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> I personally find Fahrenheit more intuitive when discussing outdoor/environment temperatures. I personally find Celsius more intuitive when discussing outdoo

> I personally find Fahrenheit more intuitive when discussing outdoor/environment temperatures. I personally find Celsius more intuitive when discussing outdoor/environment temperatures, because that's what I grew up with. Seriously, don't try to invent reasons why Fahrenheit might be more intuitive than Celsius, it's not. Neither is superior, no matter who you ask the more "intuitive" will always be the one a person grew up with. I just wish the whole world would use a single scale because that's less confusing. And here the argument is on the Celsius side because only a small minority of people in the world (<5%) use Fahrenheit.

garmaine 8y ago
Quite the contrary, imperial units and scales were selected because of human factors and expectation of user experience. If you care about such things, there are objective reasons to say imperial units are "better" than SI units. Units of length on the order of a finger-width (inch), foot-length, or stride or arms-width (meter), or area that could be plowed in one day (acre). You don't need special calibrated tools to measure/estimate these. Units of volume are based on successive halvings (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc.) because all you need is two identical cups to split a liquid to be the same level in each--works for non-liquid volumes too, if you measure them by submersing in equal volumes of liquid. The unit of mass -- pound -- is similarly split into 16 ounces because the pound originated as a measurement for silver, and a simple balance could be used to split 1 lb silver into 8 oz, 4 oz, 2 oz, 1 oz, or smaller, and then be combined to make change. Units of temperature have integer gradations approximately equal to what sensitive skin of the human body can discern in the atmosphere--I can feel the difference between 70 and 71, but not 70.0 and 70.5--and a nice even value for the normal temperature of the human body (above 100F, you have a fever). Arguably the boiling point of water is more important these days, but only since the rise of steam power and other industrial things that get very hot. What system would I rather use, if I were hypothetically not already accustomed to one? Well imperial has clearly better optimized user experience, even if some parts have aged with technological change less well than others. It co-evolved with pre-industrial human societies but is still well matched to the day to day environment we find ourselves in, even today, in the produce aisle of a grocery store, in the kitchen, in estimating the weight or size of things we might pick up, etc. Example: when I open a recipe and it says "3 cups of flour and 2 tablespoons of baking soda, 1 teaspoon of salt" then I don't need any special measuring cups or scales to make this recipe--I can make do with stuff lying about the kitchen--it's in the names! Take something that looks like a average-sized drinking cup or mug and fill it with flour three times, take an eating spoon and fill it twice with baking soda, and take a drink-mixing spoon and make one scoop of salt. Alternatively how am I supposed to interpret 0.75 kg flour, 30 mL baking soda, and 5 g salt? Either I've cooked and measured enough to have an intuition for such things, or I'd better have calibrated tools available. What do you get in return for using the not-so-human-scale SI units? Nice powers of 10? No one was ever stopping you from talking about mega-pounds or micro-inches, so long as you're consistent on lbs vs oz and ft vs in. Imperial units aren't any different in this regard from saying "2 hours" in an SI context and people knowing to multiply by 3600s/hr to get the official unit At the end of the day I prefer SI for the same reason I prefer English--as a global standard because it is the standard, even though it is actually pretty terrible. It's a bit like Qwerty vs Dvorak/Colemak/Workman, except the decision isn't a personal choice. I do wish the French had decided things differently some 225 years ago though.
- willyt 8y ago
  I remember my grandfather complaining about mm, but he then went on to tell me a story about how he was surveying a medieval building with his assistant with an old tape measure and they were getting all sorts of awkward dimensions, when the assistant noticed that the dimensions on the other side of the tape were all nice round numbers... in cubits![0] His point was that there would have been a time when all the builders were complaining about stupid feet and inches and how fiddly they were and what's wrong with cubits. [0] I'm struggling to remember what they were I thought I remembered cubits but I'm not sure why you would find those on a tape in the 1940's. Anyway, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
- dandellion 8y ago
  If imperial units are so human friendly, why do I have to look them up every time I need to convert between them? I do it occasionally and pretty much the only one I remember is 1 feet = 12 inches. I think the parent is right that it has mostly to do with what you are used to.
- didgeoridoo 8y ago
  I’ve always explained this as “imperial has better UX; metric has a better API.”
- Symbiote 8y ago
  My fingers are closer to 1cm than 1in. You already chose the metre as a good length, and the speed of ploughing a field (with an ox?) could not be less relevant to me. Your volume measure has no convenient relation to a length³ measure. I can tell you the volume of this room in litres very easily given the dimensions, but "1 cubic foot = 576/77 US fluid gallons". "There is not a single agreed-upon upper limit for normal temperature with sources using values between 37.5 and 38.3 °C (99.5 and 100.9 °F)" (Wikipedia.) You've made a false equivalence of your recipe. We can write "2dL flour" and so on, although flour in particular can have varying densities, so results are much more consistent when weighing. My British grandmother's recipes say things like "8oz flour" and were always weighed. I can do halving and so on with metric or arbitrary tools (this glass/stick) when necessary, and can expect to have appropriate measuring tools available when I need them. So, since I'm not living in the 16th century, I don't see any benefit to the old units.

