memes

As a European living in the US now for many years the temperature scale is the least of my annoyances. It's easy enough to memorize be ranges for what to wear. Fahrenheit is more granular, which is nice sometimes but really doesn't matter.

No, let's convert all the ridiculous weight/volume measures first. Having two kinds of ounces makes no sense. Measuring solids by volume (mostly) doesn't make sense. Having different units for different magnitudes doesn't make sense.

Fortunately things are often labeled in both metric and customary units so I can convert way easier.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to have my 12 fluid ounces of coffee and a 1/3 cup of oatmeal.

Yes... Thank you British Empire, French Empire, and Spanish Empire for your contributions to the system.

-British: Mile, Foot, Inch, Yard

-Spanish: Dollar, from the Spanish Pieces of 8

-French: You know what you did

Yeah, 100°C is pretty warm

C is even more intuitive than the graphic.

0 = water's frozen 100 = water's boiling

The US could have switched to the world-wide standard years ago but under Reagan the switch was abandoned.

My water does not describe 100°C as "warm"

1 mile is 5 tomAtoes (5280)

my kid

Edit: formatting

The original Fahrenheit system was actually pretty clever. It set 0° at the temperature of brine and 96° at internal body temperature. That made marking a thermometer really easy. Like, ridiculously easy. 96 is divisible by two many times before reaching a decimal.

Because the freezing temperature of water was really close to 32°, the later Fahrenheit system set that as the lower temperature and 212° as the boiling point instead of using body temperature. That made marking a thermometer more difficult, and basically took away Fahrenheit’s only advantage. It was more consistent though. Now Fahrenheit is formally defined based on Kelvin.

Centigrade was originally marked as 100° at the freezing temperature, going down as temperature increases to 0° at the boiling temperature. Obviously that didn’t last long. The downside is that marking a Celsius thermometer depended on atmospheric pressure. Now Celsius is defined based on Kelvin by -273.15° being absolute zero and a degree corresponding to a very specific amount of heat energy increase.

So yeah, Fahrenheit hasn’t made any sense for many many years.