My simplest trick was – for outside weather. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty basic:
For Celsius: 0 is cold, 10 is cool, 20 is warm and 30 is hot.
For Farenheit: 30 is cold, 50 is cool, 70 is warm and 90 is hot.
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Right. Wind or air currents, humidity, and one’s level of tiredness or hunger have a much greater effect on perceived temperature than a difference of 0.5C.
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Thank you, had no idea what was going on when I saw a Malaysian article using an interpunct like a decimal point.
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That really reams me out! 
(I’d better bale before everyone bundles in.)
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The Sumerians used base 60, and it was easy to count it on the fingers. They used their thumb to count the finger-bones up to 12 on one hand (I find it surprisingly satisfying to count that way). With the other hand, they used fingers to count groups of 12. Five fingers counting groups of twelve equals sixty.
IIRC, this is why our clocks are so weird: 12 and 60 were really important numbers to the Sumerians, and it stayed with us.
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Yeah but can you imagine how cumbersome a handheld calculator would be if we were using base-60 mathematics? That’s a lot of dang buttons.
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I am not defending the USA’s clinging to the existing system, but I come to politely point out that foot/inch and pound/ounce measurements weren’t the result solely of laziness, stupidity, and egotism. They made a lot of sense in an “analogue age” in which the sorting and dividing of physical objects was a major part of everyday life. A dozen eggs separated into groups of 6, 4, 3, and 2 for easy trading. Same thing with cutting up feet-long lumber. Not saying the system makes sense in a modern context, only that for a long time it did.
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It’s not just the base 12 maths that make the imperial system difficult. Counting to base 12 in decimal would be a mercy compared to the way the imperial system is set up!
It’s mostly the fractions. Counting in fractions of 64ths of an inch is a terrible idea. And then you have decimal inches and to confuse things even further, thousandths of an inch.
It’s almost like it’s designed to be unwieldy, confusing and prone to error.
Which is not unlike the US political system and some of the more popular US sports…
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Most of the common imperial measurements were adopted because they were handy units for dividing things easily (so 1/64 inch is used because it’s one inch divided in half six consecutive times). That can be useful for some tasks like construction or baking but less so for things like science and engineering.
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28 is 82
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alas, the local office depot has closed down.
but, i buy parent sheet paper from French Paper and can cut to any size i need. frankly, i prefer an A4 sheet for documents and what and monarch size for correspondence.
currently letterpress printing a book project on 12x9in (30.5x23cm) 4pg folios.
see, measuring is fun! and on the whole, the headline to the OP is spot on, americans are too lazy, stupid and “exceptional” to learn the much simpler metric system. but not all of us!
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IAAL but work in pharma/medical device/etc., so do enough stuff on the daily in metric – but I can operate just as comfortably as one or the other. My foreign language skills are extant, but pretty poor, but I wouldn’t brag that I can only speak in English – it’s just not that big of a deal to operate in both. For my daily life, I think in terms of miles and gallons. But I don’t see any great need in the US to chance 1 Acre Foot to 1.23 Megaliters, even though they are pretty close or to swap to liters per minute from the well ensconced CFS. If you need to do the science for a spill or something it is trivial to move over to metric to do science.
But then surveyors got half-way clever and invented tenths of a foot!
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The really crazy thing about not switching to metric is so many people can’t efficiently use the system we do have. Can’t figure out how many tablespoons in 1 1/3 cups, can’t find the middle of a 6 3/16th inch board, have no ideas what a bushel, peck, or quart are, etc. Force people to use metric daily for 6 months and they’d never, ever want to go back.
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Does a Brit really get to complain about this? Last time I spent a while in the UK (20 years ago) they used miles and MPH on the roads.
Ah yes, the metric 1/8th of an ounce…
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Right? And who doesn’t know there are three and a half grams to an eighth? Back in the day, a gram was ten bucks, and eighth was $25, so you get a better deal if you can go in with friends on the bigger bag.
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Yes, instead of using anthropocentric measures we should be using a system based on the French Philosophs incorrect measurement of the distance from the pole to the equator.
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