We’re taught both metric and US customary units in school. I prefer metric for most things, to the point I have a metric-only tape measure among other things.
However, I’ll die on the hill that Fahrenheit is superior for ambient air temperature. 0 degrees to 100 degrees neatly encompasses the range of average surface temperatures seen throughout the year in the contiguous US.
Metric. All day, every day.
standard metric measurements
The A system is superior to any american shenanigans!
A4 paper size FTW!
2xA5=A4
2xA4=A3
2xA3=A2
2xA2=A1
2xA1=A0 = 1 m²
And the ratio between sides is √2
It’s beautiful
It’s perfect 🥹
And they all taste identical.
I always preferred metric and Celsius. When I lived in South Korea, I was able to adapt immediately. Now I live in Europe and it makes all of the conversions easier.
Americans resistant to metric, in my opinion, are not very smart.
Murican’ here. The only place I prefer Fahrenheit is in weather mainly for how ironically base 10 it scales for human related comfortability for outdoor activity.
100°+ dangerous heat
90s very hot, drink lots of water
80s shorts weather
70s comfortable
60s long sleeves
50s jacket weather
40s bring a coat
30s coat and hat (water freezing is here at 32°)
20s layers
10s insulated layers
0s very cold, protect exposed skin
-0s dangerous cold
Everywhere else I’m fine for C°
You can just scale it down and have the same experience. It’s all just habit and familiarity
The whole point is that it is ironically base 10. I thought that was the goal?
Base 10 is nice for crossing regimes of scales, orders of magnitude. But we don’t really engage with temperature that way. The problem I have with F-heit on its own, is that it’s much too precise. The difference of a degree is meaningless, especially when considering weather. Fahrenheit weather maps are cluttered, dials and buttons on thermostats and in cars are slow, thermometer readings change too frequently, etc. USian shoe sizes have the opposite problem. If you need to use half sizes all the time then FFS just multiply the scale by 2.
That’s incidental:
he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees, and body temperature 96 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval 6 times (since 64 = 2⁶).
I mean, base 2 is superior imho.
30 is hot
20 is not
10 is cool
0 is freezing
-10 is terribly cold
Dangerous heat depends on humidity, it varies wildly.
Metric for most measurements except temperature (Fahrenheit - same reason you gave) and colloquial distances/velocities (e.g miles to the store, miles per hour).
the range of average surface temperatures seen throughout the year in the contiguous US.
So give it a few more years of global warming and you won’t want to use that anymore either.
Metric in logic, but standard measurements are ingrained into my brain so it’s more practical. I think that sucks.
Agreed. If I am making it building something then I prefer metric. If I am thinking about how tall something is or how long it is I think in standard. I just feel that one foot is a good size to measure something rather than meters or centimeters. It’s much easier for me to imagine a 6 foot tall object than a 1.83 meters or 183 centimeters. It’s just easier to break something up into 6 parts than it is to break something into 1.83 parts or 183 parts.
I know you could use a unit that equals 25 centimeters and that would be similar to a foot, but no one uses that for some reason.
Metric for everything but temperature because 69F is nice.
This is first time i have heard compelling and sensible argument for farenheit.
Fahrenheit for temperature until the day I die. The rest I don’t really care, the mental conversions are easy to get close enough. But F for temp as a human being is vastly superior
How is it vastly superior? 0 is freezing. 100 is boiling. 25 is comfortable human temperature.
I’m not a cup of water
Tbf you are water, just really impure.
Thermostats and other temperature displays with three digits for Celsius are a tacit admission that Fahrenheit is more useful.
They are an admission that the U.S. market is large. 99 % of the world’s countries using Celcius is a blatant admission that celcius is more useful.
Precisely. You get it
Don’t be scared of decimals. But it’s whatever you are used to for measurement units. If you grow up with one, the other won’t make any sense.
Celsius is just preferable because it has an easy to understand scale, 0 being freezing and 100 being boiling. Farenheit is just whatever the fuck.
Same with the rest of the metric system, it’s all divisible nicely. The USA is just stubborn to change, but are slowly converting, they will probably end up like the UK, using both.
