Discussion: fahrenheit vs celsius

how do i change my settings so that the weather thing on the right hand side shows me the proper temp ie Celsius???

in your profile/preferences, change "weather/weight units" to metric.

why don't you americans start using the same units as the rest of the world?

Because there's no drop-down menu for that.

Seriously, do you think our so-called "President" could handle the confusion of a system based on 10's?

"rest of the world"

Hey, last I heard (a while ago), South Yemen, North Yemen, Brunei, and Sierra Leone, had not yet joined the 'metric conspiracy'.

Why does the rest of the world get so worked up about this? I can understand wanting the units of trade standardized, but why does someone in Paris care that the good folks of Peoria are referring to "40" as "chilly". Is F=9C/5+32 really that tough? "Double it and add 30" is a pretty good approximation.

ebuckley, you have reminded me of the old "Bob and Doug" routine involving the metric six pack that contained 42 beers.

Spending a career dealing with historical temperature measurements means I'm reasonably fluent in both languages. I might even put my name to a media release talking about the earliest date it has ever reached 100F in spring in Alice Springs, if the weather in Alice Springs obliges in the next few days (it was a degree or so short yesterday).

The places where imperial measurements live on in Australia are people's heights and the weight of newborn babies. A lot of country people also still talk about rainfall in inches and points (=0.01 inch).

Dare I mention that Mars probe a few years back?

Charlie - were Bob and Doug the old Maine comics? The name rings a bell

No that's Bob and Ray. Bob and Doug (not there real names) were two guys who pretended to be Canadian about 25 years ago. They had a stereotypical shtick that involved a lot of lines about beer and back bacon and wearing toques. I know about them because my older son was quite enamored of them when he was a teenager. If I remember right, one of them was Mike Myers, who grew up to be Austin Powers, among other notable achievements.

In the UK, you tend to talk about hot days in F, and cold days in C...

Go figure...

Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis actually were Canadian (maybe they've changed citizenship since - I haven't kept track). Bob and Doug McKenzie were characters they played in a recurring segment on the SCTV TV show called the Great White North and also in a feature length film called Strange Brew (also starring Max von Sydow).

With the catchphrase, "Take off, you hoser!".

Metric FTW
It just makes more sense. 1-100 degrees c for water
1000 m
mass in kg

As a side not. lb beeing a messure of weight is confusing and really who has heard of a slug?

Just kidding, ppl can live in the past. Uk still uses miles as well

As a side not. lb beeing a messure of weight is confusing and really who has heard of a slug?

Actually, I think using pounds as a measure of weight is perfectly acceptable. It's kilograms as "weight" that gets confusing. I used to prefer Newtons, but Kenny hasn't seemed to have implemented that yet. It's so much more satisfying to say, "I lost 40 Newtons this month".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECvsgeO9rvc
Coo roo koo koo koo koo koo koo!
Minus 40 is about the same on both scales. Growing up, about half the days in the year in Saskatchewan were about that temperature, so one never really had to distinguish between F and C....

Cristina, it depends why you're trying to lose the part of your body you're trying to lose. If it's to run faster, presumably losing weight is the goal. If it's to conform to a conventional ideal of good looks, mass might be what you want to lose. Ken appears to have decided that people on Attackpoint are tracking their beauty, not their speed. (Either that or they learnt something in a physics course sometime.)

-40 is exactly the same in F and C.

To climb hills faster, losing weight might be good. For something like the 100 meter (or 100 yard) dash, losing mass might be helpful. For the appearance goal, it could be losing volume.

Losing mass and loosing weight equate to the same thing dont they 0_0

They are just multiples of the factor of gravitational acceleration, which ever system u use.

I once visited a bio lab that had a large walk in freezer whose temperature was kept at -40F/C. We all went inside to hang out for a while. It was fun.

But somehow the world does just fine using that silly, confusing, Sumerian base 60 system to measure at least some things, until, of course, we get to the era of Battlestar Galactica :)

BTW, on a recent trip to Canada, all land I saw for sale was listed in acres, all car adverts praised the wonderful "miles per gallon" they were getting, Boston Pizza described their pizza in inches, and when I asked for directions in Regina, I was quoted in miles. Perhaps it was an SK thing. I don't actually care what units other people use, (tho I prefer metric myself), I just found it interesting.

A couple other bits of trivia -- I believe Liberia and Burma are the only countries which have not officially adopted the metric system (I read this somewhere, but don't care enough to find the reference); the US became officially metric in the 1860s under Andrew Johnson, IIRC. (alot of stupid prez's since then I guess :))

Ah, I did mean Liberia, not Sierra Leone - sorry Leonians.

Thomas Jefferson pushed for metric.

