• [object Object]@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      I had an American explain “well you just know that 68 is long sleeve warm, 80 is shorts” or something, as if people cannot memorize that 18 is chilly and 21/22 is usual room temperature, 26 is shorts.

      The only thing I dislike like about Celsius is that my thermostat supports both, but doesn’t allow half degrees Celsius, so it provides less granular control in Celsius than if you set it to Fahrenheit.

    • imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 months ago

      And weight also revolves around water. 1L of water is 1KG which is 1000cm3 whereas 1cm3 is 1g. Super easy to calculate things.

      Edit: correction

    • Soggy@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      *at sea level, assuming pure water

      It’s intuitive with respect to water. Applying it to anything else is exactly the same as the Fahrenheit scale: you associate various things with numbers.

  • folekaule@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    As a European living in the US now for many years the temperature scale is the least of my annoyances. It’s easy enough to memorize be ranges for what to wear. Fahrenheit is more granular, which is nice sometimes but really doesn’t matter.

    No, let’s convert all the ridiculous weight/volume measures first. Having two kinds of ounces makes no sense. Measuring solids by volume (mostly) doesn’t make sense. Having different units for different magnitudes doesn’t make sense.

    Fortunately things are often labeled in both metric and customary units so I can convert way easier.

    Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to have my 12 fluid ounces of coffee and a 1/3 cup of oatmeal.

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      I very much prefer to cook/bake/prep in metric grams.

      2c white flour, sifted.
      1c brown sugar, packed.
      1c room temperature water.
      2tsp active dry yeast.
      2tbsp vegetable oil.
      1/2tsp baking powder.
      2 egg yolks.
      5 egg whites.
      Pinch of cinnamon.

      Fuck you. Tell me how many grams that is. I don’t need five different tools to measure out my ingredients. I need a wet bowl, a dry bowl, and a scale.

      Also this isn’t a real recipe I just started naming shit at random.

      • folekaule@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I’ve had to translate recipes from Norwegian to American and this struggle is real. Never thought I’d need to look up material density tables for cooking.

        • prettybunnys@piefed.social
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          “To American” … what?

          We have kitchen scales, we know how to weigh ingredients.

          Old recipes in English often use volume measurements, across the pond too.

          Modern recipes use weights when possible.

          Idk why you’d convert to ye olde style.

          • folekaule@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            I accidentally a word. Converting recipes from Norwegian and metric to American and US customary units.

            I’m aware. I have a scale, too. But most people didn’t weigh dry ingredients. So when I translate for someone else I have to use the “normal” measures they’re used to. For myself, I speak the language and just use metric, my scale, and a measuring cup with both markings.

    • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      Having the more granular temperature seems more practical. I often find myself adjusting my thermostat by just a single degree F. Do heating/ac thermostats in Europe use half degrees as increments? Even then I don’t think it’s as granular. But just integer values would be super annoying.

      • allan@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Half a C is actually quite close to a whole F in delta. I don’t have a thermostat though.

      • folekaule@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I have not seen any thermostats in Europe with decimal degrees. But I also don’t think a thermostat is necessarily accurate to that level anyway.

        • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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          3 months ago

          lol you don’t think it’s accurate to a degree Fahrenheit? Why wouldn’t it be?

          • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Because it’s mass produced consumer goods operating on a “below x temperature turn on heat/turn off AC” and “above y temperature turn off heat/turn on AC”. Old ones are just bimetallic strips where you change the trigger position with a slider, and modern ones use commodity grade temperature sensors, and neither is guaranteed to be placed particularly far from the vent.

            • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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              3 months ago

              The sensor is typically on the thermostat. Not at the vents. You would typically place the sensor in a central location in the house. A high quality multi speed motor AC is designed to keep a decently consistent temperature which is a bit more complex than just turn on / turn off. If you’re dropping $15k to $30k on central AC, they aren’t going to cheap out on a poor quality temp sensor.

          • folekaule@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            It’s just not that fine tuned of an instrument. The furnace also runs on intervals so it’s just going to naturally fluctuate a bit. Like with anything “it depends”, but I doubt it’s possible to keep the room within a tenth of a centigrade just with a consumer level thermostat. Maybe in a small room with resistive heating? I’d love to see actual measurements of this.

    • DahGangalang@infosec.pub
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      3 months ago

      different units for different magnitudes

      I’m not sure I get what you mean? Are you saying how we use ounces for tiny weights, pounds for “human”-ish weights, and tons for huge weights?

      • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 months ago

        I think they mean ounces, cups, quarts, gallons, with no intuitive sense of conversion between them. I personally use ounces for almost everything (cocktail recipes are in 0.25 ounce increments, big cups are 40 ounces, big ol buckets can be 256 ounces). I might mess with gallons for very large amounts, but anything that can be expressed in cups or pints I’m usually just talking ounces anyway.

        • folekaule@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Your assumption is correct. I meant using cups, ounces, etc separately or in combination. Especially annoying when trying to figure out portions. Serving size: 8oz, package size: 1lb 4 oz. You have to do math every time.

    • GirthBrooksPLO@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      It’s funny because all of the imperial units are mathematically based on metric anyway.

      I’m an American, so I started with imperial units, but I am making the very slow progression of converting to metric. I already use metric for work, and it’s already the scientific standard here and has been since the 70s. It’s just turbo annoying to try and get used to a new measuring system that I use reflexively especially when surrounded by imperial units. Makes it too easy to trip up and fall back.

    • GraniteM@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Measuring solids by volume (mostly) doesn’t make sense.

      This could be apocryphal, but I seem to recall hearing that a lot of American recipes got established during times of westward expansion, and that it made more sense for people moving out to the frontier to carry a measuring cup and a set of spoons that it did for them to carry a carefully-calibrated scale.

      • folekaule@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Yeah that makes sense. And in a pinch (no pun intended), measuring your solids by volume or even just eyeballing it is good enough for a lot of cooking (baking is a different matter).

        But let’s not forget that Europe was not always metric, either. They went through the same process. They had the same units (or similar units) as US has now, with a lot of the same quirks. That was the entire point of the metric system: have one consistent set of units. United States was onboard early for metrication, but backed out before it completed it, so here we are.

  • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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    The original Fahrenheit system was actually pretty clever. It set 0° at the temperature of brine and 96° at internal body temperature. That made marking a thermometer really easy. Like, ridiculously easy. 96 is divisible by two many times before reaching a decimal.

    Because the freezing temperature of water was really close to 32°, the later Fahrenheit system set that as the lower temperature and 212° as the boiling point instead of using body temperature. That made marking a thermometer more difficult, and basically took away Fahrenheit’s only advantage. It was more consistent though. Now Fahrenheit is formally defined based on Kelvin.

    Centigrade was originally marked as 100° at the freezing temperature, going down as temperature increases to 0° at the boiling temperature. Obviously that didn’t last long. The downside is that marking a Celsius thermometer depended on atmospheric pressure. Now Celsius is defined based on Kelvin by -273.15° being absolute zero and a degree corresponding to a very specific amount of heat energy increase.

    So yeah, Fahrenheit hasn’t made any sense for many many years.

        • Th4tGuyII@fedia.io
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          Yeah, of course that is the case now that most definitions have been updated to be tied to physical constants rather than observations that rely on specific conditions…

          But the same wiki article you linked literally says otherwise. The Kelvin’s magnitude was based on the magnitude of Celcius because of Charle’s Law.

          I.e. the volumes of gases under the ideal gas law scaled linearly with degrees celcius by about 1/273rd between 0-100C - which led to the prediction that the lowest possible temperature a gas could be was -273C (because that would be the point where it theoretically would have absolutely zero volume).

          Which is a long-winded way of saying stop being a smartass. The guy you replied to was just as technically correct as you were, given they said 1k stemmed from 1C.

          • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
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            I.e. the volumes of gases under the ideal gas law scaled linearly with degrees celcius by about 1/273rd between 0-100C - which led to the prediction that the lowest possible temperature a gas could be was -273C (because that would be the point where it theoretically would have absolutely zero volume).

            No horse in this race, but this is cool as fuck. So that’s how the first tries at measuring absolute zero were made.

          • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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            But they didn’t say “stemmed”. They said “stemming”. But sure, they’re technically correct in a historical context. I wanted to be more precise about the current definition. Under that current definition, it’s actually degree Celsius that stems from Kelvin.

  • Smoogs@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Soon it won’t matter anyways. Isn’t AmericaUS like…done now? We can move on with our normal shit and chuckle at it like a museum piece.

