W Celsius

The fraction allows you to communicate length and tolerance in a single number. A decimal implies precision to the last number, a measure with a fraction can show 1/8 as more granular than 1/16. 1/8 of a cm is less precise than a mm, but if you wrote 1.125 cm, you are now implying sub mm level precision.

This matters because the level needed in building generally doesn't line up to 1/10 measurements. For example if you had a brick wall and a row had 1 cm height differences between bricks in a row it would be extremely obvious and look terrible. A 1mm height difference would be impossible to notice, but is also overkill to get that level. Ideal is about 5/8 cm or 6.35 mm difference over 3 meters of wall. The fractional measure often ends up easier to work with in practice.

That does make sense when you need absolute precision like when doing abstract math. Otherwise you can just use whichever unit and number of significant digits you need and be precise to that amount. That's what you do with imperial/American customary units as well; a 5/32" screw isn't going to be manufactured to the precision of a Planck length; manufacturers specify their sizes to three significant digits of an inch.

Let's say you have a machining project and your tools are precise to 0.1 mm. So you plan things out at a precision of 0.1 mm. It doesn't matter that a distance is 17/38 cm exactly. It doesn't matter that it's 4.473684210526315789... mm. You can't set the tool to anything better than 4.5 mm anyway.

Also note that the metric system doesn't prevent you from using fractions. You're perfectly free to work with fractions where useful. That's just not how people talk about lengths because those fractions have no meaning outside your specific use case.

Most metric units are designed around water in some way. Very easy to convert to different units because of this. 1mL of water is equal to 1g of water which is equal to 1 cubic cm of water, for example.

I replied to you by accident, that's why I deleted it.

Yeah, obviously isn't the case everywhere, but I think such extreme temperature ranges are kind of rare (excluding random one-off days that are super cold or hot for whatever reason).

For places that get super cold (like below 0F a lot), generally Celsius probably makes more sense in terms of scaling.

We have also wife carrying competition and swamp football in Finland

I too live in America and grew up here. I know what metric is. But it's not dominant, which I think you know.

Having the more granular temperature seems more practical. I often find myself adjusting my thermostat by just a single degree F. Do heating/ac thermostats in Europe use half degrees as increments? Even then I don’t think it’s as granular. But just integer values would be super annoying.

Incredible. What a magical place

The Fahrenheit scale has only one point of reference for people and that is not 100.

Fahrenheit (the scientist) determined 0° at the coldest stable temperature he could achieve with a mixture of water, ice and ammonium chloride, then set the mean healthy body temperature (as it was known at that time, modern measuring equipment is more precise) at 96° and then as a third reference set 32° as the freezing point of water.
The reference points were later changed to 32° for water freezing and 180° higher at 212° for water boiling due to Anders Celsius work and influence.

Everything about this looks just random and devoid of any logic. Celsius for his scale referenced the temperatures at which water changes state and Kelvin uses the Celsius scale but sets 0 at the point of literally no energy. Behind both is an idea easily to grasp.

Yes... Thank you British Empire, French Empire, and Spanish Empire for your contributions to the system.

-British: Mile, Foot, Inch, Yard

-Spanish: Dollar, from the Spanish Pieces of 8

-French: You know what you did

I think they mean ounces, cups, quarts, gallons, with no intuitive sense of conversion between them. I personally use ounces for almost everything (cocktail recipes are in 0.25 ounce increments, big cups are 40 ounces, big ol buckets can be 256 ounces). I might mess with gallons for very large amounts, but anything that can be expressed in cups or pints I'm usually just talking ounces anyway.

Well yeah but you know that yesterday it was +3 and some snow melted, and froze overnight when it was -5. That tells you it's going to be slippery in the morning

It is in all the areas that matter. Who cares if our road signs and weather reports aren't.

Your assumption is correct. I meant using cups, ounces, etc separately or in combination. Especially annoying when trying to figure out portions. Serving size: 8oz, package size: 1lb 4 oz. You have to do math every time.

Half a C is actually quite close to a whole F in delta. I don't have a thermostat though.

I have not seen any thermostats in Europe with decimal degrees. But I also don't think a thermostat is necessarily accurate to that level anyway.

lol you don’t think it’s accurate to a degree Fahrenheit? Why wouldn’t it be?

Because it's mass produced consumer goods operating on a "below x temperature turn on heat/turn off AC" and "above y temperature turn off heat/turn on AC". Old ones are just bimetallic strips where you change the trigger position with a slider, and modern ones use commodity grade temperature sensors, and neither is guaranteed to be placed particularly far from the vent.

Thermostats are not exactly calibrated machines unless you spend for a high end model. Put a few next to each other and they might differ 1°C, 2°F. Worse if you take the really cheap stuff.