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I had honestly intended to be better about getting annoyed with people on the interweb. Seriously I had. Unfortunately I've let this argument from James Nicholl's ( [Bad username or unknown identity: james_nicoll)] LJ spill into 2009.
It's yet another dumb argument about the metric system.
Yes, it's dumb. Fahrenheit is a silly scale, sorry guys, it is. It's not intuitive, it's not informative and it doesn't tell somebody who didn't grow up with it squat about anything.
The piece which has particularly got to me is the assertive statement that degrees C is not accurate enough to tell you what the conditions are like near the melting point of water. In particular, one poster is asserting that as 1C could represent a range from 33F to 35F then this means that you wouldn't know if it was icy or not if the overnight temperature was 33 rather than 35...
Excuse me while I vent slightly. Coming from a place with notoriously unreliable weather forecasting and having moved to a place (Seattle) where the dropouts from the UK seem to come to get away from the stress, I have never placed all that much faith in the numbers the weather forecast tell, except as a general guideline. However, to address his substantive point; that 33F means icy patches and 35 doesn't, he is quite right. However, 1C is generally given with an ice warning for drivers. I also note, that my last few British cars had thermometers which gave an audible ice warning at temperatures below 4C. I also note, again, that, in fact, pretty much everybody in the world manages to handle the Celsius scale without too much trouble and without this confusion arising.
They manage to visualise metres too. Which is amusing because American friends have told me that you can't possibly visualise something that was entirely made up.
I'd better stop reading SF.
That's all, move along please, nothing to see here....
It's yet another dumb argument about the metric system.
Yes, it's dumb. Fahrenheit is a silly scale, sorry guys, it is. It's not intuitive, it's not informative and it doesn't tell somebody who didn't grow up with it squat about anything.
The piece which has particularly got to me is the assertive statement that degrees C is not accurate enough to tell you what the conditions are like near the melting point of water. In particular, one poster is asserting that as 1C could represent a range from 33F to 35F then this means that you wouldn't know if it was icy or not if the overnight temperature was 33 rather than 35...
Excuse me while I vent slightly. Coming from a place with notoriously unreliable weather forecasting and having moved to a place (Seattle) where the dropouts from the UK seem to come to get away from the stress, I have never placed all that much faith in the numbers the weather forecast tell, except as a general guideline. However, to address his substantive point; that 33F means icy patches and 35 doesn't, he is quite right. However, 1C is generally given with an ice warning for drivers. I also note, that my last few British cars had thermometers which gave an audible ice warning at temperatures below 4C. I also note, again, that, in fact, pretty much everybody in the world manages to handle the Celsius scale without too much trouble and without this confusion arising.
They manage to visualise metres too. Which is amusing because American friends have told me that you can't possibly visualise something that was entirely made up.
I'd better stop reading SF.
That's all, move along please, nothing to see here....
