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Comic strip of a ghost and a person with the American flag pasted on the head. The ghost repeats “Boo!” in the first three panels without getting any reaction, but when it in the fourth panel says “kg, cm, km, °C” the American gets scared and screams “AHHHH!!!”.

Edit: fixed alt text

  • MyNameIsIgglePiggle@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    What really grinds my gears - literally - is having to have two sets of sockets because America. It’s really gets annoying when you lose your 10mm socket and the other one isn’t quite right, but you can’t work out is 18/32s is close enough and then you bust a nut.

    • twei@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      I just read that as “socks”, which made the last sentence really weird

      • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        100°F is roughly (like really roughly) the hottest temp your likely to see in most temperate climates throughout a year. 0°F is(again really roughly) the lowest. The result is you can use Fahrenheit basically as a percentage, or a 0 to 100 temperature score to help you decide how to dress/prepare for the day. If the temperature is above or below 100 or 0 then you need to consider fairly serious precautions before going outside for any length of time.

        It’s not a very precise system at all, and it obviously has no place in a laboratory or similar situation. But it does work quite well for communicating the weather to common people. There is very little desire among Americans to change to Celsius not because they don’t understand it (we’re all taught Celsius in grade school) but because Fahrenheit serves most people’s needs perfectly adequately.

        OP is also arguing that easily recalling the boiling temperature of water (one of the big purported advantages of Celsius) is useless for most people as nobody actually measures the temperature of water while boiling it. Except, maybe, in a classroom, probably while demonstrating to children how the Celsius scale works.

      • alcoholicorn [comrade/them, doe/deer]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        If it’s 0 F, it’s 0% hot out. If it’s 50 F, it’s 50% hot out, if it’s 100F, it’s 100% hot out.

        It’s a more human measurement. Who the hell knows how long a kilometer or meter is? Everyone knows what a football field looks like and a yard is 1/100th of it.

        • SolarNialamide@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Who the hell knows how long a kilometer or meter is?

          Everyone outside of America.

          Everyone knows what a football field looks like

          You’re either trolling or a living embodiment of the ‘Americans think the USA is the whole world’ meme. Nobody outside of the USA knows how long a football field is.

      • psud@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        The hottest a specific person believed in. Obviously never visited $countryThatGetsHotter

    • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, everyone shits on the US for this but we do science in metric, and also everyone seems to ignore that the UK is all kinds of fucked up as well-- weight in stone, etc. I’d also argue that outside science F is a better scale for talking about weather. Sure 0 makes for a better freezing point, but most temps on inhabited earth are about 0~100 F or -25~40 C. If you knew nothing about F or C and someone asked if a scale from 0 to 100 or -25 to 40 made more sense, which one do you think most people would pick?

      • UnrepententProcrastinator@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        -25 to 40 is very useful for weather. Especially in a northern country. The only reason they don’t switch is “best country in the world” delusions they’ve been fed to believe is true since birth.

        • Umbrias@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          The actual reason the us hasn’t switched is the many billions of dollars it would cost for basically no tangible benefit. There are probably better uses of that money if we actually got to spend it on what we wanted, like social programs.