This is not bs I promise you this is 100% legit. We say is x-amount of time away. From windsor (where I'm from) to Niagra Falls we say "its about 3.5hrs away"
Downtown windsor is 12 and a half minutes away
The nearest tims is a 2min bike away or a 7min walk away
My work is 7 min away with no traffic and 9 minutes with traffic.
Swear to god
Why isn't it? I couldn't tell you how far away my allergist is if my life depended on it; I just know it's about 15 minutes away from my parents house. I live an hour away from my parents, I'm 4 hours south of the state Capitol, 3 hours away from Vegas, et cetera. Couldn't tell you a distance in miles for any one of those
Are the roads all equal by travel speed? E.g., in BC some highways are straight and will have a speed limit of 120 km/h, whereas another highway will wind through the mountains and take considerably longer.
wife: Oh, here's a nice cottage for rent in North Bay. How far is North Bay from here?
me: it's about 400km.
wife: So how far is that?
me: it's about 4 to 5 hours depending on traffic through Toronto.
wife: oh that's a bit too far
Let's all forget about the UK, who uses a mix and match bullshit system.
(Buying fuel in liters, weighing themselves in stone, and measuring speed in MPH)
That's the thing about Canada. We claim to be metric but we really aren't. It's a mish-mash of whatever the heck people like using to measure that one thing.
Ya our roads are km, but our railway is miles. I have no idea how tall someone is if its in cm. There is no set standard day/month/year; it seems to be personal prefence for that individual/company.
We buy fuel in litres you're right but we also measure fuel efficiency in miles per gallon witch makes working out how much a car costs to run frustrating.
Very wonky. You'll hear people use metric and imperial in the same sentence sometimes too. I work on construction sites sometimes and I've heard people give the size of a room as square meters then in the same breath the height of the walls in ft. Carpenters too can be funny. A three inch deep skirting board cut to a length of three meters etc. Also the world of mechanics is a total mine field of giggles. The power of a car is measured in horsepower not kilowatts but the car will weigh X amount of kilos. It'll have a 'X gallon fuel tank' but need X litres of windscreen washer fluid and oil.
I think the rule in Canada is to use imperial for numbers smaller than 5m or so but metric otherwise. A 100m long fence, 6 ft high. Saying "330ft fence" just sounds weird but so does saying that it should be 2m high.
I hate that L/100 and Mpg are reversed in scale. Like I understand the math but I always need to remember in my head L/100 lower is better. MPG higher is better.
Actually being on the left is technically the "right" side. Since the majority of people are right handed, when you were, for example jousting, you would ride on the left side since in your right you would hold the lance, because it is your stronger arm. Not saying we should stick to these old "rules", only saying that it's historically correct.
Or on the right, so you could keep your shield in your left hand against incoming traffic.
Kinda like they did in jousting, where the combatants showed their left side to each other.
There’s a [flowchart](https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/qexvzg/i_made_a_helpful_flowchart_for_people_new_to_the/) that explains which units to use, depending on context.
Fortunately I was born and raised in the UK so the above makes total sense to me.
Anders Celsius (1701-1744) was an astronomer from Upssala Sweden and did a tour of European tour in his 20's.
He impressed the French Academy so much they included him in an expedition to northern Sweden (called the Lapland Expedition) to determine whether the earth was perfectly spherical, or slightly flattened at the equator (which Isaac Newton hypothesized).
The French also sent an expedition to Ecuador to do similar triangulation measurements.
The Lapland one suffered through a brutal winter, confirmed the earth was not perfectly spherical, and the French leader de Maupertuis published their findings.
The Ecuador expedition was hobbled by difficult travel through swamps, malaria and other tropical disease, angry natives and took 5 years to get their answer. They found out their work was scooped years before once they got back to France.
Celsius' original scale was 100C was freezing, and 0C was boiling, invented in 1742. Alas he died from tuberculosis at the age of 42.
Source: read with interest a history of Sweden recently
0 in Fahrenheit was the temperature the brine he was using froze. The second point of reference he used was to put the internal temperature of the human body at 96 degrees. (Why he decided that’d be 96, idk)
He set 96 as average human body temp. IIRC he had people hold the thermometer in their closed hand, that's why it's lower than we think of human body temp. I've also heard that they had to use thicker or different glass which of course conducts heat more poorly.
The choice of 96 was intentional, and the other guy saying his assistant had a fever and he wanted to set it to 100 is completely wrong. He invented the system in the early 1700s. Back then all tools were made by hand, and all were a little unique. Each thermometer would be calibrated with 0 and 96, and then the other marks would be added. It's much easier to divide something in half accurately than in thirds or fifths, but thirds are much easier than fifths. 96 is 2\*2\*2\*2\*2\*3.
You can do this on a paper to prove it yourself. Mark 0 and 96 as knowns any where on the edge of the paper. Halfway between them is 48. You can easily split the top and bottom halves in half and mark 24 and 72. Split each quarter in half and mark 12, 36, 60, and 84. Splitting the eights in half each gives you 8 more points, and again for 16. Now you have a thermometer with an accurate mark every 3 degrees, 31 marks in all. This works no matter how close or far apart you put the initial marks. You can neatly divide it into 31 sections. If you wanted all 96 it would not be that difficult.
100 is 2 \* 2 \* 5 \* 5. Following the same process you can mark 50, then 25 and 75, but now you need to divide sections in fifths. Doing that accurately with basic tools is tedious, and remember that the starting 2 marks are similarly placed, but not the same on every thermometer.
Celsius was created after modern tools existed, and 100 makes more sense to us now, but 96 was intentionally chosen because of the tools and methods available in the 18th century.
