Do Americans understand celsius?

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there aren't enough gradations in celcius to suit me- i can feel the difference between 109F and 110F but in celcius they're both rounded to 42C.

Yeah, I can see that. In fact, I think it's generally true that older units of measurement are more "human-sized". How often do you see something which is about a metre long?

Reminds me of a true incident that happened a few years back. NASA sent a probe to Mars and as it made its final approach its trajectory needed adjusting to take up orbit around the planet. NASA exclusively uses metric for all the calculations (because it is frankly better and easier to use) but one employee fed the trajectory figures into the flight nav in imperial feet/pounds and consequently sent the probe hurtling straight into the surface of Mars. A multi million dollar f**k up due to Americans not using consistent units.

Science, technology and engineering are so much simpler using metric units for everything. All the calculations are in decimal. There is no messing around doing endless conversion of sub units of 12 or whatever to larger units. Good riddance imperial measurements and Fahrenheit. They should be consigned to the history books where they belong.

Since we now use computers based on the byte, why not have a system of measure with base 16 (2^4)?

ruveyn

Base ten and decimal is so entrenched in human thinking that it wouldn't be easy to shift to any other base. While base 16 would hold a certain amount of logic, very few of us use it in day to day life. I only use base 16 (hex) when doing low level programming. Besides - how would stupid people count things who only have ten fingers (including 2 thumbs for the pedantic)?

Let's put it this way - no one in normal, everyday life uses Celsius for anything. Maybe if you are some sort of scientist or something. Even cooking is done in F. We preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

I doubt people think about the exact temperature much. It's more of a guide.

under 30 degrees - wear coat
30-50 degrees - wear fleece jacket
50-60 degrees - wear light jacket
over 60 - don't wear a jacket

stuff like that. Right now it is 33.9 degrees F, but that's not really meaningful outside of a scale.

Gosh!
Good questions- that i dont have real answers for.

I was going to say that its a chicken and egg thing. We americans adapt to what the weatherman says. But TV weather/news shows have to adapt to our expectations. So its a cycle. But there has to be more to it than that.

I say that because Canada and the US both embarked upon adopting metric measures in everthing (tempature included) about the same time- back in the seventies. By the nineties Canada became pretty much totally metric- as I understand it. But we are still mostly imperial and still hardly use the metric system.

Why the difference?

Oldsters like me do have an emotional attachment to feet miles and degrees farenheit- but thats true of canada as well. But young folks in the USA learn about metric and use it in science class (and on the job if they go on to become actual scientists), but - I dunno. In the rest of life even young people think in the old system- apparently ( i cant get in their heads but that seems to be the case).


Most of the carpentry and constrution work in the USA depends upon the labor of Mexican and central american immigrants. And they all use metric in their home countries, but they adapt to the imperial system when they build houses here in the USA- I assume- because the construction industry is still mostly imperial.

The US is a bigger country than canada - so there is more inertia. But Americans are probably more resistent to authority or resistant in general than canadians on top of that -maybe. and we are a big enough country to get away with doing our own thing (atleast temporariy). In europe the Belgians, say, cant just defect from the metric system and get away with it because it would mess up commerce with the rest of europe too much and mess up belgium itsself too much. But the USA is like a whole continent (the whole european union) unto itsself. But it seems to me that even we have to confrom to metric eventually.

Maybe that is true of Americans but the reverse is true for me. Fahrenheit is obsolete. I always think of room temperatures, outdoor temperatures, oven temperatures etc in Celsius.

I'm of the generation that learned both Fahrenheit and Celsius (then Kelvin for sciences) but gradually Fahrenheit is slipping into history in the UK. Room thermostats for example are usually calibrated in Celsius as are cooker settings. Here in France everything is Celsius - weather forecasts, the lot.

But either way, it's an artificial conceptual framework being superimposed over reality by the mind. The temperature doesn't move, the mercury doesn't move - your mind moves.

(I'm joking, I'm joking!)

There is no spoon.

Celsius has been mandatory for medicine in the UK for over 50 years and all doctors and nurses are familiar with it. Quoting body temperatures in fahrenheit is considered bad practice. Weather reports have used celsius since the 1960s but fahrenheit is commonly included. The food industry uses celsius and it has been the predominant measurement for cooking for at least 25 years. Primary schools have taught almost exclusively in metric since the 1970s. My school never taught imperial measurements but many were in common use in the real world at the time. The younger generation is familiar with many imperial measurements despite the onslaught of metrication but others including the fluid ounce, fahrenheit, British thermal unit, and hundredweight are fading into obscurity.

of course they don't. The metric scale and celcius is a communist plot to force them to vote democrat, collectivise their farms and pay taxes for their healthcare in advance.

There is a reason why a kilobyte is 1024 instead of 1000. The reason 1024 is use because it fits into a 10-bit(2^10) byte perfectly.

If we had eight fingers on each hand, that might have been the case.

If we had four fingers on each hand, we'd probably use octal.

The Incas had ten fingers, ten toes and war open sandals. They developed a base 20 positional system complete with a zero. This is something that Greece and Rome never did.

ruveyn

"as far as a country kilometer" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
and why not, while people are in the digital mood, make time itself based on 10? like 10 hours a day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute? and why even call them by their old analog names? why not millitemps for seconds, decitemps for minutes and decatemps for hours and a solunatemp for a day/night? of course, nearly everything on earth would have to recalibrated/redone but who cares? digital is more efficient, after all. efficiency is all that matters.

Last edited by auntblabby on 27 Jan 2013, 6:03 am, edited 1 time in total.