garmaine 8y ago

Quite the contrary, imperial units and scales were selected because of human factors and expectation of user experience. If you care about such things, there are objective reasons to say imperial units are "better" than SI units. Units of length on the order of a finger-width (inch), foot-length, or stride or arms-width (meter), or area that could be plowed in one day (acre). You don't need special calibrated tools to measure/estimate these. Units of volume are based on successive halvings (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc.) because all you need is two identical cups to split a liquid to be the same level in each--works for non-liquid volumes too, if you measure them by submersing in equal volumes of liquid. The unit of mass -- pound -- is similarly split into 16 ounces because the pound originated as a measurement for silver, and a simple balance could be used to split 1 lb silver into 8 oz, 4 oz, 2 oz, 1 oz, or smaller, and then be combined to make change. Units of temperature have integer gradations approximately equal to what sensitive skin of the human body can discern in the atmosphere--I can feel the difference between 70 and 71, but not 70.0 and 70.5--and a nice even value for the normal temperature of the human body (above 100F, you have a fever). Arguably the boiling point of water is more important these days, but only since the rise of steam power and other industrial things that get very hot. What system would I rather use, if I were hypothetically not already accustomed to one? Well imperial has clearly better optimized user experience, even if some parts have aged with technological change less well than others. It co-evolved with pre-industrial human societies but is still well matched to the day to day environment we find ourselves in, even today, in the produce aisle of a grocery store, in the kitchen, in estimating the weight or size of things we might pick up, etc. Example: when I open a recipe and it says "3 cups of flour and 2 tablespoons of baking soda, 1 teaspoon of salt" then I don't need any special measuring cups or scales to make this recipe--I can make do with stuff lying about the kitchen--it's in the names! Take something that looks like a average-sized drinking cup or mug and fill it with flour three times, take an eating spoon and fill it twice with baking soda, and take a drink-mixing spoon and make one scoop of salt. Alternatively how am I supposed to interpret 0.75 kg flour, 30 mL baking soda, and 5 g salt? Either I've cooked and measured enough to have an intuition for such things, or I'd better have calibrated tools available. What do you get in return for using the not-so-human-scale SI units? Nice powers of 10? No one was ever stopping you from talking about mega-pounds or micro-inches, so long as you're consistent on lbs vs oz and ft vs in. Imperial units aren't any different in this regard from saying "2 hours" in an SI context and people knowing to multiply by 3600s/hr to get the official unit At the end of the day I prefer SI for the same reason I prefer English--as a global standard because it is the standard, even though it is actually pretty terrible. It's a bit like Qwerty vs Dvorak/Colemak/Workman, except the decision isn't a personal choice. I do wish the French had decided things differently some 225 years ago though.

willyt 8y ago
I remember my grandfather complaining about mm, but he then went on to tell me a story about how he was surveying a medieval building with his assistant with an old tape measure and they were getting all sorts of awkward dimensions, when the assistant noticed that the dimensions on the other side of the tape were all nice round numbers... in cubits![0] His point was that there would have been a time when all the builders were complaining about stupid feet and inches and how fiddly they were and what's wrong with cubits. [0] I'm struggling to remember what they were I thought I remembered cubits but I'm not sure why you would find those on a tape in the 1940's. Anyway, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
dandellion 8y ago
If imperial units are so human friendly, why do I have to look them up every time I need to convert between them? I do it occasionally and pretty much the only one I remember is 1 feet = 12 inches. I think the parent is right that it has mostly to do with what you are used to.
didgeoridoo 8y ago
I’ve always explained this as “imperial has better UX; metric has a better API.”
Symbiote 8y ago
My fingers are closer to 1cm than 1in. You already chose the metre as a good length, and the speed of ploughing a field (with an ox?) could not be less relevant to me. Your volume measure has no convenient relation to a length³ measure. I can tell you the volume of this room in litres very easily given the dimensions, but "1 cubic foot = 576/77 US fluid gallons". "There is not a single agreed-upon upper limit for normal temperature with sources using values between 37.5 and 38.3 °C (99.5 and 100.9 °F)" (Wikipedia.) You've made a false equivalence of your recipe. We can write "2dL flour" and so on, although flour in particular can have varying densities, so results are much more consistent when weighing. My British grandmother's recipes say things like "8oz flour" and were always weighed. I can do halving and so on with metric or arbitrary tools (this glass/stick) when necessary, and can expect to have appropriate measuring tools available when I need them. So, since I'm not living in the 16th century, I don't see any benefit to the old units.