Except now isn’t the human body temperature supposed to be 98.6 or something? And scaling based on the freezing point of salt water and the average human body temperature sounds a lot like basing electrical standards on potato batteries and lightning bolts.
If you’re already into it, I suppose it makes sense, but if you grew up with metric, seriously, it sounds hopelessly arcane.
If you apply the same fractional division to both Fahrenheit and Celsius, then Fahrenheit will always have the greater granularity.
Skin sensitivity has a lot with how much one notices temperature, not temperature itself. You said you could tell the difference of 1 degree Fahrenheit.
You get that people aren’t made of lightening bolts and potatoes, right?
Yes, and they also aren’t made of frozen salt water.
Frozen? No. Salt water. Oh, yes. But that’s hardly the point. Fahrenheit is a human-based scale, and thus is better at communicating environmental temperatures than Celsius.
When you corrected me before, you said I was half right, and the part I was right about was frozen salt water being used to determine 0F. Ergo, Fahrenheit is not a human-based scale, no matter how many times you repeat it – only 100F is. A top end (that isn’t even a top end) does not a scale make.
You can’t just keep shifting the goal posts every time someone responds to you.
Australia drives on the left. The cost? Well, most countries are on the right so our cars are a bit unusual, carmakers have to make two versions. Fortunately Japan and Britian are still lefties, so plenty of leftsided cars are made.
But now we’re getting to this stage where everything is Metric, except stuff from the USA. You guys are becoming a nuisance.
I agree with you 0x64 %!
As I’ve already said, the 0 to 100 range of the Fahrenheit scale, quite well encompasses the normal temperature range of where the vast majority of humans live.
Zero is pretty darn cold, and 100 is pretty darn hot, and most of live
somewhere in the middle, most of the time. There is simply nothing
remotely like that in the metric world. Celsius is fine for scientific
purposes, but for reporting the weather Fahrenheit is better (and it has
superior granularity for that purpose).
I wonder how much longer this will be true for. Sweden swapped over easily enough in the 60s, so I understand.
But does anyone who uses Celsius for reporting the weather have any issues with using it? It’s certainly good enough.
Now we’ve gone of the deep end. Oh well, my point is made. 
Below 0 means ice or snow. A very simple indicator right there in the number.
0 = Icy.
10 = cold
20 = mild
30 = hot
40 = evil hot
50 = you’re somewhere in the Sahara desert and you will probably die.
I’m sure Canadians can explain -10, - 20. I’ve never experienced them.
There. Centigrade explained.
Well yes, if the US went to metric, the dimensions of dimensional lumber would probably shift as well. 4 x 9 cm maybe?
For all that Canada is nominally using the metric system, our dimensional lumber is the same as the US, because so much of it is imported / exported.
I don’t see it ending any time soon, simply because all 3 are islands and don’t have much in the way of international traffic.
A general-purpose system of measurement doesn’t succeed or fail based on which specific cases yield round numbers. So water freezes at zero, or a daisy has a diameter of one; who cares? The purpose of measurements is to convey quantities that aren’t familiar, and won’t have a convenient value.
A system is good or bad based on how it works as a system, and the advantage of SI in that sense is that units are very easy to compare. Not just the lengths of buildings and insects, but also, say, the energy of a bullet and the mass of an apple (1 joule is 1kgm2s-2, so it’s the energy required to lift a 100g apple 10m, and so on). In science and engineering, this argument is long dead: US units are far worse than SI units.
But for everyday life (including everyday engineering, like carpentry), there is something to be said for how archaic systems work. Inches, feet and yards have what you might call a cognitive geography; inches measure different things than feet or miles do, whereas 300mm and 30cm are just the same number. It’s hard to put across exactly but, as someone who’s used to working in metric, on occasions when I’ve had to design stuff in feet and inches, there’s a kind of rustic pleasingness to the experience. The dimensions of a room even look different to those of a doorknob-- 24’ versus 27/16". You get a visceral sense of scale and precision just from the numbers.
So I say, use colloquial units for art and metric for calculation. It’s not like you can’t have both; the UK is metric, but everyone thinks of beer and milk in pints, and asks for timber in inches (people will go to the hardware store and ask for, like, 1.4m of 2x4). Also the UK still uses miles for road signage, for some reason.
They went around BC measuring “pints” and most were between 12oz(british bottle) and 16oz (a sleeve), but there is also a reason for that. Canada uses the Imperial pint which is 20oz, but the law says no single serving of beer can be larger then 17.5oz, hence it is illegal to serve a true pint (at least that is the law in BC).
Of course you can order a pitcher and 2 glasses…even if it is just you at the table…lol. laws eh?
Yeah but where’s the granularity!?!
As a temperate climate dweller I don’t understand the quibbling over Fahrenheit being ‘more precise’ for “human ranges” because honestly even Celsius offers more than enough precision for what is essentially a 5-point scale for how shit the day will be: “below ten”; “teens”; “low twenties”; “twenty-five to thirty-five”; “above thirty-five jesus fuck this”.
What’s that in shitloads?
Several.
Not so long ago, the local Bingham Copper Mine had a landslide that was the largest ever caused by man.
I reckon that was roughly Twenty KiloShitloads.
Edited for link and clarity
