New video on how to learn the US system of measures! ruclips.net/video/yrj3h3KhkNY/видео.html 🇺🇸 ERRATA: I know that it’s spelled le Système International, without the final -e. The error occurred by chance, not ignorance. It’s very hard to work with text in videos, and each video takes many days to make, which means the brain tends to filter out errors and interpret typographical errors as correct. If you look, you’ll find typographical errors in all my videos, with text in English or Latin or whatever language.
I apologize for my last comment, it was quite rude. Your video is brilliant, as usual. The SI is very simple and elegant, so we tend to think it is universal. As computer programming teacher, one of first exercises I gave to my students was conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit. :-) Thank you, magister!
I also feel the need to point that in 1866 there was no SI As SI is relativly modern iteration of metric system accepted in sience community, developed baised on older wariants and officialy adopted in 1960. Also not all metric units are SI units: litre is not for example, it is just equivalent to cubic decimeter.
As someone who has always used the metric system and never understood the Imperial, I am always terrified for a few moments when I see temperatures in the Imperial, since it either looks like the sun has exploded or it has disappeared. 75 degrees, for example, in celsius would be DEADLY but in Fahrenheit is apparently the equivalent of around 24 degrees Celcius ( a rather nice day).
As Mr Fahrenheit was from Gdańsk it is very easy to understand his scale for a Pole. He basically divided temperatures measured in his city by 100. 50F roughly 10C is a default temperature here. Below 50F it is cold, above warm. Half a way to 0 or 100 add "very". Everything beyond 0-100F range is treated as extremely dangerous natural disaster here.
I do the opposite, I’m American so was raised on the imperial system. Whenever I hear people talking about their 24C day a shiver runs through because that’s below freezing in Fahrenheit lol
In the Iberian peninsula: 50 is hell, 40 is hot, 30 lets go to the beach, 20 it's nice but it could be much better, 10 better get my jacket, 0 it's snowing lets go out and play, -10 we better stay at home.
-20 - home freezer temperature, 0 - water freezes, winter in New York 5 - fridge temperature 10 - typical cold tap water temp, mid Spring or Autumn in New York 20 - room temperature 30 - hot summer in New York 37 - average body temperature 40 - high fever (requires medical attention) 60 - typical hot tap water temp 100 - water boils 200 - oven temperature (baking, most common)
I'll join the others and say taking a 60 degrees shower is probably going to burn your skin Another "useful" number is 50 degrees, the boiling point of human blood. It doesn't mean we boil blood every day, but it does mean that anything above 50 degrees is a danger for your body. Especially in some of your less huh... thermally insulated organs. Like balls. I'm talking about your balls. Don't put 50 degrees water on your balls.
Weirdly enough, 3d printing is what got me used to millimeters more than anything else. Inches are such a clunky unit when you’re working with that level of precision that they’re functionally useless
3d printing also familiarized me with the Celcius scale, since you have very fine control over the temperature of the nozzle, and you may touch that on accident sometimes. 50C is generally the point where something starts being so hot that you have to take your hand off after a few seconds. Each 10C increment after that shortens the time you can touch it by perhaps a second. IIRC 70C to 80C is where you have to remove your hand immediately. 100C boils water obviously, and most plastics start to melt at temperatures around 200C.
Here in Dallas: 40 is a typical day in the middle of summer. 30 is warm. 20 is nice. 10 is chilly. 0 is freezing. -10 is about the average lowest temperature throughout winter. -20 - "Remember that year it was so cold, a lot of power plants went offline and millions lost electricity for a few days so they stayed with friends and relatives and their water pipes froze and busted and their houses were flooded when they returned?"
@@chitlitlah And don't forget to add to the -10 description:may cause a 100 car pileup that will kill 6 people because some people don't know to slow down in adverse weather conditions because they think driving a 4 wheel drive is gonna save their butts...
