> It's almost all defending against the pro-Fahrenheit folks making strange arguments promoting it, like somehow you can't measure your life unless it's in F.
I didn't make that argument. Fahrenheit is more natural in a lot of cases because of the range and delineation between whole number temperatures. Celsius is slightly less so but not all the time.
My entire point, which was lost in the bikeshedding is that it is not "shocking" that the metric system isn't used everywhere in daily experience because non-metric systems were literally invented to be useful and practical. Are they perfect? No. Neither is the metric system for daily human use.
The U.S. is a big place and thus has wide-ranging temperatures, and that probably contributes to resistance to getting rid of Fahrenheit, amongst other things and other measurement systems. The U.S. built a huge amount of modern infrastructure before anyone else and has never experienced a "rebuild" period. For non-engineering purposes, there's no downside to using non-metric units, and a lot of downsides in converting. As the back and forth here shows, there's probably a strong argument to be made that the measuring systems don't matter at all in an ideal world where it's free to convert entire countries back and forth between them. But for some reason, a lot of the world feels very superior for using the metric system.
Again. Not "shocking" as the original comment I replied to mentioned.
Fahrenheit was defined the way it was not because it was "invented to be useful and practical", but because a mixture of brine to set 0℉ was easy to concoct reliably. That's as close as it got to being "practical".
Every other argument seems to boil down to "I'm not familiar with it, so it's hard", "dealing with 10s is easier than 5s", and "Fahrenheit has more resolution because I've forgotten decimal numbers exist".
The actual superpower of metric is that all the units relate to each other in simple ways. For instance most liquids you and I deal with on a daily basis have a similar density to water, so if you've got 100g of it, it's going to be ~100ml. You don't need to deal with arbitrary artifacts of the measuring system beyond the unit prefixes.
"The US is a big place" , but the world outside the US using Celsius is even bigger, more populated, and with more temperature differences.
Fahrenheit being more natural is purely subjective, there's no good reason at all for it.
Keeping the imperial system is just a matter of convinience because Americans are used to it and changing everything is difficult. Also some people think producers of food and any objects to sell might lose some margin by converting and rounding to the next round number of the new unit
> Fahrenheit is more natural in a lot of cases because of the range and delineation between whole number temperatures. Celsius is slightly less so but not all the time.
You mean "I'm already used to something and I dislike other things."
I didn't make that argument. Fahrenheit is more natural in a lot of cases because of the range and delineation between whole number temperatures. Celsius is slightly less so but not all the time.
My entire point, which was lost in the bikeshedding is that it is not "shocking" that the metric system isn't used everywhere in daily experience because non-metric systems were literally invented to be useful and practical. Are they perfect? No. Neither is the metric system for daily human use.
The U.S. is a big place and thus has wide-ranging temperatures, and that probably contributes to resistance to getting rid of Fahrenheit, amongst other things and other measurement systems. The U.S. built a huge amount of modern infrastructure before anyone else and has never experienced a "rebuild" period. For non-engineering purposes, there's no downside to using non-metric units, and a lot of downsides in converting. As the back and forth here shows, there's probably a strong argument to be made that the measuring systems don't matter at all in an ideal world where it's free to convert entire countries back and forth between them. But for some reason, a lot of the world feels very superior for using the metric system.
Again. Not "shocking" as the original comment I replied to mentioned.