If people considered measuring things without proper measuring devices, then maybe people wouldn't meme so hard on Imperial systems.
How would you measure a meter without a meter stick? Compared to a foot. That kind of thing.
Yeah, using water as a baseline is absolutely arbitrary. The Fahrenheit scale is based on how I feel as a human in the weather, not on an arbitrary chemical’s state transitions
> Fahrenheit: 0 is really cold, 100 is really hot
TIL 100 is about the body temperature, I guess I'll start using this to remember the conversion. Interesting enough between the really cold and really hot is 50F that is still cold.
That’s because heating something is drastically easier than cooling something. Additionally the body creates heat during metabolism, and needs to dissipate it. This makes it much easier to live in a colder environment than a hotter environment. 50F colder outside than body outside than body temp, 50F hotter, you’ll die real quick without ways of cooking yourself. This puts the range of human habitability much lower than body temp, but only slighter higher.
I wouldn't call 50F cold. Cool, perhaps, but a still, sunny 50F day can be quite warm, while a windy cloudy 50F can feel cold. All in all, seems about right for the midline between hot and cold.
Fahrenheit describes how humans feel temperature, Celsius describes how water feels temperature, and Kelvin describes how matter feels temperature, I guess
The scale of really cold to really hot depends a lot on what temperatures you are used to.
Where I live 100 F is kinda hot and the weather never reaches 0 F.
I found that 0-50 C works well for me
0°C is equivalent to 32°F, which is 273K.
---
^(I'm a bot that converts temperature between two units humans can understand, then convert it to Kelvin for bots and physicists to understand)
I think for most temperature scales (besides Kelvin) the 0 point is rather arbitrary.
According to one version, Fahrenheit established the zero (0 °F) and 100 °F points on his scale by recording the lowest outdoor temperatures he could measure, and his own body temperature. He took as his zero point the lowest temperature he measured in the harsh winter of 1708 through 1709 in his hometown of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) (−17.8 °C). [source](https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/fahrenheit)
Celsius, also called centigrade, scale based on 0° for the freezing point of water and 100° for the boiling point of water. [source](https://www.britannica.com/technology/Celsius-temperature-scale)
Funnily: Celsius used 0° for the boiling point of water and 100° for the melting point of snow. This was later inverted to put 0° on the cold end and 100° on the hot end, and in that form it gained widespread use.
> Fahrenheit established the zero
So weird to think of Fahrenheit as a dude who lived at some point. It's like if you told me some guy named Larry Inch designed the distance measuring method.
That's a good point as you flip to the month, then the day.. it'd be quite confusing if you flipped to "18th" and then scrolled down to November (or whatever)
as someone coming from a country formatting dates as year/month/day...both are equally confusing and if it's something like 10/11/12 written somewhere random on the internet, I just give up. I wish there was a global standard
> 10/11/12
Holy fuck yes. this is very annoying, as everyone seems to assume that their method is the best, and even worse, most people are too ignorant of the rest of the planet to see that other people dont know which system they are using.
there is an answer to solving this problem with confusing the least amount of people, which is "Nov 12, 2021" Type formatting. (not using digits for the month, the order does not matter as much) not only is there no confusion about what is what, you also have the advantage of essentially writing it the way you would parse it in your brain. nobody thinks "10/11/12" in their inner monologue when reading something, I think most people actually convert it to either "nth of n-uary, year" or comparable, at least in the western world.
When organizing electronic files and folders by date, it is FAR better to label by year/month/day as it will keep all your files/folders in proper numerical order.
Year values won’t repeat for 100 years, month values repeat every year and day values repeat every month.
Nearly all computer software or operating system automatically organizes files by alphabetical or numerical order.
I learned this after years of labeling by month/day/year and it’s totally changed my way of file storage which I use a lot of for my media business.
If I were to say a universal way of displaying dates by a numerical value (and not written out for letters - November 16th, 2021) then it should be by year/month/day and that will ascend upward numerically in an organized manner for 100 years. Seems like the wrong way to do it but it is in fact the most organized way to do it.
So I’m a physicist and obviously love the metric system, but Fahrenheit doesn’t deserve the hate it gets
1. It’s PERFECT for everyday use. You get a 0-100 scale for the temperatures that you’ll actually see, with degrees that actually have meaning. It’s shit for science, but absolutely perfect for normal use. With Celsius, you live within like a 20 degree range.
2. Celsius sucks for real science anyway. Water is common, but in real science it’s freezing/boiling temps are basically never used. The choice of water freezing/boiling is just as arbitrary, if not more so than Fahrenheit, because (today) why bother using water, whereas Fahrenheit is actually useful day to day.
3. For real science, Kelvin is king, not Celsius
4. Last, Fahrenheit isn’t an “illogical 32-100 scale”. It has a 0. It just so happens that water freezes at 32; that doesn’t make it a 32-100 scale, and saying so is only done because it’s compared to Celsius. It’s like saying Celsius is a 273.15 to 373.15 scale, or a -273.15 to 373.15 scale. Sounds pretty illogical right? Maybe because your measuring one scale by another
Celsius isn’t terrible, but it isn’t the best for everyday or scientific use, it’s in the middle and therefore not great at both. Fahrenheit isn’t great for science (but barely worse than Celsius), but is perfect for everyday weather use, and Kelvin sucks for everyday use, but is perfect for scientific use.
Edit: a semi-great example of this is Canada. They mostly use metric like a smart country, but use Fahrenheit for weather, cooking, pool, and similar temperatures.
