5 ms·

Edit, ignore the following: Worst was where they switched without even mentioning it. One paragraph they're still using F and said "The lowest recorded core te

by corin_ 14y ago

Edit, ignore the following: Worst was where they switched without even mentioning it. One paragraph they're still using F and said "The lowest recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60.8 degrees.", then the very next paragraph, with no talk of changing units, they talked about people dying "though temperatures never fell below freezing and ranged as high as 45". Just because the second story happened in England..?

Locke1689 14y ago
That's still 45 degrees Fahrenheit. They were talking about outside temperature, not core temperature. I'm also questioning if you have a sense of either temperature scale. It's quite funny to think that it could reach 45 C in England at all, much less that people would freeze to death in it.
- corin_ 14y ago
  My bad, of course you're right. And no, not a great sense of temperature scales - in the UK I pay attention when it's down around freezing (in Celsius) and in LA I pay attention when it's hot, 100+ in Fahrenheit. Other than those two occasions I guess I don't really notice or care. Edit: funnily enough, 45C turns out to be the hottest temperature I've personally experienced, the day LA set it's record high in September 2010.
  - pyre 14y ago
    Easiest way to do off-the-cuff conversions: - Celsius scale is based on water freezing at 0C and boiling at 100C. That's 32F and 212F, respectively. - 45C is about halfway between 0C and 100C, so it's about halfway between 32F and 212F. - Normal body temp 98.7F or 36C. - Also -40C == -40F. I looked this up once because I was out on a day that where the wind chill was -40F. I thought that I did something wrong when the conversion came out exactly the same. ;-)
    - mikeash 14y ago
      F = C * 2 + 30 Gets you to within a couple of degrees for commonly experienced temperatures, plenty close enough for most purposes. 45C ~= 120F. The true value is 113F.
justincormack 14y ago
No worst was mentioning absolute zero in Fahrenheit...
UnFleshedOne 14y ago
They do use kilocalorie that is defined with degrees of celsius though. It isn't as bad here, but unit mixing is extremely annoying in aviation books in canada. In the same chapter of "From The Ground Up" you can see nautical miles, statutory miles, multiples of thousands of feet for height (took me a while to realize a mile is not a multiple of 1000 feet, wtf?), degrees of celsius, pounds, kilograms, kilopascals, millimeters of mercury and so on. At least I haven't seen degrees of fahrenheit anywhere...
- funkaster 14y ago
  I also find it completely strange that here in the US people tend to use feet as a sub-division of miles, but the mile/foot relation is not trivial: 1 mile == 5280 feet. And why would you need so many units for length? mile, yard, feet, inch... All (apparently) unrelated. The metric system on the other hand, is so elegant and simple. Only one unit: meter.
  - jeremycole 14y ago
    They are related, just in somewhat strange ways. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Roman_mile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Roman_mile
  - LnxPrgr3 14y ago
    Growing up in the US, we're exposed to these units our entire lives. End result? When my GPS tells me to turn right in a quarter mile, I can eyeball that distance. If it told me to turn in 400 meters, it'd make me pause a bit. When I buy a gallon of gas, I know what I can expect to get from it. I know roughly how much a gallon is and how much a liter is, but I'd have to do math to tell you how far my car will go on a liter of gas. Don't even ask me me how many liters I need to travel 100 km… It doesn't help that gasoline is sold only by the gallon, fuel efficiency is given in miles per gallon, speed limits are in miles per hour, and mile markers give our position on our highways and number our exits. Non-SI units are burned into our brains and our infrastructure all over the place. Grow up in that world, and the awkward math doesn't seem all that bad compared to having to get your bearings in a whole new system. (That's not to say we shouldn't be switching to metric… but there are definite downsides for a population so used to our strange way of doing things.) Besides, these length units do have integer relationships with each other: 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, and 1760 yards to a mile. I find the first two easy to remember, and the third easy enough to calculate by remembering that one mile is 5280 feet. But a yard is 0.9144 meters, making a foot 30.48 cm and a mile ~1609 m. Math within metric is easy. Math within our silly units is slightly more complicated, but we get used to it. Conversion between the systems is messy.

