Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

I challenge you all to make two changes today with regard to this. First, switch your phone to give you the weather in Celsius. It gets super simple fast:

0 and below - Freezing. Wear a warm jacket and closed toe shoes or boots.

1 - 10 - Cold. Wear an overcoat (a light one if you are used to colder weather)

10-15 - Early spring time. Long sleeves are probably in order, maybe even a sweater.

15-20 - Late spring. Wear short sleeves.

20+ - Warm to hot. Wear short sleeves. If it gets to be 24+ shorts are appropriate.

I am deliberately not giving conversions to Fahrenheit here because I think that's how you just go back to using it. Try to internalize the metric system here.

The second challenge is to switch your clocks/watches to the 24 hour mode. Not strictly metric system related, but you will not have to worry about AM vs PM again.

For the advanced users: switch your car to show your speed in km/h instead of m/h.

For the super-advanced users: try to figure out how many liters per 100 km does your car consume :).

Edit: if you cook (and you really should), use a scale set to grams instead of measuring cups for any recipes you are making. Almost all foods list both oz's and grams on them. You will get much more accurate measurements this way and will learn to gauge what 150 grams of cheese looks like, etc.

Specifically regarding temperature, I don't think Celsius is granular enough, unless you like working with fractions. For instance, in my home, I can feel the difference between 72 F (22.2 C) and 73 F (22.8 C), and I prefer 73 F. Fractions would be just as easy for me to decipher, but there are some dim folks out there that have to be catered to, because they are legitimate consumers.

Regarding other measurements, I agree that metric should be used, because it just makes sense. Millimeters are about as granular as 1/16 inches, so that would eliminate the need to work with fractions in most cases.

> I am deliberately not giving conversions to Fahrenheit

But I spent all that effort learning what temperature water boils at in Fahrenheit. Who the hell is going to remember what that temperature is in Celsius??

100°C , that should be simple enough :)

I think you missed the joke there...

Nope. It depends on atmospheric pressure. Do your own units for that too? ;-)

Okay, so boiling water happens to be a convenient number. But my point surely stands for the temperature where water freezes?! Metric makes no sense.

You mean 0°C?

What makes no sense is your hyperbolic rejection of metric.

I am pretty sure sjwright is being sarcastic.

Does most of this apply to newer things (cars, clocks)? My car has a clock but I have no method of changing anything but the hour/min. The speedometer is analog...I guess I could try to read the small print that displays in km...my alarm clock doesn't even have options for 24h.

With the cooking one (assuming you meant recipes from books); all the cookbooks I've seen have nothing in metric so I have to do another step of converting before I can measure properly.

The only problem I have with taking up your challenge is...why? I'd be the only one of the people I know and I would have to convert everything for them when I communicate.

If everything tomorrow and beyond was in metric, I am guessing a lot of people wouldn't replace their old items with the new one (displaying metric) they would just find a quick way to convert from their current way.

I have a car imported from US here in the EU and while driving it I just look at the smaller print in km/h, I honestly don't even notice the larger letters in miles now, it just became natural to look at the smaller print.

It still doesn't make much sense here though. I assume that where you are the speed limit is in km/h. Here it's mph. No matter what I have to know how fast I am going in mph so it makes no sense to bother knowing what I'm doing in km/h. If they changed all the signs to km based speeds (overnight) then I would probably do it but more likely I would remember where on the mph gauge the common km speeds and use those anyways.

Yeah, it sounds likely - but my point is that you would get used to it after a few days,and could continue using your car exactly as you did before. And all new cars would be produced with dials using km/h as the main unit,so the problem would eventually go away on its own. The only problem that I can think of occurs if your car somehow doesn't have a dual kph/mph dial,and shows miles per hour only. Then yes, it becomes an issue.

You do know that Fahrenheit was designed with humans in mind, while Celsius was designed with water in mind. The average person really doesn't care at what point water boils or freezes. They care about hot and cold, something F does better for humans than C.

Actually, this is a great point. As someone born and lived almost all my life outside the US, I just couldn't understand the Fahrenheit system. Having spent the last few months in the US, I went the opposite way to try and force myself to understand Fahrenheit and what I found was very surprising.

Fahrenheit actually makes sense if you consider it from a weather perspective. The only way to use the Fahrenheit scale is to look at it as percentage of body temperature. Now, I know that the body temperature isn't 100 but 98.4. If you keep that part aside for a minute, it's very easy to explain the Fahrenheit scale. 50 degrees is 50% of your body temperature. 32 degrees is 32% of your body temperature. 100 degrees means that weather is equal to your body temperature. That means things like if the weather is hot or cold is just percent of body temperature. Also, 0 degrees is the temperature at which brine freezes. So, no matter how much salt you add, ice will not melt.

Historically, when the Fahrenheit scale was invented, body temperature was supposed to be at 100. It was later realized that the body temperature is slightly less but no correction to the scale was made.

Every other scale makes no sense to me. I convert pounds to kgs, miles to kms, gallons to litres etc.. all the time just to get a sense of measure. But for the weather, Fahrenheit is really good.

It reminds me when we moved from national money (Franc) to Euro in Europe. The conversion rate was something like 1 Euro was 1.67 Francs (IIRC). I don't remember how long it took for the shops to remove the dual price tags, and when people stopped using converters or doing the conversion in their head. I decided just to forget about Francs from day one of Euro.

It would make a lot more sense if we used a system where 0 was the coldest it normally got, and 100 was the highest it normally got. Way more integer data points, and a lot less use of negative numbers.

Kelvin starts at 0°.

There's a maximum temperature but it's really stupidly hot, where the particles are accelerated to nearly light speed because of thermal energy.

The temperature of the sun would be 0.00000000000000002° in your crazy system.

I was joking, Fahrenheit is basically setting zero to the lowest temperature most people run into outside, and 100 to the highest temperature run into outside, in Europe.

So Spain's not part of Europe? They push up over 100°F there on a fairly regular basis.

0 through 100 is really just a part-time thing at best.

In °C the same thing plays out as somewhere between -40°C and 40°C where at the bottom of the scale it's really cold and at the top it's really hot.

Plus it follows the simple rule of "negative numbers mean ice outside" which is important from so many perspectives. That makes a lot more intuitive sense than "numbers under 32".

> Kelvin starts at 0°.

No, Kelvin starts at 0K [0] :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin

You forgot the most annoying part inches, feet and all that crap.

I get people telling me measurements in inches sometimes here in the UK and I always tell the to measure it again in centimeters.

It's just easier and more accurate.

I find the inches and feet to be easier to use than said pound and stone .... Not to forget those silly cooking measures like cup, bowl, tea spoon etc... which obviously are not standardized. Talking about weird measure, is the fact that properties seems to be advertised in number of rooms and not square meters or square feet.

Even worse is stupid fractional units like ounce-inches instead of foot-pounds.

Northerners! Anything below 20 is Winter; put on a jumper.

Well, I had to adjust this. For me -5 and above is T-shirt weather...

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