system. It seems as though every developed country in the world has adopted the metric system except for the United States, which still clings to tge [sic] older, more traditional measurements. Finally, scientists prefer to use Celsius (when they're not using Kelvin, which is arguably the most awkward unit of measurement for temperature). If it's good enough for scientists, it should be good enough for everybody else, right?

Not necessarily. Fahrenheit may be the best way to measure temperature after all. Why? Because most of us only care about air temperature, not water temperature.

[...] Fahrenheit is also more precise. The ambient temperature on most of the inhabited world ranges from -20 degrees Fahrenheit to 110 degrees Fahrenheit — a 130-degree range. On the Celsius scale, that range is from -28.8 degrees to 43.3 degrees — a 72.1-degree range. This means that you can get a more exact measurement of the air temperature using Fahrenheit because it uses almost twice the scale.


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  • (Score: 3, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 14 2021, @08:22PM (16 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 14 2021, @08:22PM (#1177841)

    The issue is which one is more useful?

    For the target audience of the article, which is everyday users, the answer is clearly non-metric units. Non-metric units arose exactly because they are useful, and they are useful because they are relatable. The human brain can't deal with very large or very small numbers, so things that occur in units of a few or a few dozen naturally arise. Where metric is the official system, people have largely been forced to conform to most length and temperature changes, so weather in Celsius is common, as is centimeters, meters, and kilometers. But you still hear people's height mentioned in feet in many countries, or auto driving in miles or miles per hour. This is because it is a lot easier to relate to the difference between 5-ft 6-in and 6 feet than it is between 1.68 and 1.83 meters (or 1676 and 1829 cm), not to mention when talking about differences in height of only several inches.

    In fact, non-metric units are so useful for everyday living, that even those staunch metric advocates use them all the time. You buy sacks or bags of flour, kegs of beer, barrels of oil. Nobody uses metric units for those kind of things ("Yes, please, I'd like another 237 ml of coffee!"). Area is even worse because people are pretty good at comparing lengths, but horrible at comparing areas. An acre is very relatable because you can reasonably picture it. Same with football pitches, but not square meters. The useful metric units are those that happen to be close to imperial units. Pounds and kilograms are within a factor of two. Miles and kilometers are close enough too, and (not surprisingly!) hectares are close to acres. Beer was served in pints, but snice that is 473 ml, a lot of places now give it in 500 ml servings. I am very appreciative of getting the extra beer, but when you feel compelled to change your everyday living to conform to some arbitrary system of units, rather than the other way around, then it might be a signal to you that you're doing it wrong.

    The loudest non-technical advocates for the metric system love to sell it on the fact that it is very easy to convert from kilometers to centimeters by just moving the decimal place. This ignores the fact that nobody needs to make large order of magnitude conversions in normal life (I have had someone smugly tell me that if I told him the distance to the moon in km that he can very quickly tell me the distance in cm and challenged me to see how easy it would be if I was told that distance in miles to convert it to inches. I asked him why the hell would I ever need to make that conversion, and if he ultimately wanted to know that distance in inches and was given km, then we'd be in the same boat anyway!).

    If you are a science/technical person, or involved in international commerce, the metric system makes a lot of sense, more from the standpoint of standardization than just being able to move decimal places around. Which was the primary reason it was proposed (that, and French nationalism, but that's a different story).

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday September 14 2021, @08:48PM (4 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday September 14 2021, @08:48PM (#1177858) Journal

    But you still hear people's height mentioned in feet in many countries, or auto driving in miles or miles per hour.

    Which are those “many countries” you speak of?

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 14 2021, @09:33PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 14 2021, @09:33PM (#1177867)

      My experience is seeing it on UK and UK-sounding country broadcasts (you know, those countries that stick all those gratuitous "u"'s in words) for rugby and football matches. The official TV player graphic will be metric, but you'll hear the announcer say something like "they raised all of that 6 foot 6 lock up to grab that lineout." Canada for sure. Distances are usually given in km, but it isn't unusual to hear speeds sometimes given in mph in casual contexts. (A little Googling [autotrader.com] shows my recollection is not off base)

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @03:12AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @03:12AM (#1177956)

      US is a metric country and do not let anyone tell you differently.

      https://www.google.com/search?q=what+year+did+us+join+metric+system [google.com]

      1866 yes over 150 years ago.

      In 1866, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of the metric system and almost a decade later America became one of 17 original signatory nations to the Treaty of the Meter. A more modern system was approved in 1960 and is commonly known as SI or the International System of Units.

      So why is one method better than another? People.

