Can the US just ban Celsius from the world please?

Izo

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I pity American physicians. Growing up with a backwards system, yet still have to use metric for work. Haaayoooo
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Eomer

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OD of pipe is always standard till 12" and above. Metric pipe follows the same OD sizes
What? Shit like schedule X steel is nominal OD. Copper tube size is different. As is PEX (which can either be nominal or OD sized). Most DWV pipe is nominal. The point I was making though, is this: nominal 1-1/2" pipe is for example 1.9 inches OD. So when showing that size of pipe on metric drawings, should it be shown as 38 mm? Or 48 mm? Most times it's shown as 38 or 40 in my experience, which when you think about it is actually kind of stupid since the pipe is actually 48 mm in true outer diameter.

Lejina_sl said:
Oh great, because what we need is Eomer going on another plumbing rant.
Don't make me educate you, bro.

noodleface_sl said:
The best part about engineering (and any science) school in America is everything we learn and work on is in metric. Literally never use imperial unless we have to explain it to some moron who doesn't understand what a meter is or whatever. Even voltage and current uses milli-, kilo-, Mega-, etc. It's like we know using imperial is retarded, but probably because the blacks and rednecks can't handle the change so we have to stay with it.
When I was in engineering 10+ years ago, all the lab assignments, seminars, and instruction were in metric. But there was always some cunt of a professor who'd have imperial questions on his mid term or final, just to fuck with people.
 

Luthair

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Fahrenheit definitely seems to be based on arbitrary points, I've heard both 100 degrees matching horses blood and his wife's temperature (which of course would mean she was abnormally hot).

The arguments you guys are making for Fahrenheit being "better" are based on simply being familiar with it. In both scales people cannot differentiate a degree, there are too many outside influences (humidity, wind, ambient vs radiating point, etc.) and anytime precision is needed measurement will be taken in real numbers. Celsius matches real world events well, around 0 expect snow & ice and 20 is room temp.

Canada does not officially use the imperial system; people use it on an adhoc basis which isn't really surprising as the transition occurred after the baby boomer generation grew up using imperial. The date one is annoying due to inconsistency and ambiguity, really it makes me prefer the Y-M-D format as Y-D-M is never used.
 

FiReBReTHa

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I lived in Sweden ages ago and found the YMD system they used fucking annoying until recently when it makes sense from a computer's perspective. It hurts when you find something you hate is actually pretty damn useful.
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Converted to that as well. pain in the ass organizing photos when they are done by month so they group by
January-2012
january 2013
january 2011
then
Feb-2011
Feb-2012
Feb 2013

easier,
2011 jan
2011 feb

2012 jan
2012 feb

2013 jan
2013 feb
 

Frenzied Wombat

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This debate is stupid because whatever your personal "feelings" may be, from a logical perspective the metric system is superior in every way. Besides the obvious advantages, I've never seen a college physics, chemistry, math, or biology textbook that has ever used anything but the Metric system. I can't imagine what D=Vt+1/2gt2 would look like if it had to be converted to Imperial.
 

Tirant

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That's the way it works. When people say Americans don't use metric, they are wrong for all meaningful mathematical work, all of which is done in metric. Outside of science communities, imperial is used and is exactly as useful.

Not like its hard to learn metric.
 

The Ancient_sl

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speaking of bytes I wish I could go back in time and convince everyone to use a base 8, 12 or 16 number system instead of ten. I don't care how many fingers I have, ten is awful.
Why?

The arguments you guys are making for Fahrenheit being "better" are based on simply being familiar with it. In both scales people cannot differentiate a degree, there are too many outside influences (humidity, wind, ambient vs radiating point, etc.) and anytime precision is needed measurement will be taken in real numbers. Celsius matches real world events well, around 0 expect snow & ice and 20 is room temp.
I don't agree with your suggestion that a scale that uses ~40 degrees to differentiate between the realm of habitable temperatures is better than a scale that uses ~100. It's not simply a matter of familiarity. I know because I can see the advantage to the metric system for measurements of distance and volume and I can see the sensibility of D/M/Y, but my experience with using Celsius and Fahrenheit is that Fahrenheit simply works better at describing temperature for humans.

You are wrong about not being able to differentiate a degree as well. If I turn my thermostat up or down one degree it can change my comfort level.
 

Ravishing

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as an aside, ALL US DOT(department of transportation) plans HAVE to be done in metric.
Hmm, this is not accurate at all:

Updated 10/9/2013:http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/construction/cqit/metric.cfm
From 1988 to 1998, the FHWA's policy required the use of metric units in the Federal-aid highway program; however, the 1998 Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century made the use of metric units optional.
My company is primarily a heavy highway/bridge construction company with individual projects that value over $200 million each. There was the short period in the 90s where we were bidding on Metric projects. Since then practically 99.9% of all our projects (mostly DOT work) has all been Imperial. I remember 1 project in the 2000s that was in metric. Most agencies use Imperial to limit mathematical errors starting at the bidding level and into construction. There were just way too many mistakes being made with metric conversions. Large construction projects require tons of coordination and all it takes is one subcontractor to make a mistake to cause a lot of havoc.
 

