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