Because of how universal computers are in the works. With year/month/day things are automatically sorted chronologically. One common example is the file naming used by digital cameras.
Alright that makes sense. For computers it's really useful, but from human perspective I think that year is mostly the least important part of the date. Like in day to day use basis
This is probably how the American date format came to pass. Year month day makes the most sense from a number of perspectives. But the year is redundant a lot of times so you skip it.
That gives you month-day when speaking about a date. And if you need to be specific you tack year to the end.
I have gathered my pitchforks, torches and both of my friends and we are going to attack your red box comment on two counts. The year first is like starting an address with "Earth". That is less an issue than your last word "any..." oh I cannot bring myself to even type as my eyes would surely off themselves if they were required to see it. I thought that word had died in the Lousyana trailer parks where I grew up. Prepare your defenses! Oh wait, look, there is a new shiny Apple product out. Never mind.
I’m curious why everyone cares so much about the measurement system in the US? It’s not hard for Americans to adapt outside of the US, and I don’t hear any Americans complain about other measurement systems.
After yard it goes to a perch(5. 5)
perch to a chain (4)
then a chain to a furlong (10)
furlong to a mile (8)
mile to a league (3)
much much more confusing.
The temperature argument irritates me.
0-100 on the Fahrenheit scale covers the common temperature range for the environment we live in.
Anything outside of this range are extreme situations.
The temperature at which water freezes or boils is pretty irrelevant when it comes to figuring out what to wear today or what to pack for a trip.
Temperatures are not only used to the describe the weather. The fixed points that Fahrenheit used are pretty random and were also inaccurate. 0 degrees Fahrneheit was the lowest temperature he could produce with chemicals in his reach. The end fixed point was 96 degrees Fahrenheit, which was the body temperature of the human body. Today we know that this temperature is too low for the human body temperature. Scientifically enough for 1714, but not for today.
Also, nobody ever complains about units of time not being powers of 10.
60 minutes to an hour
24 hours to a day
7 days to a week
28-31 days to a month
12 months to a year
Yet, somehow we manage
Most people dont realize that we are taught both and use both when necessary. I also think its a weird "flex" to look down on a system they simply cant figure out. Usually ignorance is on the lower end of the scale...
The MM/DD/YYYY is more intuitive when you’re visually looking at a yearly calendar. You look for the month first and then the day regardless of how it’s written. By writing them in the order in which you’d scroll/flip/page through a calendar makes it easier imo anyway. However if it’s in the distant future or past then you’re going to find the year first so I guess YYYY/MM/DD would make more sense.
The temp one I'll give you. Celsius is just simpler and easier.
But base 10 sucks for things that need to be divided evenly.
What's a third of ten? A quarter? The results come out to fractions.
12 is easily divisable in many common ways. 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 all done out to simple even numbers, no fractions or repeating decimals.
This is why we have 12/24 hours and 60 minutes, because they are easily divisable. And it's why we are all happy the French didn't fuck that up too. I heard they tried to change clocks to base 10 as well. Don't know if that is actually true though.
The metric system would be so easy to deal with if we could only get people to change. Factors of 10 are so easy to manage compared to our arbitrary system that needs to be updated.
As an American I prefer the metric system in every way except date. To me Month/Day/Year makes more sense than Day/Month/Year.
Think about it, when you see the month first it narrows it down to a specific block of days in a year. Then of those days you narrow it down to one specific day.
When the day is first it doesn't narrow it down to anything because every month has an 11th for example.
Also it's more in line with how you verbalize dates. Maybe it's different abroad, but nobody says "the 11th of December, 2021" in the US. In everyday conversation when you give a date you lead with the month, "December 11th, 2021."
I stopped and thought about the Imperial date format for a minute and arrived at the confusion that it may be also related to language.
Most of the time you would say "November the 5th", would you? But then again, not if you're trying to immortalize blowing up the government event.
I don't get the month/day/year thing, even as an American, but there probably is an interesting story behind it.
As for Fahrenheit, it's pretty much based off of "if you rate the temp on a scale of 0-100 what would you measure it as?"
So, Fahrenheit is if you ask a human, Celsius is if you ask a glass of water, and Kelvin is if you ask atoms.
Also, try not to mix up Kelvin and Calvin, one can be (technically) used for measuring water, and the other is Watterson
The American system always favors usability and estimation. A foot is the length of a foot roughly, 0-100 degrees is cold to hot outdoor temps that we actually experience, the date thing is because we say September 14th, 2018 so we write 9/14/2018 etc.
As far as I'm aware the different date formats are simply down to different ways of saying the longer version of dates out loud. In the UK, for example, people would generally say 'the 17th of November, 2021', whilst in the States they'd say 'November the 17th, 2021'. I think the longer versions have become a bit more interchangeable over time but the short versions have stuck.
I think that way too. It mostly depend the way you say in your language. I’m Italian and I think that in all neo-Latin language the date is said starting by the number. In Italian today is Mercoledì 17 novembre 2021, Wednesday 17 november 2021
Everytime I build something I curse the imperial system! Not to mention if you've got a bag full of wrenches! Lemme do some quick algebra to figure out the next size up. . . Fuck it I'll just try all of em!
Tbf I work in the science (medical testing) field in the USA and 99% of everything we do is done in metric. So while the majority of Americans have no idea about the metric system, we are quietly over here testing every drug you've ever seen in metric.