      • ReluctantMuskrat@lemmy.world
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        Except 5km is not 3 miles… it’s 3.1069 miles so off by a considerable factor. 1 mile = 1.6km is a much more accurate approximation that’s easy to remember.

        • Knightfox@lemmy.world
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          That’s 4%, that’s not a significant amount for functional purposes and it’s a whole number to whole number conversion. Most of the time, if I’m converting, it’s from metric to imperial so 1 km is 0.62 miles. If you tell me the speed limit is 70 km/h it’s way easier for me to calculate 70 ÷ 5 x 3 = 42 mph than to calculate either 0.62 x 70 or 70 ÷ 1.6 = 43.49.

  • rayyy@piefed.social
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    The US could have switched to the world-wide standard years ago but under Reagan the switch was abandoned.

    • 4am@lemmy.zip
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      No, the original “Make America Great Again” guy? The first actor elected President who presided over an unprecedented health crisis and ignored it because he hoped it would only hurt the “right” people, and plunged America into an economic disaster the likes of which we are still feeling today and may never recover from? That guy?

      God this place actually sucks

    • Spezi@feddit.org
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      Please also lets use the International fixed calendar where every month has exactly 28 days/4 weeks and the year has 13 months. Every 1st of the month is a sunday, every 2nd is a monday and so on, so you will always know which day it is by the number.

      The leftover day is a dedicated new years day.

      • Soggy@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Sounds fun, now update every computer system simultaneously to a new date format.

        • bountygiver [any]@lemmy.ml
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          time is stored as seconds since epoch anyways, the computer systems can easily survive by just converting to metric time when displaying. It’s the systems that cares about week/month that hates it

      • mogoh@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        12 Month are better for dividing a year, which is often needed. I know it will never change, but I propose 12 30-day month and 5,25 extra days at the end of a year. Also 5-day weeks or 10 day weeks and every year starts with the same day.

      • pienz@feddit.org
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        3 months ago

        Would be nice to realign September, October, November, and December as the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months respectively

      • Crozekiel@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        How do you write the date for the “leftover” day? Like, thinking about dates in Excel.

        • Spezi@feddit.org
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          You have your dates in excel? I usually go to a restaurant or the the club with them, but I guess the youngsters today date in excel.

        • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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          1/14. Easy

          If programs can handle February having 28 days, sometimes 29. It can handle 14 having 1 day, sometimes 2.

    • portuga@lemmy.world
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      Every other full spin it stops for 4h. There. We also get rid of DST because who can tell the time anymore?

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    The one thing that bothers me about the metric system is how much of it is never actually used. No one says “1 megameter”, for example. They say “1,000 kilometers”. When you think about it, most metric prefixes are never used with most metric units.

      • la508@lemmy.world
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        We use decimetres in chemistry a fair bit. 1 mole of any gas will occupy 24 dm³ at rtp

      • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        “deci” is very popular. Just not in the “correct” form “decimeter”.

        In Spanish it’s normal to say “8 décimas”, which means 8 tenths. It is context dependent though. For example if speaking in a context where millimeters are used, it will be 8 tenths of a milimiter. That is, 0,8mm.

        But yeah, it is very uncommon to use deci and deca. Because they’re just not very useful. We are used to 2 digit numbers, or numbers with 2 decimal places. So 87m is not harder to use than 8,7dam.

        It’s probably also the reason there is no prefix between kilo and mega, or milli and micro. (They are x1000 increments instead of x10).

        For the same reason, when in a context of millimeters, it’s preferred to say “87mm” instead of “8,7cm”.

    • Bilb!@lemmy.ml
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      I’ve thought that was weird too. Decimeter’s seems like a good unit for measuring a person’s height, for instance.

        • Bilb!@lemmy.ml
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          Yeah, I hear you. There’s really no practical difference between saying 174cm and 17.4dm I think from the American perspective where 6ft is a sort of benchmark for adult male height, so psychologically that 6 looms large. CMs obviously work fine, but I’m trained to see the bigger 17 as a sort of benchmark/goal. None of that is healthy or rational, though.

          Maybe it’s easier to say “Oh, they’re 17dm” or “15dm” and get a general sense for the height of a person. When you need to get precise, it’s not useful.

    • Holytimes@sh.itjust.works
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      It’s because metric sucks at anything on a human scale and most people deal with things on a human scale. Imperial was developed over hundreds of years to be extremely narrow and scope in a specific two things at a human scale.

