I say this as an American, by the way. We need to stop defending our archaic system. It just makes us look dumb. Literally the entire rest of the world has moved on, and is just laughing at us.
But we're digressing now and this comments section isn't about us not getting on board with SI.
[1] Note that I'm talking about the scale used during conversation, generally about ambient temperature (weather). The usual advantage of using the same scale for science and conversation isn't particularly relevant the way it is with, say, meters vs feet. Reckoning ambient temperature is not useful at all for the kinds of temperature-measurement you do in a lab.
Fahrenheit is used for weather, and in fact, even "metric countries" have been known to use it.
Sorry but this is just wishful thinking.
But I'd delete my comment, it's been downvoted ad nauseuem because people are insulted by the idea Fahrenheit might be convince to, this is the kind of hive mind behavior I'd expect on Reddit vs HN
Also, how old were these people you were interacting with? The UK switched to SI quite recently, well within the lifetimes of many living people.
Name few/any?
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Even though I do remember the formula C=5/9*(F-32), Fahrenheit has never felt convenient or range non-arbitrary.
Zero being the freezing point in Celsius is a lot more important when it comes to weather conditions (provided the autumn/winters are cold enough where you live) - icy roads, clearing/scrapping windshields, skiing, etc. The boiling point is nothing to scoff at even when it comes to simple cooking.
To be honest, I think Fahrenheit is a more useful scale for typical weather temperatures.
For science, sure, °C is nice, but for common day to day use, which is the majority of temperature use, °C is senseless. I do not freeze at 0°C, I live in Minnesota and that is shorts weather. I do not boil at 100°C, I'd have been dead for a while. It's useless. Fahrenheit is much better at representing everyday life, the range in which I can be comfortable, below 0 or above 100 I'm better off staying in doors.
Also, don't forget that temperature is important for a lot more than just the air temperature. It's also used in cooking, where the boiling temperature of water matters a lot. Every morning I heat water to 98C to make coffee, or 85C to make green tea.
In Fahrenheit the entire "scale" is useful to describe weather. If I turned a knob that set the temperature of a room to 0% rotation, or 0 degrees, the room would be cold. If I set the knob to 100% rotation, or 100 degrees the room will be hot.
In Celcius the scale is arbitrarily cut off at 40. The resolution that you can represent a temperature at is severely limited if you don't have a decimal point.
I don't know anyone who went to school in the US and didn't learn SI units. Science in the US uses SI units. Fahrenheit is just a very convenient way to express weather on a 0% to 100% scale.
>Literally the entire rest of the world has moved on, and is just laughing at us.
Maybe young kids with nothing better to do on the internet. As an American born outside of the US who's traveled a lot, one thing people tend to agree on is Fahrenheit is very convenient for weather.
The parent post of all of this is provocative nonsense (I mean really, apparently this person doesn't know that we can do instant bank transfers, and fails to understand that sales tax isn't a constant across states and even county lines in some places)
>And why should we have different scales for weather versus other common things like cooking?
Because it's not (currently) useful to measure weather on the planet we call "Earth" relative to the boiling point of water.
If/when the ambient temperature starts to move in a direction where it does scale from the freezing point of water to the boiling point of water, we'll have much bigger issues than worrying about what units we're measuring weather in.
And I would contend that it's much worse to have two separate temperature scales, one for weather and one for everything else (including cooking), than to just use one for everything. People who grow up with Celcius have no problem whatsoever using it for weather. It makes total sense. Once you've used it exclusively for a month, it'll make total sense to you too. I promise. I frequently run into people who forget that water freezes at 32 and boils at 212. It's much harder to forget the numbers 0 and 100.
You're building the strawman argument that the only reason people use Fahrenheit is the cognitive load of switching then tearing it down.
Frankly it's a bit condescending.. (oh you don't really want to use Fahrenheit, you're just too lazy not to, don't worry it's easy to switch!)
And it's false, as evidenced by people in England and other countries I've visited who still refer to weather in Fahrenheit at times.
It really is the more expressive scale for weather, and even people who don't use it and despise Imperial units are usually up front in at least admitting it as such.
People don't usually need to remember when water boils or freezes when thinking about weather, or even cooking since cooking occurs at temperatures both well above and just below boiling. They know around 0 degrees it can snow and around 100 degrees they might get heat stroke if they're not careful.
I'm also somewhat amazed that no one has brought up Kelvin (my one true love) in this discussion yet. But that's my astronomy background talking. Black body radiation is a total mess unless you use an absolute temperature scale in the equation, for example.
I don't think anyone in India uses or even understands Fahrenheit.
100 is just as arbitrary.
> one thing people tend to agree on is Fahrenheit is very convenient for weather.
I've traveled a lot too, and not once have I heard that. But that is just as anedoctal as your claim. What is not anedoctal, is that weather reports outside of US almost exclusively use celcius.
Look up the original definition of the meter, kilometer, etc. "The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. In 1799, it was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar (the actual bar used was changed in 1889 and 1927). In 1960, the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. In 1983, the current definition was adopted."