Hoss

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Fahrenheit definitely seems to be based on arbitrary points, I've heard both 100 degrees matching horses blood and his wife's temperature (which of course would mean she was abnormally hot).

The arguments you guys are making for Fahrenheit being "better" are based on simply being familiar with it. In both scales people cannot differentiate a degree,
Never heard those stories. The only one I ever heard is that he was studying temperature and he set 0 to be the lowest he thought the temperature would ever get where he was (because he hated working with negatives) and made 1 degree the smallest change in temp he could detect without instruments. Normal people absolutely can detect a 1 degree F change in temperature.

This debate is stupid because whatever your personal "feelings" may be, from a logical perspective the metric system is superior in every way. Besides the obvious advantages, I've never seen a college physics, chemistry, math, or biology textbook that has ever used anything but the Metric system.I can't imagine what D=Vt+1/2gt2 would look like if it had to be converted to Imperial.
This just supports what I said on the first page. Metric is for people who suck at math.
 

Frenzied Wombat

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This just supports what I said on the first page. Metric is for people who suck at math.
Quite the opposite, it's for people that are good at math that don't want to waste needless time performing trivial measurement conversions before they can actually start working on the REAL math. If I was working on the Imperial equivalent of Schrodinger's equation, converting imperial weights wouldn't be the hard part, solving the equation, whether it be in imperial or metric, is..

I doubt the people who write physics and chemistry textbooks "suck at math" lol
 

Homsar

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American footbal comes from rugby(rugby football) different rules and called it football. Sports played by peasants ect and not on horses is where the name football comes from. The name Soccer also comes from Europe...
 
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my experience with using Celsius and Fahrenheit is that Fahrenheit simply works better at describing temperature for humans.
And for someone that has grown up with celsius, the fahrenheit scale doesn't make any sense. I pretty much always have to use google to convert a fahrenheit temperature to celsius for it to make sense to me. Even with quite a lot of exposure to it thx to internet and racing games. I have learned that 32F is 0C and body temp is ~100. Everything else I have to convert with google still.

Same thing with PSI, in racing games I adjust tire pressures in PSI because I got used to it in nascar games back in the days but it's basically arbitrary number to me and I can't visualize what it is in bar (which I use irl to adjust my tire pressures).
 

Hoss

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I doubt the people who write physics and chemistry textbooks "suck at math" lol
No, but the textbooks are written for people who do.

I'll re-phrase a little. Anyone who says metric is better because imperial is too hard just wants to use metric because they suck at math. People who say it because they 'grew up on it', obviously have other reasons for being wrong.
 

The Ancient_sl

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And for someone that has grown up with celsius, the fahrenheit scale doesn't make any sense. I pretty much always have to use google to convert a fahrenheit temperature to celsius for it to make sense to me. Even with quite a lot of exposure to it thx to internet and racing games. I have learned that 32F is 0C and body temp is ~100. Everything else I have to convert with google still.
That's...not what I was saying. Obviously you are going to be more familiar with the one you use all your life. The scaling on Fahrenheit is more applicable to human experience. The only true benefit Celcius provides is freezing at 0. That is a good marker for a relevant data point. The effort to learn freezing at 32 doesn't outweigh Fahrenheit's other benefits.
 

Frenzied Wombat

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No, but the textbooks are written for people who do.

I'll re-phrase a little. Anyone who says metric is better because imperial is too hard just wants to use metric because they suck at math. People who say it because they 'grew up on it', obviously have other reasons for being wrong.
Dude, it has nothing to do with "sucking" and everything to do with efficiency. It's like saying that those that drive instead of walk are just lazy and suck at walking. No, driving is just incredibly more efficient. Metric and Imperial accomplish the exact same thing, measurement, the difference is that one intra-converts purely based on moving a decimal point, whilst the other uses all sorts of arbitrary formulas to do the exact same thing.

Oh, and I doubt my old Quantum Chemistry/Physics textbooks were written for people that "suck at math".
 

ohkcrlho

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American footbal comes from rugby(rugby football) different rules and called it football. Sports played by peasants ect and not on horses is where the name football comes from.The name Soccer also comes from Europe...
and nobody here use the term soccer
 

The Ancient_sl

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There was a video from John Cleese, a man I respect, lambasting Americans for their use of the term Soccer. I was like, WTF John, where do you think we got the term from?
 

Homsar

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Relevance? English came up with it and then it's somehow our dumb name for football.
Pretty much, amazing that brits ect. came up with soccer and make fun of Americans for calling it football when it comes from rugby football. Full retard when I see that photo posted by europeans/soccer fans