this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Standardization
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The choice of water's melting and boiling point as two points in the Celsius scale is arbitrary, too. Why not choose the melting and boiling point of something like Cesium? It would have been more fun because who doesn't like Cesium? And it could still use °C. Humans can live in a comfortable 3 degree range in this new system. All of the other units which include temperature can be reconfigured to use this system just as easily as Celsius. We can massage everything so the Joule, etc. is based on 1°C (Cesium, not Celsius!)
I'm not defending the Imperial system. I'm just pointing out the Celsius system is based on arbitrary choices, too.
Freezing water is useful to everyday life, as you need to know if there's ice on the road. So having that be a simple number makes sense
Kinda like knowing that if someone's temperature is over 100 they're probably too hot and there might be a problem. That's an easy number for me to remember. Do you have a problem remembering 37? Cuz I can remember 32.
The point I was responding to was claiming that the definition of the centigrade scale is arbitrary when compared to everyday life, which its clearly not.
Both obviously claim to have neater numbers for everyday life, and the change from F to C doesn't really fit in with the argument of decimalisation like everything else, but you do have to ask why americans dont want to modernise like the rest of the world
A lot of us do. Engineers and scientists all use metric. Anyone who uses tools hate the they need to have two different sets of wrenches or whatever else. I personally find it annoying when I hear something in Celsius or metric and need to do a mental conversion (which a lot of us can't do). I think we should switch over to metric, but a lot of us don't like the change. And as much as I wouldn't be that opposed to switching to Celsius, I don't see much value in that specific metric