      It’s a big reason why imperial makes far more sense. If you actually need to talk about anything on a human scale, everything no matter how nonsensical makes sense the moment, it’s explained because it’s all extremely intuitive.

      While metric is basically a tiny fraction of a technically Superior system that basically makes no f****** sense in 99% of cases for a day-to-day life.

      Try metric is the measurement of science, engineering and other fields of study because they actually do with things outside of day-to-day human scope

      As the saying goes, use the right tool for the right job and only a dumb f*** uses the wrong tool for the wrong job

      • Deme@sopuli.xyz
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        Could you give an example of a situation where metric makes less sense than imperial? I will then explain to you that it only appears to you like that, because those are the units you’ve lived your whole life using. Without that baggage, the adaptability and easy conversions make SI-units objectively superior in every situation.

      • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I have no idea what you’re talking about… humans are around 1-2m tall, weigh about 40-80kg, have a body temperature of about 37 C, and need to drink a couple litres of water per day. How are these units not the proper order of magnitude for measuring things “on a human scale”?

  • Hansae@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    Tbf as someone who grew up with the imperial system due to being raised by a British boomer its fairly easy if you’re familiar with it, I still often cook in imperial due to a load of old cook books I have.

    Having said that anyone who wants the imperial system in the modern day is a absolute idiot, metric is objectively superior.

    • neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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      A brit once told me that the imperial system makes sense if you look at it from the perspective of a peasant at the market - units of 12 was a lot easier to work with in the olden days because it’s easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6.

      I guess it makes sense from a historical viewpoint.

      • seejur@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I just wish it was always 12 instead of 3, 12, 1760 and whatever the eff they come up with.

        Farenheit on the other hand does not make sense at all

        • Geologist@lemmy.zip
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          Best way to use Fahrenheit is to consider it as a percentage of how hot it is. 0 degrees is zero percent hot, and 100 is fully hot. Beyond that you’re in super cold/hot territory.

          But yeah, Celsius is still better.

          • Holytimes@sh.itjust.works
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            Fahrenheit is better at describing weather in reference to human interaction with temperature Celsius is better for everything else.

            But that’s the same for everything imperial. It’s always better when it comes to actual human elements. How big is that stick? How many things in that piece of bread? How much weight is that rock? I need to move.

            While metric is basically better anytime you have tooling you need to be extremely exact. You need to know something that is less human and more mathematical or abstract.

            Well each system can do the thing. They’re not great at it quickly falls apart. That’s a big reason why people tend to say imperial sucks. Most people no longer actually interact with the natural world anymore. Everything is computers, exact measurements, quantifiable numbers from shops. The only thing left that most people deal with on a day-to-day basis is the weather and why Fahrenheit may be better than Celsius. It’s only vaguely better since weather is already such an imprecise thing that really doesn’t matter.

            Well yes the granularity of Fahrenheit is far more useful. If you actually want to be like specific about things Celsius when it comes to weather it’s close enough f****** does the job

        • Knightfox@lemmy.world
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          Fahrenheit makes more sense as a unit in use. 100 equals hot, but doesn’t equal death, 0 equals cold. In a lot of the world freezing is only kind of cold, not actually cold. Metric makes sense for science while imperial is more of a common persons unit; that’s also why Americans in science use metric.

        • prime_number_314159@lemmy.world
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          It makes a lot more sense if you know about chains. A chain is 22 yards, and there are 80 chains in a mile. There are also rods (a quarter of a chain) and furlongs (10 chains)

          So: 3 Barleycorn in an inch 4 inches in a hand 3 hands in a foot 3 feet in a yard 5.5 yards in a rod 4 rods in a chain 10 chains in a furlong 8 furlongs in a mile

          … And of course there’s the overlapping systems of length for manufacturing, agriculture, maritime, and horse racing, which have their own, separate subdivisions and largest units, but usually you can get away with just the nail, the fathom, the nautical mile, and the span.

      • Hansae@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        Its basically entirely this, its not for no reason much of the world wound up using something akin to it. Honestly for small scale stuff such as cooking I do genuinely quite like using it but especially in the digital age its simply become obsolete I can’t imagine having to code something which requires employing imperial measurements.

      • Holytimes@sh.itjust.works
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        Imperial is FAR more human and “natural” then metric. Metric fails frequently at being quantifiable with natural experiences and objects.

