I think this summer is the first one in three or four years that we’ve gone above 100. There was that nasty “heat dome” over the Midwest last month though… and we were on the far edge of it. I saw some of the highs for Kansas City this summer and just cringed.
I’ve seen snow that lasted more than a few days three times in 31 years in Ireland., and I think I might have had 2 days over 30c ever.
I HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR SUNLIGHT
Well keep in mind that Chicago is south in latitude from Rome, so…
Fahrenheit is awful. Really what % of American’s can even spell it correctly. Celsius is just granular enough that degrees make a difference, and half-degrees or fractions are still measurable if you want to be precise. Even more so, common temperatures land nicely on round numbers - 0 degrees, 20 (room temperature), 30 (hot day) and so on.
There’s no reasonable justification for F based on granularity or on endpoints. Come on. You can barely feel the difference between 1 and 1.8 degrees of delta F. And our milestones of “meaning” for F are the same milestones with different numbers that everyone else in the world has for C.
So do you pronounce it “gif” or “jif”?
If you even need to ask…
Tim’s view of metric vs imperial is very much the way I’ve always seen it.
Metric is much better for sciences and very large/small things. Imperial is much handier for day to day stuff in most cases. Celsius is pretty shit for weather.
I don’t understand that. How is Celsius back for weather? 30 hot, 20 good, 10 cool 0 or below, cold. And no one needs to boil any blood.
The scale is too small. There is no granularity to it.
Humans don’t live in temps that involve liquids boiling, having a scale based off that doesn’t really make sense. There are a lot of varying degrees of habitability that Celsius just glosses over for the most part. Plus everything is in the 10-20’s. Like everything.
It feels like using miles to measure floorspace. You can do it, but it’s kind of stupid, even if still technically just as accurate as long as you don’t mind using a lot of decimals.
Come on. It’s 1.8:1. This is not a huge difference in granularity. Do you really care about the difference between 74 F and 75 F if you’re not doing something scientific?
When I take my car, it’s nice to know at a glance if there’s danger of thick ice in the road. 0 Celsius is really easy to parse.
This makes no objective sense. I suspect your statement is based purely on personal familiarity.
Not only is it 1.8:1, but also:
- we are allowed to use decimals with Celsius measurements, if we want greater granularity
- the perceived temperature varies quite a lot depending on wind speed and humidity
I’m with the Imperials. Metric system is great for scientific and industrial applications, but almost nothing in my day-to-day ever needs to be scaled by a power of ten. And that’s pretty much the only advantage of metric.
I am particularly amused by the defense of Celsius. If you were designing a base-10 scale of mean terrestrial air temperature, it would look a lot like Fahrenheit. 0 is pretty close to the coldest air temperature non-Chicagoans will experience, and 100 is pretty close to the hottest. That’s metric!
But instead, Celsius is based on the transition points of water, which is mostly useless to me.
Ah, but you say: 0 is merely “close” to the coldest mean terrestrial air temperature one encounters, which is unacceptably arbitrary! With Celsius, you are guaranteed the satisfaction that zero is exactly the melting point of that pure H20 sample we all have lying around. Bad news: the melting point of H20 is actually slightly higher than 0, and the boiling point is slightly less than 100. So you can’t even justify Celsius based on intellectual smugness.
As for volumes: Divide by a cup by 3. No problem, I have teaspoon and tablespoon measures in my cabinet and can do it precisely. Try to do that in metric for nearly any measure, and you’ll need to get a digital scale.
Not really, it’s origins are day to day crap. The length of a fence post, how much flour to use, that sort of thing.
Metric tends towards things like the heat of a star, the melting points of things, very small and precise amounts of chemicals and the like.
There is a reason the British, having exposure to both systems, tend to use it that way.
I trained as a quantity surveyor so I’m not going to support anything other than the international standard for measurement and the old farts and Colonel Blimps pushing this and other post Brexit nonsense in the media are horrible old reactionary dinosaurs.
Imperial is hopeless. And yes, even for every day applications. Everything works so neatly, especially length to volume to area etc
Stupid question:
Don’t spoons and cups come in differing sizes? Whats the volume difference between a mug and a cup? Or has all creative expression in kitchen utensils been normalized to conform to standard measurements?
is it a heaped table spoon or a flat one?
That just all seems bizarre and illogical to me.
The whole celsius vs fahrenheit is less a matter of function and more a matter of what you are used to. Like it has been said upthread, the easy awareness of the freezing point when driving, makes celsius more practical. Otherwise I doubt the larger scale of Fahrenheit is really necessary, but I reckon that might be easier to get used to than changing to feet and cups.
According to Wikipedia, this depends on whether you use a US customary, US legal, Imperial, Canadian, Japanese, or metric cup. Of course, most recipes don’t mention which one they’re using, so using them in the first place seems pointless to me.