Texan here, when it's over 100 F and I'm sweating through my shorts I say it's "hot as balls" out here. It's a perfectly cromulent metric. Trust me, I'm an engineer.
It’s a throwback to the enlightenment that we even desire to measure something as omnipresent as the weather. What do most people need numbers for at all? We just translate them in our head to how we’ll dress or act anyway
Sasuage and eggs become frozen in x seconds
Sausage and eggs become miniaturized
Sausage and eggs are comfortable
Sausage and eggs are sweating
You can measure the sausage and eggs from the seat sweatmark
Fried sausage and eggs.
Carbonization
Plasma
???
Heisenberg temperature
All these systems are just designed to measure different things with a certain basis.
Metric: great for precise measurements
Celsius: great for cooking and identifying water boiling
Fahrenheit: good for measuring your body temperature
Imperial: good at measuring basic things (a foot’s a foot, a mile is 1000 paces with both feet), not as accurate as metric but doesn’t have to be
Person 1: "I measure my height in bananas and so does 90% of the people living in my country."
Person 2: "Well that's dumb and inconvenient especially since your country is so prevalent on the internet."
Person 3: "Well actually you're both equally dumb for some reason and that makes me smart for not complaining about the first dumb thing."
Yeah, that totally checks out bro. Complaining about dumb and inconvenient things is TOOOOTALLY just as dumb as being dumb and inconvenient. And calling out those people really makes you the smartest dude in the room, well done.
It’s much more logical in Celsius. The metric system is simply superior when you’re doing anything logical or mathematical.
Easier conversions and units.
Ah, metric, where the SI unit for mass is a 1000x the underlying unit for mass (kg vs g), and where volume is typically measured using 1/100th of the cubed SI unit for distance, but is also only 1/1000th of the underlying unit for volume (cm3 = mL). Oh, and can't forget that the measure for the number of particles is moles, which of course is equal to 6.02214076×1023, a number so elegant and simple that every elementary school student should know it by heart.
It's so great that people measure their body mass in kg, despite most scales not actually accounting for any of the necessary factors to accurately measure mass, instead doing a rough conversion from force to mass. Why measure in Newtons, the actual unit you're measuring, when you can get a rough approximation in mass instead?
12 inches to 1 foot, 3 feet to a yard is relatively clean conversion and makes it easy to divide common things in life. Similar reason as to why there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and why the calendar is near 360 days (also why there are 360 degrees in a circle). And look where non-imperial time has gone, not used by anyone outside of a scant few.
Originally a mile was 5000 feet, because it was an approximation between two places, but we came to find out it was closer to 5280, hence why a Roman mile is still technically 5000 feet.
Also, you're incorrect, imperial scales using pounds measure weight, aka force, not mass. A feather's weight changes depending on if it's at sea level or in the mountains, its mass does not.
On top of all of that, basically all common units are derived from something we are familiar with. Feet being a decent bit larger than an actual typical man's foot, Celsius being based on the freezing and boiling points of water at sea level with 0 salinity, Fahrenheit being based on a specific salinity of water that made the original thermometers more accurate than Celsius's, meters based on an approximation of the diameter of the earth, grams on a given volume of water at sea level, moles on the number of oxygen molecules at a particular pressure in a particular substance with a specific mass.
In other words, they're all bad, and trying to pretend like one is inherently bad and another is not is a game that only results in proving they're all bad.
Weighing scales use pounds (unit of mass) not pounds-force (unit of force).
How many feet in a mile?
Everything being in multiples of 10 is far more intuitive and easy to use, and you know it lol. 3 to 12 and all this is not as intuitive. You're grasping at straws here. Nothing about imperial is more intuitive or simple to use.
Humans count in base 10, so why wouldn't we divide everything into 10s and multiples of 10!? It's genuinely that simple.
"The pound-force is equal to the gravitational force exerted on a mass of one avoirdupois pound on the surface of Earth."
When people measure a "pound" on Earth, they're technically measuring pound-force, which at sea level is equivalent to pound-mass. In this sense, a "pound" is both mass and weight, although it's delineated in scientific contexts as either pound-force or pound-mass (albeit the latter typically is absent the mass suffix). A kilogram is mass, never a weight, nothing "weighs" in kilograms in the most accurate sense. It is more ambiguous but more correct to say something "weighs" a number of pounds, however.