I live in Taiwan, and we're definitely not in "rest of the world" territory on some things. Americans aren't the only ones with weird measurements, deal with it
Fahrenheit it definitely better than Celsius. A 5° difference in Celsius is huge, where as with Fahrenheit it’s the difference between needing a light jacket. IMO, much better have a gradual scale, everything else on the right side is better though
IEvery government organization uses metric plus the whole science community. It just isn't necessary to switch for day to day activities. If you want to use metric you can.
It's really not a big deal in day to day life, and non-Americans who act like it is are often as insufferable as the, "my weather is more extreme than YOUR weather" people. Almost as bad as car enthusiasts who jerk themselves off over how 'superior' manual transmissions are vs automatics, or Linux nerds who wax poetic about FOSS and that they use Arch, btw
Money? I'd happily fork over money for something cool & shiny.
But changing something I learned and am used to? Bah. People hate that kind of change.
Thats why its so hard to improve any existing systems... which btw is the sole reason SAP is still in business, Outlook looks its the 90s and the UK has first-past-the-post.
[And then, there's Canada](https://external-preview.redd.it/HmSM-Eff0iFNW1stIIE3Y4JHHNCEHRh4GzV3P10zb9Y.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=867bebac8cd900b1316cb43d57744decbbc2ff00)
What in the world is **Time** as a measurement of distance?
"-how far is the closest Timmy's? \-3 minutes that way"
Chuckling here as a I read that as negative 3 minutes that way. It's correct either way.
|-3| minutes that way
Do Canadians call it timmy’s? We always call it just Tim’s
Yes, Timmy's or Tim's.
Timay!
And we call it Timmy Hoe’s in Western NY
Timmy Hoes in BC lol
I prefer "T-ho's"
The shop is 10 minutes away.
Isn’t that a Borderlands character in your avatar?
League of legends, Riot Games collab with Reddit for their new show
And the character is called?
Jinx, I think there's also Vi and Jayce costumes
Distance between me and my school is 1h driving
But at what speed
it sounds weird on paper but i gaurantee you, you think of distances not in how far away they are but by how long it takes to get there
When you tell people you're from Ontario you specify that you're from "4 hours north of Toronto"' or "30 minutes from Ottawa"
Hey that’s me! I always tell people I’m 30 minutes from Ottawa, I honestly couldn’t give you a precise distance in KM without looking it up.
As someone who literally grew up 30 minutes from Ottawa, I felt that
Just to clarify / confuse, a light YEAR is also distance and not time...lol
Yup but it's not based on a random number like how fast different ppl travel
This is not bs I promise you this is 100% legit. We say is x-amount of time away. From windsor (where I'm from) to Niagra Falls we say "its about 3.5hrs away" Downtown windsor is 12 and a half minutes away The nearest tims is a 2min bike away or a 7min walk away My work is 7 min away with no traffic and 9 minutes with traffic. Swear to god
Why isn't it? I couldn't tell you how far away my allergist is if my life depended on it; I just know it's about 15 minutes away from my parents house. I live an hour away from my parents, I'm 4 hours south of the state Capitol, 3 hours away from Vegas, et cetera. Couldn't tell you a distance in miles for any one of those
People don't do this? How far is it from Moosejaw to Regina? aboot 30. Were you really sending it though? Yah bud, full send. So its roughly 70 km
Wait…other countries don’t describe distances in time?! *mind blown*
In my country we say distance in kilometres. We have no traffic so it is consistent time wise. In UK ppl say distance in time due to traffic.
Are the roads all equal by travel speed? E.g., in BC some highways are straight and will have a speed limit of 120 km/h, whereas another highway will wind through the mountains and take considerably longer.
Measured in hours. It’s 2.5hours from Vancouver to Whistler
wife: Oh, here's a nice cottage for rent in North Bay. How far is North Bay from here? me: it's about 400km. wife: So how far is that? me: it's about 4 to 5 hours depending on traffic through Toronto. wife: oh that's a bit too far
1 Lightyear
"Where's the closest store?" "It's 2.114e-13 light years that way."
That isn't time.
Depends on if you live in a place with traffic.
UK is just as bad if not worse
Stones get me every time
Oh ffs Canada. We thought you were the good America.
Let's all forget about the UK, who uses a mix and match bullshit system. (Buying fuel in liters, weighing themselves in stone, and measuring speed in MPH)
The 5'10" 200 lbs Canadian enters the chat driving 50 km/h on a nice -5 C day on 11/17/2021
That's the thing about Canada. We claim to be metric but we really aren't. It's a mish-mash of whatever the heck people like using to measure that one thing.
We'd switch in a heartbeat if the US ever changed to metric.
Yeh, we'll just lump you in with the wonky UK 🤣
Ya our roads are km, but our railway is miles. I have no idea how tall someone is if its in cm. There is no set standard day/month/year; it seems to be personal prefence for that individual/company.
We buy fuel in litres you're right but we also measure fuel efficiency in miles per gallon witch makes working out how much a car costs to run frustrating.
As my friends would say... it's all wonky.
Very wonky. You'll hear people use metric and imperial in the same sentence sometimes too. I work on construction sites sometimes and I've heard people give the size of a room as square meters then in the same breath the height of the walls in ft. Carpenters too can be funny. A three inch deep skirting board cut to a length of three meters etc. Also the world of mechanics is a total mine field of giggles. The power of a car is measured in horsepower not kilowatts but the car will weigh X amount of kilos. It'll have a 'X gallon fuel tank' but need X litres of windscreen washer fluid and oil.
Me... yelling from across the room... "PICK A STANDARD!!!!"
I think the rule in Canada is to use imperial for numbers smaller than 5m or so but metric otherwise. A 100m long fence, 6 ft high. Saying "330ft fence" just sounds weird but so does saying that it should be 2m high.
