Pity the translator who has to look at that title and make the decision between Fahrenheit, Celsius, Kelvin, and just saying the hell with it all and finding a translation for “The Firemen”.
Remember that, but misunderstood it then and hoped that if you don't add missions to the book we would maybe see a PDF like the Runenberg missions. ;)
You know the Farenheit scale predates Centigrade by about 20 years, right? I'm an American who freely recognizes that the SI units and measures have a lot of advantages over the weird and irregular ones we use here, but doesn't make them "not real".
Yeah, SI was invented to make international trade and science exchange more feasible and above all consistent as a replacement and improvement for several measuring systems, not really to fill in a void where no system previously existed.
And it generally does that (especially for spaceflight things!) But using degF for weather temperature is a more human-friendly system.
They do! Measuring people in stones and potato or length in dicks and one sixteenth of a dead horse. Just silly.
All units are arbitrary; what makes them real is that there is an existing consensus about what they mean and how to use them. It's kind of like money in that regard.
Talk about off topic, hah! I don't think I agree that it's more human-friendly. 0 degrees is when the streets outside my house starts getting slippery, 100 degrees is the temperature of the water you pour on coffee* and Fahrenheit lands on 98,4 (which is about as uneven as Celsius, to be honest) for my resting body temperature**. It's probably a matter of being used to it combined with living in a climate where the freezing point of water is a really common comparison point. * Not as relevant to civilised people since civilised people drink tea, but the barbarians around here drink stupid amounts of coffee per person and year. ** Due to a common cold it's close enough to 100ºF atm
Fortunately the kind people at The Register have provided a handy tool for converting units. Ever needed to convert between double decker buses and linguine? Unsure as to how many nanowales a standard football pitch is (Football, not American Handegg)? El Reg have you covered https://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html
Same here - I blame America. [emoji14] SI units make a whole pile more sense. I disagree that Fahrenheit makes sense for weather - it surely does matter what you're used to, but living somewhere that is below freezing half the year 0=freezing is very convenient, and 20=room temp is about as easy to memorize as 70=room temp. ToadChild is right that all units of measure are arbitrary, but I'd argue some are more arbitrary than others. Using temperature again, Celsius is based on water's freezing and boiling points. Fahrenheit is based thus: 0 degrees is the freezing point of some saltwater slush at the mouth of the Thames (or something like that), and 100 degrees was the temperature of the inventor's wife's armpit, lol. She must not have been feeling good that day, haha.
I'm fairly sure you're guessing as well as it'd likely depend on where each individual tool or part was made and that it's sourced from both sides of the border. Insert joke about the Thames not qualifying as "water". Fahrenheit is based off of the melting and boiling points of a brine solution made from equal parts ice, water and salt - no idea if that's by volume or weight because frankly it doesn't matter as it has been adjusted to be defined by Celsius since then. Inch, feet, Fahrenheit, stones, pounds - they're all just different ways of writing the corresponding measurements of SI. And soon we'll no longer have the current iffy definition of what a KG is, which will clear up the issue of the reference KG putting on weight due to pollution in Paris.
Why? Serious question. For me it feels more natural to have 0 degrees at the water freezing point which translates directly to frost and ice when below 0, than at -32 C which for me differs very little from -36 and -25 as they all fall under "fucking cold".
The main argument in favor of human-friendliness of F I've seen is that its degrees are smaller, so a nice round number represents a distinct temperature. I can feel the difference between my home thermostat being set to 69F or 70F, but in C that's more like 20.5 vs 21 degrees. You can still measure it, but the numbers are a bit messier.
If the argument is that "decimal figures are difficult to understand" then that strikes me as an indictment of the American education system rather than a benefit of Fahrenheit.
More like, 100degF is the start of 'fucking hot' (in the local lack-of-humidity). There is something to say for having the typical freezing point of water as 0deg as opposed to the lowest possible freezing point of water, though!