Love the Latin version of the rhyme. It's more than 50 years since Australia decided to move to the metric system, and it's well and truly engrained now.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Interestingly, the Metric Conversion Board chose the temperature unit as one of its first concerted targets, for much the same reasons as you outlined...everyone used it and talked about it frequently, and it was relatively easy to get a feel for how it worked without constantly converting back to F.
I was at primary school in the 1970s in Australia, when we changed over to the metric system. I feel lucky to have knowledge in both systems, although I find it difficult to remember all the measurements in the Imperial system because I have become so used to the metric system.
I am a retired engineer living in Ireland. My primary school education was exclusively in imperial units (feet, pounds etc). My university courses were a mixture of both. The electrical department used SI but the mechanical department used imperial so I am inherently fluent in both systems. The most dramatic news story I have come across relating to confusion between imperial and metric units was the incident of Air Canada flight 143 from Montreal to Edmonton on July 23rd 1983 which became known as the "Gimli glider". Air Canada were in the process of converting from imperial to metric and in the confusion between pounds and kilograms meant they loaded only half the fuel needed. Needless to say they didn't make the journey, but the outcome was without casualty and can be viewed on RUclips.
@@noylj1 Yes and no. The younger generation will need to be educated, but the fact it was never made mandatory in the States like it was in GB/Canada is the reason it never was able to take hold. The older generations never fully switch (my Canadian grandparents used nothing but imperial units or used a converter all the time). Sometimes you just need to implement it and let the mess sort itself out, which it inevitably will. Most of science and much of business either already uses metric or will be able to do so in only a couple of years.
@@th3oryO But, there is no mess now. You want to mandate a mess. Make the whole world drive on the right side, since almost everyone already does so it must be the right way, and then we'll consider it. Was this voted for or simply dictated to the subjects? Or, live your life and leave us alone.
@@wildlifeathome To test the surface of the mirror, engineers used both a reflective null corrector, which used mirrors, and a refractive null corrector, which used lenses and was supposedly less accurate than the reflective corrector. The null correctors were so sensitive that they could only be used in the middle of the night when there were no vibrations due to passing traffic. When the reflective null corrector showed an error that had not been detected by the cruder refractive device, it was assumed that the refractive device was poorly calibrated and the mirror was ground to remove the ‘defects’ spotted by the reflective device. When a final check was done with the refractive corrector, it showed a spherical aberration of a quarter of a wavelength but it was assumed that this was to be expected with a crude measuring device. The quarter wavelength error turned out to be a real error. The project’s chief scientist, C. Robert O’Dell, spoke for the team who worked on the project saying: “All of us feel horrible.” It is thought that the error in the null corrector arose because the lens of the device wouldn’t descend far enough, and, because the operating engineers were close to a deadline, three household washers were inserted into the million-dollar measuring device.
Man, i remember doing this when the Euro was introduced when i was a kid. Multiplied everything by two to get the price in German Marks initially, but before you know it, you've shifted your entire way of thinking about money to the new currency, and now i need to convert when my grandma talks about old prices. Great way of learning how to multiply, though!
Never been to Europe but I was watching a TV show from Spain and the characters kept talking about "Pesetas" and converting it to Euros, by the last season of the show all you would hear was Euros lol..
Circa '15 I was working in the back window of a McDonald's and found a 1 Deutsch Mark coin. IDK how it remained in circulation that long, but I got to keep it! :D
As someone in the US (who thinks the Imperial system is nuts), I've been doing this for about a decade- both my mobile and my computer show Celsius so I have a good intuitive sense for the temperature scale. Decades ago, during President Carter’s short-lived push to change the US over to metric, a friend complained that she didn't want to have to “convert” gallons to liters and feet to meters and I said she didn’t _have to_ - she just had to have an idea of what those measurements _were_ - it didn’t matter what they happened to be in the other units she was used to. (She didn’t know _exactly_ what a foot or a gallon was, either-no one does-she just had an intuitive sense of what they were.)