      An inch is about the lenght between 1st and 2nd knuckle - About even one has one at the ready.
      A foot -- look down
      A cubic - roughtly the length from elbow to middle finger tip - 1/2 of yard.
      A yard - roughly then distance from your nose (looking straight ahead) to your finger tip with your arm full stretched out at shoulder hieight. Also roughky 1/2 your height

      Fl oz (volume)-
      Tablespoon 1/2 oz
      cup 8oz
      pint 16oz
      quart 32oz
      gallon 138oz.

      For us computer people - Binary!!!
      .

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @02:38PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @02:38PM (#1177986)

        I've used both customary and SI measures for daily living and the main difference is that the customary measures are mainly defined in an anthrocentric way. Your personal foot is unlikely to be a foot, but you'd learn the relationship between yoru foot and an actual foot and you can use them to estimate lengths. Same goes for most of the other lengths. Time is a mess in every system we've ever designed. Time measurement is literally the measure with the most room for improvement, but nobody has ever gone about fixing it. You can't do much about the length of a year, or the actual duration of a day, but there's no inherent reason why we couldn't redefine the hour to be 20 per day, a minute to be 100 per hour and the second to be 100 per minute. We could also make every month 30 days and add the remaining 5 days to the first 5 odd months and put leap year day as November 31st.

        It's never going to happen, you'd have to have the entire world changing all at once and then have to deal with the issue of dates and times from before that point not matching even remotely.

        One of the great things about the measuring system in America, is that while it's backed by SI measures, the increments are much easier for humans to use. Everywhere you go, you're carrying most of the things needed to estimate measures.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @03:06PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @03:06PM (#1177999)

          Time and Math are fun...

          364.24.... days around the sun
          360 degress in a circle or face of a clock????

          360 is nice because divs by 12 nicely. So also divs by 24 and 60 nicely! And making gears to move them... again nice math.

          Did you know that Feburary was the LAST MONTH of year. Julain calendar. IT is why is shorter than others Orignal calendar was a 12 or 13 month calendars. Roman standardized it. 31,30,31,30,... days months The Julius (July) and Augustius (Aug) wanted their own months with same number of days. Remember Sept->7, Oct->8,Nov->9 and Dec->10.

          Dont even get into current different between Europe and US Calendars.... Europe Weekend is on right SAT, SUN. So SUN is day of rest (New Testament/christian based). US Weekends Sun left, SAT right. So SAT.... Sabith is the last day... day of res (Old Testament/Hebrew/Jews based)

          It its that US based match Genesis the best... Sun (heavens), Mon/moon (earth), then 4 norse gods Tue, Wed (Oden) Thu (Thor), Fri, the Sat (Sabeth/day of rest)

          They talking about virus are left encoded in our DNA. Now you can see human history encoded in Math, Time, Calendars

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by vux984 on Tuesday September 14 2021, @10:39PM (4 children)

    by vux984 (5045) on Tuesday September 14 2021, @10:39PM (#1177882)

    tldr; -- you're wrong about the usefulness of easy conversions, and pretty much everything you think is more relatable in imperial units is really just familiarity and practice.

    For the target audience of the article, which is everyday users, the answer is clearly non-metric units.

    There is NOTHING clear about that at all.

    Non-metric units arose exactly because they are useful, and they are useful because they are relatable.

    Sure. But it doesn't really matter, because familiarity is a far FAR more important factor. If you are born and raised in a metric country, celsius is 2nd nature. The lack of granularity doesn't make an iota of difference; for the human experience 2 degrees makes little difference in almost all contexts, let alone 0.5 degree steps. I know how hot and cold -40 -30, -25, -20, -15, -10, 0, 10, 20, 25 30, 35, 40 are by living through it; i have mental reference frame for them, how to dress, how I'll feel (and at different humidities), etc. I've memorized how hot beef and chicken need to be to be safe, what a mild and severe fever is. So for day to day use, it not 'better than farenheiht'... but its not worse. The fact that it ties more neatly into science is a the only real advantage, but IS a real advantage.

    But you still hear people's height mentioned in feet in many countries, or auto driving in miles or miles per hour.

    More because the US exports its culture via hollywood, and everything it manufacturers than any actual functional reason. Canada being so closely tied to the US didn't cut over as hard as Europe, and so yes pounds and feet and inches are still widely used here, but again its a matter of comfort, I can buy groceries in either system with equal facility. 250g sliced black forest ham, 2lbs salmon, 1kg salmon, 2kg apples, 5lbs apples... i've been using both for decades -- I can convert units in my head as needed but i don't really do that, i have a mental picture of what 100g of sliced ham looks like, what 200g of sliced ham looks like, what 1liter of milk looks like, what 4 liters of milk looks like, how much beer is in a pint, the size of a 2x4, what a 12mm bolt looks like....

