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Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

For a pseudo-scientific analysis ... it's a shame the units of measurement weren't defined up front.

(I live in one of the 190+ countries that use Celsius, but I know that 99.8% of things on the Internets are written by people from just one of those three other countries that doesn't. I'm also aware that for reasons that are a bit bewildering, everyone in those 190+ countries politely goes out of their way to make it clear that we're talking metric, because we're now used to the idea that if people don't mention units then they're probably from North America, and consequently are almost definitely using gallons (US, not UK gallons), miles (US, not UK miles), Fahrenheit and other deprecated units. We should probably stop being so considerate.)

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This is interesting, can you give some examples of unit omission? As an american I am having trouble thinking outside of my environment. I know I am guilty of temperature unit omission: "It was 10 degrees outside /The high is going to be 60 tommorow." I am having trouble coming up with others. I am having the most trouble with gallons and or miles:

I was running on fumes, it took 3 to fill my car up.

My friends new truck is super efficient for a pickup it gets 35 / 35 miles / 35 to the gallon.

I ran for 3 yesterday.

Buffalo is 120 from Syracuse.

Apparently the problem is that you just say "three gallons" and not "three U.S. gallons". But I'm pretty sure the miles are the same. Except that there are nautical, international, statute, and probably some other miles. So stop being so inconsiderate.

dfc - you're right, I think, that it's almost always ambiguous temperature references, doubtless because the 'degree' part of the unit name is shared between the three common measures.

As rgarrett88 points out, short distances are often reduced to foot and inch numbers, with the receiver left to intuit context. Sometimes people will assert they hit a hundred, or went from zero to a hundred in x seconds, and weight-lifters are likely to talk about the number they can push ... again reliant upon sender and receiver sharing the same cultural background.

My comment about 'us' being so considerate was somewhat tongue in cheek, natch, though (since I'm speaking for all the rest of us now) we'd really like it if you guys would switch over to metric at your earliest convenience. I won't say ISO / SI, as working in K is just too unwieldy :)

I like to think our rejection of the metric system is because we are standing on principle and reject the semantic inconsistency that is the kilogram. Base measures should not be prefixed;)

Cling onto that raft! I fear it's a combination of NIH (despite the same being said of imperial, Fahrenheit, etc), fear of change, and irrational dislike of the French. Of course, Daniel Fahrenheit was Dutch/German, and Anders Celsius was Swedish.

But if you think kg is frustrating, I'm learning electronics now - every book, when starting to talk about capacitors, says something like 'However, the Farad is not a convenient unit, and you'll most be working with 0.0000000001F capacitors'. Yes, the SI unit is unhindered by a prefix, but you can't but help wish they'd thought more carefully about this before writing it down.

36-24-36? Ha ha, only if she's 5 3.

-Sir Mix-a-Lot

I was doing 70 on the road out of Wallingford, and the police pulled me over.

I'm pretty sure I've heard phrases like 35 to the gallon before.

"She's five eight"

Along that vein, "She's 36-24-36"

To be fair, the author defined the units of measurement on their second mention, and from then on consistently gave the temperature in both Celsius and Fahrenheit. The fact that he did not specify what scale of measurement he meant when he wrote "10 degrees" does not merit great criticism; it is a simple omission, I would treat it as I would treat a typo...

Other than that, this is a rather cool (no pun intended) experiment. I usually just rested my toast horizontally across the toaster or placed it on a grill after toasting to avoid the dreaded toast sweat. Maybe I'll heat up my plates in the future. More importantly: the toast still cools down. Where does the toast sweat go? Where did it come from?

Based on the article talking about ambient temp being 24 I'm going to guess that not everyone in those countries goes out of their way to make it clear that they are talking about metric

Really, in scientific work like this, the temperatures should be measured in kelvin.

Apologies for not thinking of this, fixed now, thanks :-)

Hope you took the comment in the whingy great southern continent spirit it was intended. ;)

I was just going to dwell upon my amazement that toast lasts 120 seconds at your place. Butter really needs to get on and be melting within 10 seconds, vegemite or marmalade within another 10, and that leaves you about 15 seconds of tolerable consumption temperature. We are not animals, after all.

FYI - when I've been too busy to pre-warm the plate, I've found a sheet of kitchen paper between plate and toast can ameliorate some of the toast sweat problem.

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