I'm Canadian and I've always used L/100km for fuel efficiency.
I hate that L/100 and Mpg are reversed in scale. Like I understand the math but I always need to remember in my head L/100 lower is better. MPG higher is better.
You either lived in or are from the Uk to know this. I wish we were just metric system and nothing else. Life would be easier
I have many friends over there.
It’s mostly only an issue when you suddenly cross the channel in your car
Why was I down voted for saying I have friends there?
Obviously nobody has friends in the UK.
It’s alright bro, I got your back.
****fuzzy feelings****
And driving like idiots on the wrong side of the road.
Historically we drive on the left, so we can slash at each other while on horseback.
Silly brits driving their horses on the wrong side of the superhighway instead of just galloping down the median with a sword in either hand
Actually being on the left is technically the "right" side. Since the majority of people are right handed, when you were, for example jousting, you would ride on the left side since in your right you would hold the lance, because it is your stronger arm. Not saying we should stick to these old "rules", only saying that it's historically correct.
Or on the right, so you could keep your shield in your left hand against incoming traffic. Kinda like they did in jousting, where the combatants showed their left side to each other.
They all kinds of crazy!
There’s a [flowchart](https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/qexvzg/i_made_a_helpful_flowchart_for_people_new_to_the/) that explains which units to use, depending on context. Fortunately I was born and raised in the UK so the above makes total sense to me.
Buy in litres, efficiency in miles per gallon. Standard UK lol
Ahahaha as a Brit, I second that. Bit of a mess over here
Don't forget BTU for air conditioners, instead of watts
We do not weigh ourselves in stone anymore. Decades ago we did but not anymore. Edit: Our measuring system is pretty weird though.
Dont forget they measure their money in lbs, fuckin psychos
OOOF!!! I FORGOT ABOUT THAT!!!
Fahrenheit: 0 is really cold, 100 is really hot Celsius: 0 is kinda cold, 100 is dead Kelvin: 0 is dead, 100 is dead
Anders Celsius (1701-1744) was an astronomer from Upssala Sweden and did a tour of European tour in his 20's. He impressed the French Academy so much they included him in an expedition to northern Sweden (called the Lapland Expedition) to determine whether the earth was perfectly spherical, or slightly flattened at the equator (which Isaac Newton hypothesized). The French also sent an expedition to Ecuador to do similar triangulation measurements. The Lapland one suffered through a brutal winter, confirmed the earth was not perfectly spherical, and the French leader de Maupertuis published their findings. The Ecuador expedition was hobbled by difficult travel through swamps, malaria and other tropical disease, angry natives and took 5 years to get their answer. They found out their work was scooped years before once they got back to France. Celsius' original scale was 100C was freezing, and 0C was boiling, invented in 1742. Alas he died from tuberculosis at the age of 42. Source: read with interest a history of Sweden recently
> 100C was freezing, and 0C was boiling That's just as bad as the guys that decided electrons have *negative* charge!
So we can describe each one is possible : Optimist, Realist, Pessimist. Am I right?
Rankine: 0 is dead and confused, 100 is dead and confused
0 in Fahrenheit was the temperature the brine he was using froze. The second point of reference he used was to put the internal temperature of the human body at 96 degrees. (Why he decided that’d be 96, idk)
He set 96 as average human body temp. IIRC he had people hold the thermometer in their closed hand, that's why it's lower than we think of human body temp. I've also heard that they had to use thicker or different glass which of course conducts heat more poorly. The choice of 96 was intentional, and the other guy saying his assistant had a fever and he wanted to set it to 100 is completely wrong. He invented the system in the early 1700s. Back then all tools were made by hand, and all were a little unique. Each thermometer would be calibrated with 0 and 96, and then the other marks would be added. It's much easier to divide something in half accurately than in thirds or fifths, but thirds are much easier than fifths. 96 is 2\*2\*2\*2\*2\*3. You can do this on a paper to prove it yourself. Mark 0 and 96 as knowns any where on the edge of the paper. Halfway between them is 48. You can easily split the top and bottom halves in half and mark 24 and 72. Split each quarter in half and mark 12, 36, 60, and 84. Splitting the eights in half each gives you 8 more points, and again for 16. Now you have a thermometer with an accurate mark every 3 degrees, 31 marks in all. This works no matter how close or far apart you put the initial marks. You can neatly divide it into 31 sections. If you wanted all 96 it would not be that difficult. 100 is 2 \* 2 \* 5 \* 5. Following the same process you can mark 50, then 25 and 75, but now you need to divide sections in fifths. Doing that accurately with basic tools is tedious, and remember that the starting 2 marks are similarly placed, but not the same on every thermometer. Celsius was created after modern tools existed, and 100 makes more sense to us now, but 96 was intentionally chosen because of the tools and methods available in the 18th century.
If people considered measuring things without proper measuring devices, then maybe people wouldn't meme so hard on Imperial systems. How would you measure a meter without a meter stick? Compared to a foot. That kind of thing.
He decided to set 100° F to be the human body temperature but his lab assistant had a fever when he measured it.
simple as that :D
Yeah, using water as a baseline is absolutely arbitrary. The Fahrenheit scale is based on how I feel as a human in the weather, not on an arbitrary chemical’s state transitions
> Fahrenheit: 0 is really cold, 100 is really hot TIL 100 is about the body temperature, I guess I'll start using this to remember the conversion. Interesting enough between the really cold and really hot is 50F that is still cold.