They are just multiples of the factor of gravitational acceleration, which ever system u use.

Gravitational acceleration is not constant. If I want to lose weight, I merely need to go to a higher altitude. To lose mass, I need to eat less. Hiking to a higher altitude accomplishes both.

As for C being more "logical", I suppose it is if you're a physicist, but for the average person, the boiling point of water is pretty arbitary. F puts the 0-100 scale on everyday terms: 100 is really hot and 0 is friggin' cold. Of course one can easily adapt to either system and if one was to adopt metric units for everything else, one should use C as well, but since we rarely need to take advantage of the underlying number base when using temperature (nobody cares about a millidegree), it seems silly to claim that one scale is inherently better than another.

And, yes Charlie, I had Bob & Doug in mind when I used "double it and add thirty".

I thought the AP crowd were measuring their weight in PGs.

petergrams? (yes, I know what 'the G' is...)

Surely those are when you have Peter Gagarin deliver a message for you? Ideally in song, although singing petergrams presumably cost more.

You mean he doesn´t jump out of a cake...?

You mean he doesn´t jump out of a cake...?

I haven't yet, but there's always a first time. If it was a team fundraiser, and the terms were sufficiently rewarding....

As long as the cake isn't the dessert at the team fundraiser banquet...

Oh, and Randy - all those imperial units that you saw in Saskatchewan are there to make visiting Americans feel comfortable. ;-)

Almost comfortable - as in gallons with 20 oz, just to make you think you're getting a better deal.

...and then back in the day when there were US gallons and Canadian gallons. Which do you use for fuel efficiency?

imperial + metric = gimli glider
(Pearson & Quintal, you rock !!)
actually Canadian pilots are great at gliding - can anyone ID another great Canadian gliding incident?

boyle wrote:
...and then back in the day when there were US gallons and Canadian gallons. Which do you use for fuel efficiency?

There still are US and Canadian gallons! Of course, the "Canadian" gallon is really the Imperial gallon, so we should blame the British and US for having two different gallons.

Anyway, Canadian automotive sales-people naturally quote miles per Imperial gallon, which makes their cars seem more fuel efficient than they actually are!

10 L/100 km = 28.25 Miles/Imperial Gallon = 23.52 Miles/US Gallon

At least Orienteering is metric (1:10,000 and 1:15,000) or do you still use 1 inch = 14 furlongs in the US?

How on earth is a scale metric? There are no units in a scale - it's just a ratio. We (SLOC) have maps at 1:1000, 2000, 2500, 3000, 3750, 4000, 5000, 7500, 10000, 15000, 24000, and 50000. I wouldn't say any of the those scales are more or less metric than the others. 1:5, 10 and 15 are certainly more standard, but only 1:10 could make the dubious claim of being more "metric".

Now, contour interval, that's another story. 2.5m and 5m are definitely metric. 3m is usually really 10ft (typically from USGS), just stated as the nearest meter to make it "seem" metric.

RE: Gimi Glider. I give up! I know of the Gimi glider incident, and seem to recall something else, but can't remember.... yukon king: do tell!

TriARgirl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

can anyone ID another great Canadian gliding incident?

Aha, I knew about the flight to the Azores, but didn't realize that it was also a Canadian airline.

yah, the wiki link above has a nice section on the event cascade & the metric vs imperial etc calc.s, a nice analysis...and Air Transat, they are canadian-based? The pilot involved, Piche, is Canadian for sure....

I believe a highlight of my honeymoon was to see tail # 604 (the actual Glider) out a window at Heathrow just by chance.

I find the whole F --> C thing a bit of a pain in the ##@! I design geothermal systems (based on heat loss/heat gain calculations) so I'm always bouncing back and forth between the two. It's not so much the direct conversion, it's the fact they are different scales and that a temperature difference in one scale is not immediately (ok linearly) related to a temperature difference in the other (for design purposes).

The scale 1:10,000 is metric because it is based on 10. 1:15,000 is (3/2)metric. The common conversion factor from metric to english is to multiply by 2.54. Thus, 1:10,000 multiplied by 2.54 is approximately 1:24,000, which is why USGS maps are at that scale. They could have made them at 1:25,400 but rounded the five down to 0 with a shift of the decimal point. The decimal point being the comma like the Euros who use metric use -- not the period that we use. 2.54 multiplied by a period doesn't give a comma as that would put it between the m and the n.

So why aren't they 1:25 000 (nearer to 1:25 400) which is a common scale for commercially available maps in many other countries? 1 inch to 1 mile is 1:63 360 and 1:24 000 isn't related to that either.