        But imperial falls apart the second your trying to do something at a large scale, super small scales or literally anything that isn’t “human scale”

        And basically every test I’ve ever seen. If you don’t have tools or some reference point, people will nine times out of 10 be able to more accurately gauge something using imperial measurements then using metric measurements.

        Metric relies far too much on reference in tooling, but that’s also its greatest strength. It’s absurdly, exact and reliable while imperial is loosey-goosey

        • la508@lemmy.world
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          And basically every test I’ve ever seen. If you don’t have tools or some reference point, people will nine times out of 10 be able to more accurately gauge something using imperial measurements then using metric measurements.

          That’s clearly utter bollocks

  • somethingDotExe@lemmy.world
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    Never got this. I saw one fucking dumb american actually defend the rrtarded system by saying “It’s actually more precise” - what a fucking stupid thing to say, when you don’t even have a smaller unit than freaking Inches. Atleast we have mm. You guys use 1\4 Inch. Wtf is that??

    • Soggy@lemmy.world
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      Fractions are pretty good for quick ratios, which is why it’s popular in carpentry, but I’d never call it “more precise” than decimal numbers. Anything that needs tighter tolerances than 1/16" is probably going to use metric measurements.

      I will say that for most people it doesn’t impact their life either way. If the Imperial system (or the modern American system based on it) were truly inferior they would have been replaced but it’s mostly an issue in laboratories and engineering.

        • Soggy@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          I fully forgot about thousandths even though I see them all the time as “mils”. Definitely metric but worse.

    • Eh-I@lemmy.world
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      It’s a fraction. So like if you had one apple to split between four people then we would all get one quarter of a whole apple.

      1 apple per 4 people = 1 per 4 = 1/4 = 0.25

      I don’t know that I would say that fractions are more or less precise than decimal.

      • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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        Precision has nothing to do with the unit system. Or notation of fractions.

        0,001m is as precise as 1mm

        1/1000m is as precise as 1mm

        In SI you don’t even have prefixes, you use scientific notation with base units. You don’t say neither 1mm nor 0,001m. You say 1x10-3. Which is exactly the same as the other magnitudes of this comment.

        If you want precision in imperial, you could as easily say 0,00000000001 inch. It would be as precise as 0,000000000255 mm, or whatever the conversion is.

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          3 months ago

          Yeah, but let’s see if they get the apple example before we throw all that at them.

      • entwine@programming.dev
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        3 months ago

        I think “decimal” is a loaner word in European, as it’s yet another thing America invented. Don’t laugh at them for being slow on the uptake.

        • Knightfox@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          We do, but centimeters are in a weird spot. In general they are just a bit too small to be used in place of inches and too big to be used when you need millimeters. Also, inches easily go into feet which then go into yards. Probably the closest function to that would either be decimeters or fractions/decimals of a meter but that doesn’t really feel great either. There’s also something to be said about functional accuracy; for measurements that don’t have to be exact imperial units feel pretty good. For example, I might say that a cardboard box is about 1cubic foot if it looks about 1 ft in length on each side. If I instead used meters, 1 ft is about 30 cm (30.48 cm) or 0.3 m which would translate to 27,000 cubic cm or 0.027 cubic m. You might round that 0.027 to 0.025 or 0.03 cubic m depending on if it’s more or less than but it’s still feels like a weird unit for our rough approximation.

          Another quick example, my foot size is approximately a foot in length and I paced off a room at 10ft x 20ft so the area is about 200 sq ft. The equivalent would be that my foot is approximately 0.3 m so 10 steps x 0.3 m x 20 steps x 0.3 m = 18 sq m.

          Imperial units work well when you want to use relatively small whole numbers and high accuracy isn’t super necessary, but ultimately it just comes down to preference.

    • 𝕲𝖑𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍🔻𝕯𝖃 (he/him)@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      So that guy was an idiot, but you’re wrong about the smaller units.

      Fractionals commonly go all the way down to the 32nd. If you need to be even more precise than that we have the thou, which is defined as 1/1000 of an inch or 0.0254mm.

    • Billegh@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      The only argument they have is for temperature, because they’re afraid of decimal points.

  • voldage@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    0 C being the temperature water freezes is useful for knowing if there is ice outside, which has practical use. If we keep going the way we are, soon 100 will be an indicator that there is no water outside. Practical if you’re a hydrophobe or hydrophile.