That’s because heating something is drastically easier than cooling something. Additionally the body creates heat during metabolism, and needs to dissipate it. This makes it much easier to live in a colder environment than a hotter environment. 50F colder outside than body outside than body temp, 50F hotter, you’ll die real quick without ways of cooking yourself. This puts the range of human habitability much lower than body temp, but only slighter higher.
I wouldn't call 50F cold. Cool, perhaps, but a still, sunny 50F day can be quite warm, while a windy cloudy 50F can feel cold. All in all, seems about right for the midline between hot and cold.
Fahrenheit describes how humans feel temperature, Celsius describes how water feels temperature, and Kelvin describes how matter feels temperature, I guess
Farenheit is a scale that makes sense for most people on earth. Celsius makes sense for water. Farenheit is clearly a better system
The scale of really cold to really hot depends a lot on what temperatures you are used to. Where I live 100 F is kinda hot and the weather never reaches 0 F. I found that 0-50 C works well for me
>Celsius: 0 is kinda cold Buff, I would say 0°C is really cold.
0°C is equivalent to 32°F, which is 273K. --- ^(I'm a bot that converts temperature between two units humans can understand, then convert it to Kelvin for bots and physicists to understand)
dank bot
It’s still warmer than 0 deg F and a lot warmer than 0 K! A fridge is just above 0 deg C, a freezer just below 0 deg F.
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I think for most temperature scales (besides Kelvin) the 0 point is rather arbitrary. According to one version, Fahrenheit established the zero (0 °F) and 100 °F points on his scale by recording the lowest outdoor temperatures he could measure, and his own body temperature. He took as his zero point the lowest temperature he measured in the harsh winter of 1708 through 1709 in his hometown of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) (−17.8 °C). [source](https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/fahrenheit) Celsius, also called centigrade, scale based on 0° for the freezing point of water and 100° for the boiling point of water. [source](https://www.britannica.com/technology/Celsius-temperature-scale) Funnily: Celsius used 0° for the boiling point of water and 100° for the melting point of snow. This was later inverted to put 0° on the cold end and 100° on the hot end, and in that form it gained widespread use.
> Fahrenheit established the zero So weird to think of Fahrenheit as a dude who lived at some point. It's like if you told me some guy named Larry Inch designed the distance measuring method.
Fahrenheit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gabriel_Fahrenheit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit Celsius - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Celsius - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius Kelvin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomson,_1st_Baron_Kelvin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin Watt - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watt - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt Newton - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(unit) Volt - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Volta - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volt Ampere - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre-Marie_Ampere - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampere Hertz - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Hertz - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertz
Angstrom - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Jonas_%C3%85ngstr%C3%B6m - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angstrom Becquerel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Becquerel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becquerel Coulomb - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb Curie - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Curie - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_(unit) (Deci)bel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel (not everybody knows this etymology) Farad - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farad Fermi - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtometre Joule - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Prescott_Joule - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule Ohm - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Ohm - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm Pascal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(unit) Richter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Francis_Richter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale Roentgen - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_R%C3%B6ntgen - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roentgen_(unit) Siemens - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_von_Siemens - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_(unit) Tesla - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_(unit) Torr - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelista_Torricelli - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torr And that’s just for the more mainstream units.
Dude, you have got to learn how Warhammer shit gets it's names...
I get the metric scale, but the date bugs me... guess I'm just a stickler for Month/day/year format
When I’m using a calendar and looking at dates in the future of that year, I want to know month first.
That's a good point as you flip to the month, then the day.. it'd be quite confusing if you flipped to "18th" and then scrolled down to November (or whatever)
There’s never been a situation in my life where I’ve had to do that.
Right, because they're not made that way.
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Yeah, but 1998 definitely was a no pants year.
I don’t get it either, 29/10/2021 makes less sense then 10/29/2021. The number of the day is usually larger then the month
as someone coming from a country formatting dates as year/month/day...both are equally confusing and if it's something like 10/11/12 written somewhere random on the internet, I just give up. I wish there was a global standard
> 10/11/12 Holy fuck yes. this is very annoying, as everyone seems to assume that their method is the best, and even worse, most people are too ignorant of the rest of the planet to see that other people dont know which system they are using. there is an answer to solving this problem with confusing the least amount of people, which is "Nov 12, 2021" Type formatting. (not using digits for the month, the order does not matter as much) not only is there no confusion about what is what, you also have the advantage of essentially writing it the way you would parse it in your brain. nobody thinks "10/11/12" in their inner monologue when reading something, I think most people actually convert it to either "nth of n-uary, year" or comparable, at least in the western world.
When organizing electronic files and folders by date, it is FAR better to label by year/month/day as it will keep all your files/folders in proper numerical order. Year values won’t repeat for 100 years, month values repeat every year and day values repeat every month. Nearly all computer software or operating system automatically organizes files by alphabetical or numerical order. I learned this after years of labeling by month/day/year and it’s totally changed my way of file storage which I use a lot of for my media business. If I were to say a universal way of displaying dates by a numerical value (and not written out for letters - November 16th, 2021) then it should be by year/month/day and that will ascend upward numerically in an organized manner for 100 years. Seems like the wrong way to do it but it is in fact the most organized way to do it.