by corin_ 14y ago

Locke1689 14y ago

That's still 45 degrees Fahrenheit. They were talking about outside temperature, not core temperature. I'm also questioning if you have a sense of either temperature scale. It's quite funny to think that it could reach 45 C in England at all, much less that people would freeze to death in it.

corin_ 14y ago
My bad, of course you're right. And no, not a great sense of temperature scales - in the UK I pay attention when it's down around freezing (in Celsius) and in LA I pay attention when it's hot, 100+ in Fahrenheit. Other than those two occasions I guess I don't really notice or care. Edit: funnily enough, 45C turns out to be the hottest temperature I've personally experienced, the day LA set it's record high in September 2010.
- pyre 14y ago
  Easiest way to do off-the-cuff conversions: - Celsius scale is based on water freezing at 0C and boiling at 100C. That's 32F and 212F, respectively. - 45C is about halfway between 0C and 100C, so it's about halfway between 32F and 212F. - Normal body temp 98.7F or 36C. - Also -40C == -40F. I looked this up once because I was out on a day that where the wind chill was -40F. I thought that I did something wrong when the conversion came out exactly the same. ;-)
  - mikeash 14y ago
    F = C * 2 + 30 Gets you to within a couple of degrees for commonly experienced temperatures, plenty close enough for most purposes. 45C ~= 120F. The true value is 113F.

justincormack 14y ago

No worst was mentioning absolute zero in Fahrenheit...

UnFleshedOne 14y ago

They do use kilocalorie that is defined with degrees of celsius though. It isn't as bad here, but unit mixing is extremely annoying in aviation books in canada. In the same chapter of "From The Ground Up" you can see nautical miles, statutory miles, multiples of thousands of feet for height (took me a while to realize a mile is not a multiple of 1000 feet, wtf?), degrees of celsius, pounds, kilograms, kilopascals, millimeters of mercury and so on. At least I haven't seen degrees of fahrenheit anywhere...

funkaster 14y ago
I also find it completely strange that here in the US people tend to use feet as a sub-division of miles, but the mile/foot relation is not trivial: 1 mile == 5280 feet. And why would you need so many units for length? mile, yard, feet, inch... All (apparently) unrelated. The metric system on the other hand, is so elegant and simple. Only one unit: meter.
- jeremycole 14y ago
  They are related, just in somewhat strange ways. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Roman_mile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Roman_mile
- LnxPrgr3 14y ago
  Growing up in the US, we're exposed to these units our entire lives. End result? When my GPS tells me to turn right in a quarter mile, I can eyeball that distance. If it told me to turn in 400 meters, it'd make me pause a bit. When I buy a gallon of gas, I know what I can expect to get from it. I know roughly how much a gallon is and how much a liter is, but I'd have to do math to tell you how far my car will go on a liter of gas. Don't even ask me me how many liters I need to travel 100 km… It doesn't help that gasoline is sold only by the gallon, fuel efficiency is given in miles per gallon, speed limits are in miles per hour, and mile markers give our position on our highways and number our exits. Non-SI units are burned into our brains and our infrastructure all over the place. Grow up in that world, and the awkward math doesn't seem all that bad compared to having to get your bearings in a whole new system. (That's not to say we shouldn't be switching to metric… but there are definite downsides for a population so used to our strange way of doing things.) Besides, these length units do have integer relationships with each other: 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, and 1760 yards to a mile. I find the first two easy to remember, and the third easy enough to calculate by remembering that one mile is 5280 feet. But a yard is 0.9144 meters, making a foot 30.48 cm and a mile ~1609 m. Math within metric is easy. Math within our silly units is slightly more complicated, but we get used to it. Conversion between the systems is messy.