    You talk about 1.68m vs 1.83m, and I assure you I can visualize the 15cm difference perfectly fine. I have mental images for all of these things. "Feet and Inches" may seem natural to you for 'human scale things', but there's another imperial unit ... hands. You know like what horses heights are measured in. Nobody gives a horses height in feet and inches... its hands. And anyone who works a lot with horses can visualize and estimate height in hands pretty accurately. And guess what? A hand is 10cm. People raised in metric, have the same facility. 1.68meters is no more obscure to someone raised in metric than 17 hands is to a horse trader, and the difference to 1.83m is a little more than hand taller than 1.68. That's not to say metric people are thinking in 'hands' they're thinking in 10cm increments, but the point is that thinking in 10cm increments for human scale stuff is perfectly natural and easy to do, and the near equivalence to a hand just illustrates how easy.

    Meters are very close to yards, and 10cm is very close to 'hands'. If you think the imperial equivalents yards and hands are 'relatable' then metric must be just as relatable.
    Finally, if you are raised in metric, you know how tall you are in metric, and how tall others around you are. So just as you have a mental idea in imperial feet an inches how tall you are, your boss, you mom, your sister, your favorite basketball player... a metric user has that in cm, so they visualize human scale things the same way you do, in relation to human scale things with those values.

    You buy sacks or bags of flour, kegs of beer, barrels of oil. Nobody uses metric units for those kind of things

    I buy flour by the kg. It's sold in 5kg, 10kg, 20kg... I usually buy beer in bottles and rarely in cans, I've never bought it by the keg, and I buy oil by the liter, not by the barrel; although I realize 'barrel' is the international standard for trading the oil commodity. But that's a historical artifact and dominated by US economic clout rather than there being any real advantage to oil in barrels.

    Nobody uses metric units for those kind of things ("Yes, please, I'd like another 237 ml of coffee!").

    When I ask for a cup of coffee, I'm asking for coffee in the usual object used for drinking it. The same way when I a ask for a bottle of beer, i want the amount of beer in a bottle along with a bottle. There's no unit called "bottle". When I ask for a cup of coffee its whatever amount of coffee fits in the mug it'll be served in, which in my experience is quite a bit more than a unit 'cup'.

    An acre is very relatable because you can reasonably picture it. Same with football pitches, but not square meters.

    There's nothing more relatable about an acre than a hectare if you have experience with it. Square meters are very easily visualized. And lots of square meters are trivial to convert to hectares and square kilometers.

    The loudest non-technical advocates for the metric system love to sell it on the fact that it is very easy to convert from kilometers to centimeters by just moving the decimal place. This ignores the fact that nobody needs to make large order of magnitude conversions in normal life

    You cherry picked a stupid example calculating the distance to the moon in different linear scales. Lots of real world calculations are easier in metric, and are things people actually do.

    If you are dealing with areas and volumes and liquids and weights. And then yes, being able to convert from cc's to cubic meters or to compare the volume of a liquid in liters with the volume of a container in meters. These kinds of conversions come up pretty routinely in lots of walks of life. How many liters of water do you need to fill a circular kids pool 2m across and 40cm deep is pretty easy. (bonus question ... how much will it weigh? Also easy. )

    Go ahead and do it in pints and feet and inches and lbs; its a lot more hassle.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @12:26AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @12:26AM (#1177903)

      And guess what? A hand is 10cm.

      A hand is actually 10.16 cm, which is 4 inches. So a hand is a natural unit of inches. Your horse breeders are working in imperial units.

      When I ask for a cup of coffee, I'm asking for coffee in the usual object used for drinking it.

      You go vehemently denying everything said, then right here admitting that you use these really strange units (what's a cup of coffee? Is it the same as a cup of milk? Is a cup of coffee 8 oz like a cup you have I the kitchen? How do you manage all this? Why don't you use the liter as your measurement like a civilized person and give up this arbitrary "cup" nonsense?). So it IS metric except when you want to do something useful! You could have saved a lot of typing and just typed "I agree." Same with beer. You are very unclear what your "bottle" is. Baby bottle? 12 oz? Long neck? Tall boy? Honestly, I don't know how you can deal with this stuff every day. For me, I'll normally ask for just a regular bottle, but if I'm only a little thirsty I ask for the deci-bottle. When we're really letting our hair down and the whole family is over, maybe I'll order the kilobottle.