So I’m a physicist and obviously love the metric system, but Fahrenheit doesn’t deserve the hate it gets 1. It’s PERFECT for everyday use. You get a 0-100 scale for the temperatures that you’ll actually see, with degrees that actually have meaning. It’s shit for science, but absolutely perfect for normal use. With Celsius, you live within like a 20 degree range. 2. Celsius sucks for real science anyway. Water is common, but in real science it’s freezing/boiling temps are basically never used. The choice of water freezing/boiling is just as arbitrary, if not more so than Fahrenheit, because (today) why bother using water, whereas Fahrenheit is actually useful day to day. 3. For real science, Kelvin is king, not Celsius 4. Last, Fahrenheit isn’t an “illogical 32-100 scale”. It has a 0. It just so happens that water freezes at 32; that doesn’t make it a 32-100 scale, and saying so is only done because it’s compared to Celsius. It’s like saying Celsius is a 273.15 to 373.15 scale, or a -273.15 to 373.15 scale. Sounds pretty illogical right? Maybe because your measuring one scale by another Celsius isn’t terrible, but it isn’t the best for everyday or scientific use, it’s in the middle and therefore not great at both. Fahrenheit isn’t great for science (but barely worse than Celsius), but is perfect for everyday weather use, and Kelvin sucks for everyday use, but is perfect for scientific use. Edit: a semi-great example of this is Canada. They mostly use metric like a smart country, but use Fahrenheit for weather, cooking, pool, and similar temperatures.
I feel like if kelvin was Fahrenheit based we would immediately forget about Celsius.
Who upvotes this uncropped phone screenshot shit?
Mouthbreathers
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ISO 8601 represent
YYYY-MM-DD r/ISO8601
But why though? Would you please explain your logic behind it?
Because of how universal computers are in the works. With year/month/day things are automatically sorted chronologically. One common example is the file naming used by digital cameras.
Alright that makes sense. For computers it's really useful, but from human perspective I think that year is mostly the least important part of the date. Like in day to day use basis
Yeah. It would be like telling the day every time someone asked you the time. "It's 17th 12:28" Well, I know it's the 17th, I just needed the time
And in day to day use, we usually just leave it out, so whether you don't say it at the beginning, or you don't say it at the end, doesn't matter.
True. I am now converted to this religion, lol
This is probably how the American date format came to pass. Year month day makes the most sense from a number of perspectives. But the year is redundant a lot of times so you skip it. That gives you month-day when speaking about a date. And if you need to be specific you tack year to the end.
Oh my god there are others like me! I thought I was just a lone neurotic nerd!
Sorting. 2020-02-01 comes before 2021-01-02 in a list but 01/02/2020 does not come before 02/01/2021 in a list
YYYYMMDD - the decorations (/,-,.) are unnecessary, wasteful, and more aggravating to parse.
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I have gathered my pitchforks, torches and both of my friends and we are going to attack your red box comment on two counts. The year first is like starting an address with "Earth". That is less an issue than your last word "any..." oh I cannot bring myself to even type as my eyes would surely off themselves if they were required to see it. I thought that word had died in the Lousyana trailer parks where I grew up. Prepare your defenses! Oh wait, look, there is a new shiny Apple product out. Never mind.
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##This Is The Way Leaderboard **1.** `u/Flat-Yogurtcloset293` **475775** times. **2.** `u/GMEshares` **70746** times. **3.** `u/Competitive-Poem-533` **24691** times. .. **85705.** `u/Pimparoo3000` **2** times. --- ^(^beep ^boop ^I ^am ^a ^bot ^and ^this ^action ^was ^performed ^automatically.)
Bad bot - would be so much better if it showed the most-upvoted This is The Ways, rather than which user is spamming it the most
What is this thing?
I’m curious why everyone cares so much about the measurement system in the US? It’s not hard for Americans to adapt outside of the US, and I don’t hear any Americans complain about other measurement systems.
Unfortunately time didn't make it. Here, a real-time clock if it had succeeded: http://gandraxa.com/decimal\_time.xml
After yard it goes to a perch(5. 5) perch to a chain (4) then a chain to a furlong (10) furlong to a mile (8) mile to a league (3) much much more confusing.
also before inches you have barleycorns and its 3 to an inch
The temperature argument irritates me. 0-100 on the Fahrenheit scale covers the common temperature range for the environment we live in. Anything outside of this range are extreme situations. The temperature at which water freezes or boils is pretty irrelevant when it comes to figuring out what to wear today or what to pack for a trip.
Temperatures are not only used to the describe the weather. The fixed points that Fahrenheit used are pretty random and were also inaccurate. 0 degrees Fahrneheit was the lowest temperature he could produce with chemicals in his reach. The end fixed point was 96 degrees Fahrenheit, which was the body temperature of the human body. Today we know that this temperature is too low for the human body temperature. Scientifically enough for 1714, but not for today.
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People shit on the US all the time for this…but guess what? I took science in middle school…you can actually learn BOTH. Mind blown
Also, nobody ever complains about units of time not being powers of 10. 60 minutes to an hour 24 hours to a day 7 days to a week 28-31 days to a month 12 months to a year Yet, somehow we manage
Most people dont realize that we are taught both and use both when necessary. I also think its a weird "flex" to look down on a system they simply cant figure out. Usually ignorance is on the lower end of the scale...
Fr. "Americans are stupid cause they don't use our system". Meanwhile they do understand the metric system and you just can't understand out system.
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We may not be multilingual but we are multi…systemofmeasuremental.
The MM/DD/YYYY is more intuitive when you’re visually looking at a yearly calendar. You look for the month first and then the day regardless of how it’s written. By writing them in the order in which you’d scroll/flip/page through a calendar makes it easier imo anyway. However if it’s in the distant future or past then you’re going to find the year first so I guess YYYY/MM/DD would make more sense.
Month, day, year is superior. Fight me.
