3 ms·

Or we can stop using freedom units and join the rest of the world. Take a small step to make this happen right now: set your phone and thermostat to show you th

Or we can stop using freedom units and join the rest of the world. Take a small step to make this happen right now: set your phone and thermostat to show you the temperature in Celsius. I did this and my kids are growing up with an intuitive understanding of what 20 degrees C feels like.

duckymcduckface 7y ago
You got them on meters and liters as well?
- IgorPartola 7y ago
  Liters don’t come up much and those are going to be a lot harder given that every gas station is in gallons only. Meters no, centimeters yes. They are 6 so they mostly measure small stuff. I use grams for cooking too. Who thought that “1 cup of cheese” was a reasonable measurement?
  - kortilla 7y ago
    >Who thought that “1 cup of cheese” was a reasonable measurement?, It’s easier to use a 1 cup scoop to grab something quickly than it is to weigh something out.
    - rat9988 7y ago
      Which cup?
      - IgorPartola 7y ago
        In case you are not from the US, an official freedom unit of volume is a cup which equals 8 fluid ounces (not the same as ounces which are a unit of weight; yeah it really is that dumb). Almost all cooking recipes use teaspoons (5ml), tablespoons (15 ml), or fractions of a cup (1 fluid oz, 29 ml or so), including for measuring things like cheese, herbs, pasta, etc. No American recipe website will ever say “use 200 grams of butter), it will tell you how many cups of butter to use.
        walshemj 7y ago
        And American Fluid Oz are not the same as real Imperial Fluid Oz which is another difference to work with.
        jsmith99 7y ago
        Or how many sticks of margarine, according to their favourite margarine brand.
brownbat 7y ago
I want to be careful, this could get holy war-ish... So I do not want to sell anyone on changing their view. This isn't advocacy. But just want to provide one illustration of why someone may prefer Fahrenheit. When I travel, hotel rooms generally let me alter the temperature on digital thermostats by one degree. In the US, that's great, that's plenty of precision. In Europe, I lose fidelity and am strictly worse off. If people like a room set at 71 degrees, they don't like 72 or 70. If they like it at 75, they aren't secretly shooting for 76. When I'm cooking in an oven or sous vide, I often want to tweak controls very precisely in an attempt to balance the carmelization of sugars or the rendering of fats while leaving proteins or starches intact. Room temps, weather, and cooking are the ways I mainly interact with these scales. In each of them, the precision of the base unit in F is strictly advantageous to me. Celsius can absolutely allow greater granularity, if everyone used an extra significant digit as a rule. I blame psychology though, people and systems often just don't bother to think that way. I wholly support the metric system to unify measurement across different scales. That's neat. But as I rarely need to talk about millidegrees or gigadegrees, it seems less relevant to me in this context.
- stephen_g 7y ago
  To somebody who lives in one of the few hundred countries that uses Celsius, this just seems like a non-problem... While a lot of air conditioners adjust in single degree steps, plenty exist that go up or down in half degrees. A sous vide would probably adjust with a single decimal point. Digital thermometers basically also always do also. My weather app says it’s 16.1 degrees C outside right now... Easy... Your comment about psychology is actually just you mistaking familiarity with your temperature system with something more universal. In countries where we use metric/Celsius, we find decimals super easy to think in because we’re used to doing it!
- twic 7y ago
  The user interfaces let you input temperatures with more precision. But i would be astounded if the thermostats actually regulated the temperatures with that much accuracy. Have you tried measuring the temperatures actually attained?
- IgorPartola 7y ago
mikeash 7y ago
I did this years ago and it hasn’t worked yet.
droithomme 7y ago
I don't find the range of temperatures of distilled water at sea level from freezing to boiling particularly useful for thinking about the weather. A more arbitrary scale like F works just as well maybe even better since 100F is too hot. However 0 as the temperature your seedlings will freeze is useful so C has that going for it.

duckymcduckface 7y ago

You got them on meters and liters as well?

IgorPartola 7y ago
Liters don’t come up much and those are going to be a lot harder given that every gas station is in gallons only. Meters no, centimeters yes. They are 6 so they mostly measure small stuff. I use grams for cooking too. Who thought that “1 cup of cheese” was a reasonable measurement?
- kortilla 7y ago
  >Who thought that “1 cup of cheese” was a reasonable measurement?, It’s easier to use a 1 cup scoop to grab something quickly than it is to weigh something out.
  - rat9988 7y ago
    Which cup?
    - IgorPartola 7y ago
      In case you are not from the US, an official freedom unit of volume is a cup which equals 8 fluid ounces (not the same as ounces which are a unit of weight; yeah it really is that dumb). Almost all cooking recipes use teaspoons (5ml), tablespoons (15 ml), or fractions of a cup (1 fluid oz, 29 ml or so), including for measuring things like cheese, herbs, pasta, etc. No American recipe website will ever say “use 200 grams of butter), it will tell you how many cups of butter to use.
      - walshemj 7y ago
        And American Fluid Oz are not the same as real Imperial Fluid Oz which is another difference to work with.
      - jsmith99 7y ago
        Or how many sticks of margarine, according to their favourite margarine brand.

brownbat 7y ago

I want to be careful, this could get holy war-ish... So I do not want to sell anyone on changing their view. This isn't advocacy. But just want to provide one illustration of why someone may prefer Fahrenheit. When I travel, hotel rooms generally let me alter the temperature on digital thermostats by one degree. In the US, that's great, that's plenty of precision. In Europe, I lose fidelity and am strictly worse off. If people like a room set at 71 degrees, they don't like 72 or 70. If they like it at 75, they aren't secretly shooting for 76. When I'm cooking in an oven or sous vide, I often want to tweak controls very precisely in an attempt to balance the carmelization of sugars or the rendering of fats while leaving proteins or starches intact. Room temps, weather, and cooking are the ways I mainly interact with these scales. In each of them, the precision of the base unit in F is strictly advantageous to me. Celsius can absolutely allow greater granularity, if everyone used an extra significant digit as a rule. I blame psychology though, people and systems often just don't bother to think that way. I wholly support the metric system to unify measurement across different scales. That's neat. But as I rarely need to talk about millidegrees or gigadegrees, it seems less relevant to me in this context.

stephen_g 7y ago
To somebody who lives in one of the few hundred countries that uses Celsius, this just seems like a non-problem... While a lot of air conditioners adjust in single degree steps, plenty exist that go up or down in half degrees. A sous vide would probably adjust with a single decimal point. Digital thermometers basically also always do also. My weather app says it’s 16.1 degrees C outside right now... Easy... Your comment about psychology is actually just you mistaking familiarity with your temperature system with something more universal. In countries where we use metric/Celsius, we find decimals super easy to think in because we’re used to doing it!
twic 7y ago
The user interfaces let you input temperatures with more precision. But i would be astounded if the thermostats actually regulated the temperatures with that much accuracy. Have you tried measuring the temperatures actually attained?
IgorPartola 7y ago

mikeash 7y ago

I did this years ago and it hasn’t worked yet.

droithomme 7y ago

I don't find the range of temperatures of distilled water at sea level from freezing to boiling particularly useful for thinking about the weather. A more arbitrary scale like F works just as well maybe even better since 100F is too hot. However 0 as the temperature your seedlings will freeze is useful so C has that going for it.