W Celsius

Best way to use Fahrenheit is to consider it as a percentage of how hot it is. 0 degrees is zero percent hot, and 100 is fully hot. Beyond that you’re in super cold/hot territory.

But yeah, Celsius is still better.

I'm so confused, you didn't have the room to write "calculator", but you had the room to write "(calc is short for calculator btw)"

.....

Fahrenheit makes more sense as a unit in use. 100 equals hot, but doesn't equal death, 0 equals cold. In a lot of the world freezing is only kind of cold, not actually cold. Metric makes sense for science while imperial is more of a common persons unit; that's also why Americans in science use metric.

Kilometers to miles is probably the easiest common conversion. 5 km is 3 miles, easy peasy.

... Is anyone going to tell him we use millimeters too if the need is that small?

I.e. the volumes of gases under the ideal gas law scaled linearly with degrees celcius by about 1/273rd between 0-100C - which led to the prediction that the lowest possible temperature a gas could be was -273C (because that would be the point where it theoretically would have absolutely zero volume).

No horse in this race, but this is cool as fuck. So that's how the first tries at measuring absolute zero were made.

Yes, but how do you record that precision without needing a qualifying statement. When precision matters, "0.25" represents a measurement that is known to be closer to 0.25 than it is to either 0.24 or 0.26. Something that is only precise to 1/4 of a unit isn't that precise. The decimal way to record a precision of 1/4 is "0.25 +/- 0.125".

The thing to understand about decimals and precision is that you're still recording a fractional measurement, but your denominator is fixed to powers of 10. 0.1 is 1/10. 0.01 is 1/100. So when increasing precision by less than a factor of 10 is difficult to represent.

This matters a lot for things like digital calipers, where a cheap set will show the same measurement as a nice set that's more precise because the good ones aren't 10 times as precise. But if they have a fractional setting, the nicer ones will read more precisely because that increased precision can be represented on the display.

I think the implication was supposed to be that the Americans call calculators "calcs" and the image wants to ridicule them for that. I have to say I don't think I've ever heard of that outside of maybe software names, but I'm not from the US.

It makes a lot more sense if you know about chains. A chain is 22 yards, and there are 80 chains in a mile. There are also rods (a quarter of a chain) and furlongs (10 chains)

So:
3 Barleycorn in an inch
4 inches in a hand
3 hands in a foot
3 feet in a yard
5.5 yards in a rod
4 rods in a chain
10 chains in a furlong
8 furlongs in a mile

... And of course there's the overlapping systems of length for manufacturing, agriculture, maritime, and horse racing, which have their own, separate subdivisions and largest units, but usually you can get away with just the nail, the fathom, the nautical mile, and the span.

I think I never saw using Deca- and deci- in real life

For those that joined the stream recently, they're just using slang

That is even more stupid. Then why not just use centimeter then?

I'd be a big fan of fractional metric.

Although if we really wanted to go crazy (this will never happen), we'd ditch base-10. It's a stupid base that we only use because of our fingers. Base 12 is superior and is actually the strongest defense of feet and inches (though yards can fuck right off). It has 6 divisors whereas 10 only has 4.

Base 60 is also cool (divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60), but that would also be significantly more difficult to teach children - it takes them long enough to learn the order of 26 letters.

And being a geographer, I adore 360 because it's fucking awesome to work with, and you don't get a better composite until 2520, which is just too much to deal with.

Nobody in the us says that, it sounds like something we'd make up and say the British say.

273 .15

I'm accustomed to the imperial system. But agree that metric is better.

Some metric stuff I have no trouble with. I have a good spatial sense of the distance of a mm, m, and km. And can do a rough miles to km (and vice versa) conversion in my head. I have a good sense of how much a kg is and similarly can do a rough conversion to and from lbs in my head. But while I understand that a gram is 1/1000 of a kg, if handed a small object and asked to guess how many grams it is, I'd fail miserably.

Celsius I can't ever remember the conversion, but I've had enough exposure to it that I understand if it means cold/cool/warm/hot weather.

Imperial is FAR more human and "natural" then metric. Metric fails frequently at being quantifiable with natural experiences and objects.

But imperial falls apart the second your trying to do something at a large scale, super small scales or literally anything that isn't "human scale"

And basically every test I've ever seen. If you don't have tools or some reference point, people will nine times out of 10 be able to more accurately gauge something using imperial measurements then using metric measurements.

Metric relies far too much on reference in tooling, but that's also its greatest strength. It's absurdly, exact and reliable while imperial is loosey-goosey

Fahrenheit is better at describing weather in reference to human interaction with temperature Celsius is better for everything else.

But that's the same for everything imperial. It's always better when it comes to actual human elements. How big is that stick? How many things in that piece of bread? How much weight is that rock? I need to move.

While metric is basically better anytime you have tooling you need to be extremely exact. You need to know something that is less human and more mathematical or abstract.

Well each system can do the thing. They're not great at it quickly falls apart. That's a big reason why people tend to say imperial sucks. Most people no longer actually interact with the natural world anymore. Everything is computers, exact measurements, quantifiable numbers from shops. The only thing left that most people deal with on a day-to-day basis is the weather and why Fahrenheit may be better than Celsius. It's only vaguely better since weather is already such an imprecise thing that really doesn't matter.

Well yes the granularity of Fahrenheit is far more useful. If you actually want to be like specific about things Celsius when it comes to weather it's close enough f****** does the job

It's because metric sucks at anything on a human scale and most people deal with things on a human scale. Imperial was developed over hundreds of years to be extremely narrow and scope in a specific two things at a human scale.

It's a big reason why imperial makes far more sense. If you actually need to talk about anything on a human scale, everything no matter how nonsensical makes sense the moment, it's explained because it's all extremely intuitive.

While metric is basically a tiny fraction of a technically Superior system that basically makes no f****** sense in 99% of cases for a day-to-day life.

Try metric is the measurement of science, engineering and other fields of study because they actually do with things outside of day-to-day human scope

As the saying goes, use the right tool for the right job and only a dumb f*** uses the wrong tool for the wrong job

"deci" is very popular. Just not in the "correct" form "decimeter".

In Spanish it's normal to say "8 décimas", which means 8 tenths. It is context dependent though. For example if speaking in a context where millimeters are used, it will be 8 tenths of a milimiter. That is, 0,8mm.

But yeah, it is very uncommon to use deci and deca. Because they're just not very useful. We are used to 2 digit numbers, or numbers with 2 decimal places. So 87m is not harder to use than 8,7dam.

It's probably also the reason there is no prefix between kilo and mega, or milli and micro. (They are x1000 increments instead of x10).

For the same reason, when in a context of millimeters, it's preferred to say "87mm" instead of "8,7cm".