The fact that Celsius needs three digits to express what Fahrenheit can do with two shows that Celsius degrees are too close together. Plus, you need a sign since Celsius is often negative.
Fahrenheit just covers the human-felt temperature range better. 0°F is very cold, 99°F is very hot.
And the zero-and 100-points of both scales are equally arbitrary. Kelvin at least has a zero point based on an intrinsic property of temperature. And “double” or “half” mean something in kelvin.
It doesn’t? Nobody needs the accuracy of 3 digits to tell the temperature, a 1°C change is just about perceivable to us. So having more of a scale is irrelevant (and if you do want more, then having 3 digits is literally a non-issue). You also use a sign for negatives in Farenheit when it gets that cold and you use 3 numbers when it gets that hot. This is the first time I’ve ever heard this argument for Farenheit ahaha.
Basing Celsius around water, something we all come into contact to, which we freeze and boil all the time. Is not really an “arbitrary” scale. Farenheit was based on a solution of brine and then a rough estimate of human body temperature, two things not even related.
You wouldn’t like Kelvin, that uses 3 numbers.
I never seen a sign or a third digit on a Fahrenheit thermostat. Every time I set my car to metric it adds a tenths digit because Celsius degrees are too coarse.
What car is that, I am european and I haven’t seen even a single time a car show anything in tenths of a degree and besides how the fuck is a thermostat going to get that precise without being a lab one or for a small space.
My perspective is probably unique but…
I don’t have a hard preference for either. I know both and I use both on a regular basis. If I need to convert, I convert. I find that one might be easier or more practical for specific instances or applications, but that’s far from a blanket statement that one is always superior, and I have little tolerance for that kind of thinking.
I also convert, neither system bothers me. I truly believe that the pushback against standard measure is that most people who use metric don’t know the conversions well enough to comfortably use them. Most Americans don’t either, hence their resistance to metric. But once you learn how to convert between the systems in your head (roughly) you can navigate both. It’s like being bilingual
If America adopted the metric system the need for convertion would go away. So there is no need to be bilingual in this stuff… Use metric and that is it. But you cannot do that as a single person. Laws should be passed.
There’s really no need. You’re (collectively) the ones bothered by it.
I tend to use metric when I’m designing 3D models.
In woodworking and other linear measurements, I use imperial units.
Celsius for my 3D printer, but Fahrenheit for weather.
Driving is miles.
In cooking I use imperial units.
Metric for Physics.
When I see imperial units in high school physics I wonder what is the point. We typically use SI units so that constants are the same across the board. I can’t imagine c being anything else other than 3e8 m/s.
I remember my sophomore thermodynamics class in college always seemed artificially hard because the only really difficult problems were ones where they decided to use fucking BTUs.
I’m reading the wiki and that sounds like hell. I prefer the 4200J/kg/K edit: wait that’s just heat capacity, maybe you were stuck in even more hell.
Fahrenheit for temp, metric for everything else. Base 10 system is just easier.
I have my phone set to show me the temperature in Celsius. I’ve tried really hard to internalize how far a kilometer is, and have failed so I still have my distance units set to miles.
I grew up with metric, so I have my temp/weather set to C as well. The only time I deal with F is with my thermostat. I’ve driven long enough to be able to visualize how far a mile is, but I still can’t visualize in feet past human height.
My digital micrometer has a button for switching between regular and metric I don’t give a single fuck
IMO measurements are actually one of the few areas in life where we are living in a decent timeline because US Customary is basically an affine rescaling of SI Units (affine but not linear because (at least) of x [K] = (x [°F] − 459.67) × 5/9) with exact conversion factors if you’re careful. And then my personal preference for the units I was socialized under become irrelevant for practical work.
5/9 is close enough to half for most purposes, and 30 is close enough to 32 - you can be within a reasonable margin of error converting to F/C with much easier math. Sure it isn’t perfect, but most of the time you don’t need that accuracy in the first place.
much easier math
No thank you, I like hard math. I didn’t learn all this math to not use it 😆
Just make sure you don’t get too many significant digets in your answer and so get the wrong answer.