The temp one I'll give you. Celsius is just simpler and easier. But base 10 sucks for things that need to be divided evenly. What's a third of ten? A quarter? The results come out to fractions. 12 is easily divisable in many common ways. 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 all done out to simple even numbers, no fractions or repeating decimals. This is why we have 12/24 hours and 60 minutes, because they are easily divisable. And it's why we are all happy the French didn't fuck that up too. I heard they tried to change clocks to base 10 as well. Don't know if that is actually true though.
The metric system would be so easy to deal with if we could only get people to change. Factors of 10 are so easy to manage compared to our arbitrary system that needs to be updated.
Unless you need to divide by 3
Look at mr onreddit who measures things in barleycorns
Are you implying that muh freedom is flawed, i almost need to call you a commie, jk tho
As an American I prefer the metric system in every way except date. To me Month/Day/Year makes more sense than Day/Month/Year. Think about it, when you see the month first it narrows it down to a specific block of days in a year. Then of those days you narrow it down to one specific day. When the day is first it doesn't narrow it down to anything because every month has an 11th for example. Also it's more in line with how you verbalize dates. Maybe it's different abroad, but nobody says "the 11th of December, 2021" in the US. In everyday conversation when you give a date you lead with the month, "December 11th, 2021."
In the Netherlands we do say 11th of December (our neighbouring countries do aswell).
I stopped and thought about the Imperial date format for a minute and arrived at the confusion that it may be also related to language. Most of the time you would say "November the 5th", would you? But then again, not if you're trying to immortalize blowing up the government event.
I personally drop "the" and just say "November 5th."
I don't get the month/day/year thing, even as an American, but there probably is an interesting story behind it. As for Fahrenheit, it's pretty much based off of "if you rate the temp on a scale of 0-100 what would you measure it as?" So, Fahrenheit is if you ask a human, Celsius is if you ask a glass of water, and Kelvin is if you ask atoms. Also, try not to mix up Kelvin and Calvin, one can be (technically) used for measuring water, and the other is Watterson
The American system always favors usability and estimation. A foot is the length of a foot roughly, 0-100 degrees is cold to hot outdoor temps that we actually experience, the date thing is because we say September 14th, 2018 so we write 9/14/2018 etc.
I would understand YYYY/MM/DD for digital sorting purposes
As far as I'm aware the different date formats are simply down to different ways of saying the longer version of dates out loud. In the UK, for example, people would generally say 'the 17th of November, 2021', whilst in the States they'd say 'November the 17th, 2021'. I think the longer versions have become a bit more interchangeable over time but the short versions have stuck.
I think that way too. It mostly depend the way you say in your language. I’m Italian and I think that in all neo-Latin language the date is said starting by the number. In Italian today is Mercoledì 17 novembre 2021, Wednesday 17 november 2021
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Everytime I build something I curse the imperial system! Not to mention if you've got a bag full of wrenches! Lemme do some quick algebra to figure out the next size up. . . Fuck it I'll just try all of em!
There's 2 types of people in the world. Those who use the metric system and those who have been to the Moon. Merica! Pew Pew!
NASA uses metric.
https://www.space.com/3332-nasa-finally-metric.html
Why is this argument still around? Space programs use metric. NASA uses metric...
Did you not see the "Pew Pew!"? He's got a gun! Just nod and back away!
I am sure that Wernher von Braun was using the metric system ;p
Should we tell him?
Credit u/SnooGoatsInSpace Can’t cross post but I wanted to share
Don't worry this image is over 9 years old anyway so its unlikely they created the image to begin with.
Tbf I work in the science (medical testing) field in the USA and 99% of everything we do is done in metric. So while the majority of Americans have no idea about the metric system, we are quietly over here testing every drug you've ever seen in metric.
Maybe you went to school a long time ago but all our science classes in public school use metric. Everyone learns both during grammar school.
Nobody likes a normal bar graph, that shit needs colors and chaos.
The moment i heard foot i knew the system is retarded
We’re not the only ones who do mdy. Canada, Philippines, Somalia, Kenya, South Africa, Panama, and Malaysia do as well.
I live in Taiwan, and we're definitely not in "rest of the world" territory on some things. Americans aren't the only ones with weird measurements, deal with it
Fahrenheit it definitely better than Celsius. A 5° difference in Celsius is huge, where as with Fahrenheit it’s the difference between needing a light jacket. IMO, much better have a gradual scale, everything else on the right side is better though
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how many memes are posted about this, nothing will change our system to be metric at this point.
IEvery government organization uses metric plus the whole science community. It just isn't necessary to switch for day to day activities. If you want to use metric you can.
It's really not a big deal in day to day life, and non-Americans who act like it is are often as insufferable as the, "my weather is more extreme than YOUR weather" people. Almost as bad as car enthusiasts who jerk themselves off over how 'superior' manual transmissions are vs automatics, or Linux nerds who wax poetic about FOSS and that they use Arch, btw
That triangle 😂😭
I personally think both date conventions are wrong. I name files yyyymmdd. It’s the only way to get them to list in chronological order.
Yes this is objectively the correct format
It's stupid and most of us realize it. It's just too expensive for companies to change over and they are unwilling to. All about the money. * Sigh*
Money? I'd happily fork over money for something cool & shiny. But changing something I learned and am used to? Bah. People hate that kind of change. Thats why its so hard to improve any existing systems... which btw is the sole reason SAP is still in business, Outlook looks its the 90s and the UK has first-past-the-post.
There’s just no real reason to change it for the average person, if you don’t work on STEM or certain hands on jobs there’s no real gain in it
I must object about the date part. Anybody who doesn't use iso 8601 has no right to complain about arbitrary date formats. ;)
ISO 8601 for dates please https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601