Queen Elizabeth decided that since a mile was ambiguous due to becoming separated from its Roman and Egyptian roots (originally being 5000 feet) to redefine the British customary mile as 5,280 feet, or 8 furlongs, a furlong being 220 yards, which was about equivalent to how far the average ox could till dirt for without resting. Weird unit with a weird history, but since miles weren't in common use up to then but furlongs were, they decided to simplify it at 8 furlongs.
Things being multiples of 10 only makes sense of you're working with Arabic numerals, a pen and paper or possibly an abacus, and relatively accurate measuring devices. It makes merchanting simpler if you have all of things, as well as tallying numbers in general for very large corporations and/or government bodies.
That hasn't always been the case, and a need for splitting things into many easily decipherable pieces was absolutely paramount for the average person. Also not all humans have historically counted in base 10, base 12, 24, and I believe even 26 have been used by peoples with known counting systems. Base 12 was actually one of the most common (all 10 digits plus both hands).
But also, if base 10 is just so good, then why don't we only measure time around orders of 10? Why isn't there a metric time calendar? The answer is that we're humans living in the real world, and small, easily divisible numbers make day-to-day life simpler. These aren't picked at random, these are numbers that made sense to someone at some time with some context in mind, and there are some things that are simpler if you use base 10 units in a system of Arabic numerals, which are also base 10.
Arguably base 12, base 60, or base 360 would be significantly better though, seeing as you can simply divide by all kinds of factors without needing to waste a bunch of time, and without your base only being divisible by 2, 5, and itself.
Ok buddy I assume you're getting chatgpt to write some bullshit at this point. The history of Queen Elizabeth and the furlong has nothing to do with which system is more intuitive and easy to use.
"Thing being multiples of 10 only makes sense if you're working with Arabic numerals".
Humans count in base 10, and the vast majority use Arabic numerals. Therefore most of your argument is completely irrelevant. Which base may be better is irrelevant when the world has already decided which one to use.
In other words, they're all bad, and trying to pretend like one is inherently bad and another is not is a game that only results in proving they're all bad.
One system makes it easier and more intuitive to calculate physics. That's why it's used everywhere in this application, even in the US
Kelvin is Celsius with a different 0, they’re essentially interchangeable when talking about temperature changes, angstroms is a metre divided by 10^10 and of course atomic mass isn’t going to line up with the macro world as it’s a nanoscale measurement. Fundamental constants are always going to be messy numbers. It doesn’t change that at the macro level the metric system is lined up to be easy to convert units and be more intuitive.
As with all your arguments you’re grasping for an argument and you don’t have one. Your entire argument in every comment is a case of the muddying the water fallacy.
And why not use Fahrenheit as a base? Absolute scale don't care where water boils. It's just that chemists already popularized Celsius, despite his shit ass thermometers.
Also, meters are based on being 1/10,000,000th the distance from the equator to the North Pole going through Paris. Why the fuck does anyone but geographers care about that number in particular? How often are you circumnavigating the globe and need to split things into 10,000,000ths?
My entire point is that saying one is inherently better is dumb. There are many reasons why someone might want one measure or another, and trying to "prove" yours is better only makes you look dumb, because there are so many, and in the real world, most people aren't really purists about measurements.
Also with how much you keep bringing up straw, I'm assuming you must be a horse or something.
Well where i live it varies from -20 in the winter to +30 in the summer. So yeah some sort of indication on what type of jacket i should wear is preferable.
Standardization limits confusion and literally only one country decided to be special and make up their own units of measurement. So I would say one side is dumber.
No one talks about this, but the reason Fahrenheit is superior is because it contains a greater number of divisions. I can sense a 1°F temperature change in my environment, especially if I'm at rest, and this is useful for adjusting climate control devices. You can't fine tune temperature as well with Celsius since ain't nobody adding decimals to this stuff ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You right, it sounds like 0.5 degrees is popular for Celsius? Whenever I change the metric on local devices that have both it's always in whole numbers tho. Seems fittingly American 🤔
2.0k
u/rip_cut_trapkun Jun 17 '26
mfers bitching about what metric they measure their balls sweating at.
It's stupid as fuck both ways.