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The Many Times The US Tried To Go Metric
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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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It would be an easy switch for me outside of speed and temperature.
I think farenheight makes the most sense when it comes to describing a comfortable temperature. Baking , computers, and what-not, celsius makes more sense.
Speed, well, that'd take me a long time to get used to.
Measuring for home projects and the like wouldn't be difficult as I had already made that switch at my last job.
Eh American temperatures just sound confusing.
I’ll see headlines like “Record breaking weather over 104 degrees “ and think holy shit people must be dying, and it’s just like only bloody 40 degrees.
I just think of it like this. 0 is fucking cold, 100 is fucking hot. It's the easiest for me to describe comfort levels according to temperature.
72 is room temperature, so anything above, it's time to start taking clothes off. Anything below it's time to start putting more on.
32 is around about where water freezes so if it gets close to that, time to make sure pipes are wrapped and plants are inside. Only really have to worry about that one time a year though.
Celsius:
0 is freezing
10 is not
20 is pleasing
30 is hot
In metric you just look at the first digit:
0x is cold
1x is light jacket
2x is shorts weather
3x is hot
One time... Like late November to early March.
I only have to worry about the change once a year as far as major things go. Which is what I was alluding to.
Comfort levels? I usually wear a hoodie with 1-2 layers down to 32, then my coat for everything below that with layers added the colder it gets.
I live in Michigan so the transition seasons are a crap-shoot on what you'll need to wear that day anyways so I have to keep clothes in my car either way temperature is measured.
American living in Canada here. It took me a couple of months at most to get used to both. I still couldn’t give you an accurate conversion between metric and imperial, but my brain understands the metric units now. It’s just a matter of using the units in everyday life.
Speed and distance were probably the easiest ones for me. You set your car’s dash to use km/h instead of mph. Then you just follow the road laws like normal. If it says the speed limit is 100 km/h, you just don’t let the number on the dash go much above that. Or you just drive the same speed everyone else does like you do on American roads anyway.
Temperature was a bit more confusing, but you pretty quickly learn that you’ll be happy if you set the thermostat to 18-24 and that if the temperature outside hits 30, it’s going to be a hot day. That kind of precision is more than enough for your mind.
I genuinely used to think I’d have a hard time switching to metric for most things. In my mind, I’d always have to be converting things back to imperial in my head. But that just isn’t the way it works. You quickly just start to relate the units to the real world and you understand it pretty quick.
The speed thing would be difficult for me as I'm into car culture so with that I'm far too used to MP/H.
Speed limits and driving would be easy as I have a VW with nice clear gauging for both speeds and my info center I think can be switched over anyways.
Horsepower/torque numbers are also what the fuck. That might be a British thing though. What is the most common measurement for that outside the US?
The temp thing I still don't think I could ever change. Not like I would do it in a way that would affect people.
I already use celcius as much I can outside of temp.
HP is kiloWatt and lb/ft is Newtonmeter
kW=(0.105NmRPM)/1000 HP=(LbFt*RPM)/5252
Hahahs LbFt 😭
"Making sense" is probably a habit, but all the units in Si are made so they are easy to convert to and from. Temperature included. So there's practicality tied to it. Just like 1l of water is also 1kg of water, which is also 1000cm³ of water. Same thing goes with temperature where Celsius is tied to transition states of the water, 0° for freezing, 100°C for boiling/gas. But it's not as tightly related as other units and even more rarely used for conversion. For us in the Si world it makes sense because everything is in scales of 100 or 1000, with definite start and end.