      Your arguments boil down to that you are comfortable working in either system of units, which is fine. However, there are plenty of metric advocates, and you'll find them on this site as well, who will try to argue the natural superiority of the metric system with arguments that essentially boil down to "I can move the decimal point" with the zeal of an obsessed numerologist. I've worked in both systems for decades as a scientist and neither system is superior than another. I find ease of calculations to be very overrated for everyday use, including your pool example as they are edge cases in general use (if you want to calculate in imperial units, you don't switch around to all those colorful (but useful) units, but you stick to one unit, like the foot, and you calculate your cubic feet and convert to gallons by multiplying by some constant (0.133 in this case), which is only applying a scaling factor--which you seem to do in your head anyway to go between lbs and kg). I still feel that if one feels the need to redefine the world around them to match their system of units, that should be a cause of concern. Pints go to 500 ml. Teaspoons go to 5 ml. Perhaps shoe sizes to integer cm (I suppose the Japanese use half-centimeters anyway)? Why not?

      • (Score: 2) by vux984 on Wednesday September 15 2021, @04:51PM

        by vux984 (5045) on Wednesday September 15 2021, @04:51PM (#1178038)

        A hand is actually 10.16 cm, which is 4 inches. So a hand is a natural unit of inches. Your horse breeders are working in imperial units.

        I'm well aware that a hand an imperial unit. My point was not to suggest that a hand was metric, my point was that 10cm is a relatable unit for human scale measurements. The hand is an imperial measurement that is almost identical. And that there are lots of people in horses who can estimate and visualize height in hands without any difficulty. So if you agree hands are relatable and horse traders can visualize and estimate heights of human scale things (horse scale things) in hands without difficulty then surely there is nothing unbeleivable to you that metric users can do it just easily in 10cm increments.

        You go vehemently denying everything said, then right here admitting that you use these really strange units (what's a cup of coffee? Is it the same as a cup of milk? Is a cup of coffee 8 oz like a cup you have I the kitchen? How do you manage all this? Why don't you use the liter as your measurement like a civilized person and give up this arbitrary "cup" nonsense?).

        Precisely because I'm not using it as a 'measurement' and I"m not asking for a specific measured quantity of liquid. I'm asking for however much fills the vessel it's being serving it in. If anything that's advantage of the metric system, if I ask for a cup of coffee I generally want 'a suitable variable size serving'; although i might want a precisely measured cup for some reason. But if I ask for 500mL of coffee I probably want 500mL of coffee.

        The fact that a cup is an ambiguous quantity is a disadvantage. And related to that, an another advantage to metric is that it not ambiguous. If I'm given units in metric its unambiguous. If I'm given units in gallons, I need to resort to context to determine whether its american gallons or imperial gallons or dry gallons. Likewise tons are a clusterfuck. And in physics the blurryness between pound as mass and pound as force isn't doing it any favors. Metric also standardized on using real numbers for small units instead of fractions. You are never dealing with 5/64ths or 3/16ths. I think cm, mm, um are much easier to work with, convert between, and add or multiply as needed.

        In day to day usage the two systems are nearly equivalent, but metric as a planned and standardized system is better for science because there is a clean break from the conflicting and ambiguous definitions of the previous system. And there is really no good reason to learn two.

        However, there are plenty of metric advocates, and you'll find them on this site as well, who will try to argue the natural superiority of the metric system with arguments that essentially boil down to "I can move the decimal point" with the zeal of an obsessed numerologist.

        What is the volume of a pipe 4km long and 20cm wide. The ability to convert from cm to km without effort is a real advantage. Is it the biggest advantage? No, its not. But the volume of a pipe 2 mile long and 5" wide IS more hassle to calculate due to the unit conversions and these are calculations that need to made in the real world. And the inability of some people to articulate why metric is much better doesn't mean its not much better. The clear unambiguous definitions and global standardization are the biggest advantages, but simple unit conversions are an advantage too.

        The small units is another spot where unit conversion comes up, the milli-units to micro-units. Lots of manufacturing and production have values and tolerances in this range, and imperial is just more annoying to deal with.

        Metric has several advantages, and the ONLY argument imperial unit advocates have is that imperial is more "relatable", but its a really thin argument. Metric is perfectly natural to use day to day if you grow up with it as millions of metric users can attest.

    • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday September 15 2021, @02:02AM

      by deimtee (3272) on Wednesday September 15 2021, @02:02AM (#1177943) Journal

      The one context where he has a point is peoples' height. To people who have some familiarity to both systems, feet/inches is much more relatable because most heights are in the narrow range of 5 to 7 feet. You can just check 5 or 6 for the feet (not tall, tall) and then the inches for an accurate mental picture. 5' 1" is short, 5' 11" is almost tall. 6' 1" is tall (but not very tall), 6' 11" is very tall. Anything outside the 5' to 7' range is extreme.

      I use metric for pretty much everything else, but I still find myself converting 1xx cm to feet / inches to judge if a description is a short or tall person. Probably because while 140 cm is very short and 200 is very tall, it doesn't come up often enough to have internalised what 178 is.

      --
      If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 17 2021, @02:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 17 2021, @02:09PM (#1178622)

      Same with football pitches, but not square meters.

      You quoted this and forgot to write how stupid it is. Not only I don't know how big a football pitch is (actually I don't even know what a "pitch" is), but I'm pretty sure most Americans don't. Most people see football fields only on TV. Even for people regularly going to watch games live, they see the field from too far away to make it useful as size comparison with every-day ground surfaces. Something like "when I'm standing in the xyz square in my city, it feels/looks similar to when I'm standing on a football field" - wtf? How often does the regular person stand on a football field?

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Mykl on Tuesday September 14 2021, @10:55PM (1 child)

    by Mykl (1112) on Tuesday September 14 2021, @10:55PM (#1177889)

    ...between 1.68 and 1.83 meters (or 1676 and 1829 cm)

    ... it is very easy to convert from kilometers to centimeters by just moving the decimal place

    But apparently not as easy to convert from meters to centimeters.

    Sorry, couldn't resist.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 14 2021, @11:26PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 14 2021, @11:26PM (#1177893)

      Yeah, once I crossed from comment into essay, I started getting lax with proofreading.

  • (Score: 2) by hash14 on Wednesday September 15 2021, @01:31AM (2 children)

    by hash14 (1102) on Wednesday September 15 2021, @01:31AM (#1177929)

    The loudest non-technical advocates for the metric system love to sell it on the fact that it is very easy to convert from kilometers to centimeters by just moving the decimal place. This ignores the fact that nobody needs to make large order of magnitude conversions in normal life (I have had someone smugly tell me that if I told him the distance to the moon in km that he can very quickly tell me the distance in cm and challenged me to see how easy it would be if I was told that distance in miles to convert it to inches. I asked him why the hell would I ever need to make that conversion, and if he ultimately wanted to know that distance in inches and was given km, then we'd be in the same boat anyway!).

    Okay, here's a better example. This seems like something that could come up a lot in say, carpentry or other minor construction projects. Suppose you need some plaster to surround a window for example. Would you rather compute the perimeter if you measured them to be 2 feet, 8 inches by 4 feet, 10 inches? Personally, I would find it much easier if I knew they were 80cm by 145cm instead. Let's make it even more fun then - what if you need 4x that amount of material? I can do the metric ones in my head. It's 9m. I'm not even going to bother trying with the imperial units.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @02:50AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @02:50AM (#1177952)

      Imperial units are base-12, the math is super easy.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @09:51PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @09:51PM (#1178122)

      Except you wouldn't do that. You'd measure it in inches or feet for the same reason that you wouldn't use both meters and centimeters if it's large enough for both to apply. And that's a regular theme where the examples are engineered to make SI look good, ignoring the fact that nobody would use the customary measures in such a way.

      In America, we know more about SI units than foreign people typically know about customary measures. It's a foregone conclusion that we're wrong because most countries didn't have a functioning system of enforced units of measure that we're wrong, but if you look at how the SI measures came about, it's not a good system for most situations. Most of the nice features are completely accidental.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @11:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @11:09PM (#1178142)

    > This is because it is a lot easier to relate to the difference between 5-ft 6-in and 6 feet than it is between 1.68 and 1.83 meters (or 1676 and 1829 cm),

    For you maybe, not for everyone!!
    This may be only true if you use imperial units, if not, it is exactly the opposite!

    For me, 1.68 and 1.83 are totally different and well understood difference ... 5ft 6in and 6 feet both looks to me like a small child (around maybe 7 years old)
    It just a matter of what you are used to. Every time some country change their coin (mostly same value range, like in Europe, for the euro, not the 10milions from zimbabwe [banknoteworld.com] to try to solve inflation... think on traveling to another country with a different coin, if your country never changed coin) , people feel hard to understand the new value, it feels uncomfortable... but with time and more unit use, you start to learn it and later found that the old unit is the one now that feels uncomfortable