How is something that is based on the then calculated distance from the equator to the north pole. Why do I say calculated? Well, because: "One of the earliest expeditions to set out with the explicit intention of reaching the North Pole was that of British naval officer William Edward Parry, who in 1827" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole#Pre-1900... No one had been there yet. So they didn't lay a tape measure down. You couldn't actually even do that. And the earth isn't even flat anywhere so you're measuring an idealized object. Even more arbitrary.
But ignore that... ITS BASED ON THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE EARTH... how is that NOT arbitrary? Well it is. That's why all of the new definitions of metric things are being redefined to be as close to absolute constants as they can be: "The metre is defined as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 seconds."
But that's still really arbitrary because it comes from the circumference of the earth.
And your boiling point and freezing points are also arbitrary because it depends on the altitude you live at. Sure it's at sea level for these numbers... but who lives at sea level? http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9162438 looks like 1/3rd to 1/2 (max). Maybe way less.
So the Fahrenheit argument is "the numbers that are generally useful to people for air temperature are those that exist in human inhabited or are generally hospitable", eg 0 (pretty cold) to (100) pretty hot with specialized areas knowing more about their end of the spectrum (minnesota, riyadh).
Your celsius argument means is that you care about temperatures over 100 (or 140) F up to 212F, or 37.7778 C up to 100C. I really doubt you care actually. You could just have a gague labelled "beef, pork, chicken, black tea, green tea, boiling" and be totally fine. Actually boiling doesn't even matter, it's pretty obivious when things are boiling and since it's a state change it's a very stable temperature.
It's valid that it would make things easier if the US was on the metric system. It would be valid to say that india shouldn't go 30 minutes off of the hour to have a solo time zone, because that makes time zones easier, same for indiana (if they still do that).
But don't pretend the metric measurements are any less arbitrary than the imperial ones. That's a very earth centric point of view. We should be on galactic measurements by now. You should see how much news.zcombinator.g out at alpha centauri is complaining about the metric system.
Some are less arbitrary, such as the Celcius.
But the most important aspect of SI units is that they form a system which is coherent _together_, and makes it easy to convert/calculate with.
The multiples of ten, divide by ten is a very nice feature. But if you think about it, base 10 is still arbitrary and human centric. It's based on the fact that we have 10 fingers. Not some universal constant.
That's a little less arbitrary than fractions of the circumference of the earth, or the coldest temperature in Danzig in winter 1708/9. (Weather ranges and human temperature preferences are also a lot more subjective)
Though, celsius does have the benefit of being on same scale as Kelvin, which is great.
And I don't even want to get into the differences between the different kinds of tons, pints, gallons, and miles. There are three different kinds of miles in common usage, plus over a dozen historical ones. It's enough to drive you mad.
We're not so good about SI units for temperature, speed, and distance though, despite the particular failings of the latter two.
an ounce is around 30g. A tablespoon has to be half of it and a teaspoon is ~5g
If I transfer from an account with the Commonwealth Bank, to an international account, like the English bank my brother uses, it takes 3-5 days, depending on if it's a weekend.
I haven't used an American bank before, but how does this compare?
... I can do it from my phone. Looks like America has some ways to go, yet.
The current NBN is crap, the rollout has been a disaster and the common person just doesn't understand how crap it actually is.
Thankfully a new line to Hawaii should open in January/February, and that might have a more significant impact on our current congestion.
It was supposed to cover 99%, but after the main street had to be torn up six times due to installation mistakes, the city said no more. They weren't challenged on the decision.
Because it is fttn, the main bottleneck, the last mile, remains precisely the same.
So I am required to pay 60, where I used to pay 40, for the same speed and data.
If you transfer between US banks, it will take between 1 and 5 business days, depending on when you send it (noon EST is a common cutoff time to have it done overnight), whether you've sent to the account before (sending with ACH, the "normal" way, requires you to confirm ownership of both accounts, which takes around 2 days) and whether you pay for it (if you pay $15-$20 for a "wire transfer", it can be done same day).
You can get around some of that (owning both accounts) by using a physical cheque (yes, they actually use those still in the US) but it can still take more than a day for the funds to be available, depending on the size of the transfer.
There are a whole ton of transfer services like Venmo that work around this by not using the banking system but in the end you usually need to get the money into/out of the bank somehow and you're stuck using the old ways.
Sending internationally is SWIFT, so mostly takes the same amount of time regardless of the bank you use or the country you're in (at least in my experience).
Another thing is that in order to get paid, I actually had to sign a permission to allow my employer to transfer money to my account with direct deposit. This means that there are means to transfer money without checks, but this option is somehow not readily available to anyone and the recipient has to sign a permission to allow it. Seriously, why do I have to sign a permission for someone to send me money?
I was absolutely baffled. In some ways, visiting the US felt like traveling back in time to 1980.
I don't think I've had a rental where automatic debiting of my bank account didn't occur.
I've also only ever used checks for bond, sent to the Bond Board. Never for a damn thing else. They aren't even accepted in most places. My employer pays directly into my bank account, no permission required.
Aside from that all you have is ACH, which is what's being complained about.
Most of the developed world has essentially free wire transfers.