I´d go with ebuckley and state that the 1:10 000 scale (and others of the same kind) is just a ratio and not necessarily metric in any way. This goes as long as you don´t put any specific measures into the scale (like 1 inch to mile) and use different kinds 'on both sides'.

It could be called 'metric' if I said that 1 m on the map is 10 000 m´s in the terrain. But I can also say that 1 inch on the map equals 10 000 inches in the terrain and that would be just as correct - but definitely not metric...

An explanation I found on the 1:24000 scale says:

The most common USGS topographic map scale is 1:24,000. In this scale 1 inch on the map represents 24,000 in, or 2,000 ft. (1 cm represents 240 m) on the ground.

On the bright side, some other conversions just got simpler now that the Canadian dollar has achieved parity with the U.S. dollar.

It should be noted that 6000 ft is the approximation often used for 1 nautical mile, which is about the length of 1 minute of latitude. So 1 inch =~ 1/3 nautical mile on a 1:24,000 scale map (and 3 in should be about 1 minute of latitude). Not exactly what I would have chosen for a scale, even as someone who works daily with NMs.

On the bright side, some other conversions just got simpler now that the Canadian dollar has achieved parity with the U.S. dollar.

You mean I can take that funny money out of the Monopoly box and use it to buy stuff in Canada now?

On the bright side, some other conversions just got simpler now that the Canadian dollar has achieved parity with the U.S. dollar.

And the way things are going, the kilometer will probably reach parity with the mile.

A while back, I started to wonder whether -40C really is exactly -40F. This would be true if 0C were exactly 32F, and 100C were exactly 212F. But are they? These temperatures are often described as being the freezing and boiling points of water, at standard pressure. However, there have been several definitions of standard conditions, some commonly used with imperial measure, some with metric. Also, I ran across a definition of Kelvin that defined 0K as absolute zero, and 273.16K as the triple point of water, and a definition of Celsius that defined 0.01C as the triple points of water, with one Celsius degree as 1/273.16th of the difference between absolute zero and the triple point of water. Does anyone know definitively what the accepted definitions are? Is -40C really exactly -40F? Is 0C really 32F? (Well, something has to keep one up at night...:-)

The Air Transat glide to the Azores wasn't due to a metric to imperial error, but rather a matter of "nah, that alarm can't be for real"...in that case, good gliders, lousy pilots.

Been out gliding all afternoon, and my vario seems to tell me my sink rate in feet/sec, despite that fact that it seems to claim to be feet/min. Not that I really care, I just listen to it beep. When it beeps, I'm going up. Except when I find it too annoying and turn it off. Like I did this afternoon. Not that it was beeping anyway.

Tom clearly has the correct explanation on the scale issue. Pay attention, people!

More prosaic question: who knows what is normal body temperature in F versus C? In Celsius it is 36.6, but in F it's usually not clear, especially early in the morning.

98.6 F is the normally quoted value, but 36.6 C translates to 97.9 F. What should we make of this? Are metric people cooler? Or are they just cold-blooded? Maybe the comma/period disparity has something to do with this.

Speaking of another closely related topic to orienteering I always wondered why there are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball?

98.6F is a ridiculously misleading value. It's just 37C, but the extra digit of precision makes you thing that measuring body temperature to the 10th of a degree is a reasonable thing to do. In truth, variations of 1-2 whole degrees (F) are normal.

About the golf ball... generally that happens because there are also 337, 338 ... dimples on the ball. To my knowledge the governing bodies do not specify that aspect of balls but they do other ones.

About the temperature... I really don't think that body temperature is metric or not metric. It is what it is. Kind of like a meter. As to the precision, I suppose you take an average to come to a value? 98.6 could be more accurate (and within the power of the measuring equipment) than 98 or 99. I don't really know.

My understanding of the body temperature thing is that it was generally agreed by the medical/scientific community (which has been using metric for quite some time) that body temp was "around" 37C. The 98.6 is simply a conversion to F.

Finland may have officially been metric for more than 100 years, but some lots of units are still used. For example in men's O distances are:

relay (one leg) = poronkusema (the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to stop to urinate)
long = 2 x poronkusema
Middle = (old) penikulma

Also:
typical day's training = päivämatka

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_unit

Poronkusema is perfect unit for training distances. My typical training runs are one or two or three poronkusemas. Mile/kilometer accuracy is pointless.

We don't use temperaure units here. It's always cold here.

Pardon my limited Finnish but I translate päivämatka to mean to "day trip". Like going somewhere for the day. Like a trip to the beach. I guess it works for orienteering training since it involves traveling around the forest...

True, you can us it as "day trip" too. But it is also an old distance unit.

It all about contects. How do you translate this:
Hae lakkaa satamasta, kun lakkaa satamasta.