Hacker News Reader

Comment by exergy | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. And that's why the UK is especially stupid with units. At least in the US they are consistently idiotic with Fahrenheit and Miles and BTUs and so on. In the UK, they understand what a kilogram is, but measure weight in stones anyway. Fucking stones! And then this thing with yards and miles.

Utterly hopeless.

View on HN

I don't see anything idiotic about Fahrenheit. With distances I can see why powers of ten make a difference, but we don't vary temperatures by orders of magnitude in regular life.

Nor do I spend much time around freezing or boiling water. Fahrenheit has 9/5th more specificity.

Is the point that it's different than the rest of the world? I can see that point, but am I missing anything particularly bad about the Fahrenheit scale?

> Is the point that it's different than the rest of the world? I can see that point, but am I missing anything particularly bad about the Fahrenheit scale?

Mainly that it doesn't make any sense. Why was 32F made the magical number for the freezing point of water? The "well known" temperatures like freezing/boiling points of water are based on observations after the scale was invented. The secrets to the F scale died with Fahrenheit and today nobody knows for sure what 0F actually means.

So what, it gives much more granularity than Celsius, that’s the OPs point, and it’s why it makes sense to use it.

You can basically approximate a 1F change to 0.5C change (or 0.55C) for non scientific purposes.

  50F -> 10C
  51F -> ~10.5C
  52F -> ~11C

Unless you hate decimals, I don't think there's much granularity gained.

I'm a thermodynamic engineer by trade. We spend a lot of time around freezing and boiling water. Even more, we spend a lot of time in Kelvin land.

I've a particular hatred of Fahrenheit :)

I wonder if they're keeping fixing this as a backup plan for a rainy day? Say one day UK's GDP goes down harder than they'd like, so in order to burn some money and boost it back without making it look obvious, they'll announce the country has made up its mind, and is switching to full and proper metric starting next year. Cue the economy going to overdrive, as everything and the kitchen sink has to be relabeled or replaced...

(And if that doesn't help for long, they can stimulate the economy further by changing the driving side to the right one.)

Hahaha, a likely theory!

Actually, I'm Indian, and we have our steering wheel on the right side, just like the Brits. It's one of the less fortunate things we picked up from them.

It’ll go the other way: the next time they need to leave something, they can have a referendum to leave the metric system, then go through a few governments to get it done.

UK went a little crazy sometime after the American colonies split.

I mean, the US screwed up their fluid ounce / weight ounce so that a US fluid oz of water doesn't quite weight a US oz, but the UK redefined a hundredweight as 112 lbs to make it an even number of stones, and even though they kept their ounces correct, they redefined a pint to 20 ounces so now there's nowhere in the world a pint's a pound.

> now there's nowhere in the world a pint's a pound.

was 20 years ago in our student bar. More like 3-4 pounds for a pint now, 5 in London

Fahrenheit is a better scale for day to day temperature measurement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com