@@polyMATHY_Luke “Also it’s time to get rid of daylight saving time haha” I find it funny (well, not really) how every November and March the newspapers are full of stories about how *everyone* _hates_ changing their clocks back and forth (unless you live in…Phoenix(!)-and the rest of Arizona or Hawaii, where DST is not observed). But somehow we still have to do it.
I'm a physics student, so I think when doing actual science it makes sense to use SI because of how things like volume and lengths are not based on random multiples like 12, 5280, and 16 but 10's. But for average everyday life for most jobs like a fast food worker, a philosopher or an accountant, I don't see why it matters. Most people don't do painful measurements/conversions often enough to justify a costly/headache switch in my opinion. Recipes tell you how many ounces to use, people know how many miles to drive, etc and they don't need to do much calculation in daily life.
@@youtubehandlesareridiculous, practically speaking, metic and customary units are both good enough for the every day things that most people do. Switching would be a one time cost to society it switching over the physical infrastructure and for the people who grew up with customary units. But afterwards, there are long term benefits: easier imports and exports, easier for tourists to and from the US, easier to speak to and be understood by a global audience, one set of tools and measures, and so on.
When you started explaining the reasons why you taught it this way, I began to notice the similarities with your linguistic teaching philosophy, and I am immediately understood why you have this on your Polýmathy channel. And suddenly I was like, “Bravo, Luke. Bravo.”
@@polyMATHY_Luke The way you spell connection. First saw that and was confused by it in Lord of the Rings. I thought it was archaic, like ax. But then I learned that neither connexion nor ax are archaic, but they are in fact still in use in America. Axe without an 'e' looks so wrong.
@@موسى_7 Connection is actually largely considered archaic in America but it's simply considered 'dated' in the UK (& other commonwealth nations I imagine); I say dated because the connexion spelling is actually not as popular with younger people as it once was in Britain and it's steadily losing ground because of this even though some significant institutions still consider it acceptable or preferred use. I prefer it myself honestly and I imagine Luke does too especially because the spelling is a standard alternative English spelling that preserves the Latin spelling of the etymological root of this word (i.e. 'connexio'). The spelling connection won out though as I believe, because the XIXth c. was a time of massive spelling reform and especially spelling simplification (which was most severe in the States) in English and therefore irregular spellings like connection, where the 'ct' morphed into an 'x'-when *logically* it *ought to be* as simple as 'connect'+'ion'-were considered suspect.
When we converted to metric measures for many things here in Canada in the '70's, it was just easier to switch thinking to metric units rather than to try to convert back to the imperial equivalent. For example, it became easier to think of distances in kilometers alone, particularly when car odometers amd speedometers and all the road signage became metric.
Canada is such in an ambiguous place when it comes to metric (as in measurement) systems... When people about body heights, they talk in feet. About distances, kilometers (although, sometimes in hours). About body weight, mostly in pounds but sometimes in kilos. About recipes, in cups. Oven or water temperature : farenheit. Outside temperature : both celsius and farenheight. Body temperature : celsius. Officially, you are in metric but because of your southern neighbours, you have to keep using imperial in so many fields. Then... above all, you have to deal with US and UK variants of imperial. I guess that's the price to pay when you used to be called British North America :-).
@@WolfgangSourdeau It would be more accurate to say that the reason for the continued use of imperial/US customary units in Canada is because the United States is its largest trading partner which means a high level of integration between the economies of the two nations.
What is a third of a Kilometer? A third of a mile is 1760 feet... There are 10 millimeters in a centimeter. There are 10 centimeters in a... uhhh...? There are 100 centimeters in a meter. Okay, we're going by 100 now. So there are 100 meters in a... uhhh... crap. Okay! There are 1000 meters in a kilometer. Is metric on base 10, or on base 10/100/1000?
@@EpicToadRage There are 10 centimeters in a... *decimeter* So there are 100 meters in a... uhhh... *hectometer* Btw, you also have 1 liter in a 1000 cubic centimeters. And if you will those 1000 cubic centimeters of water, you get 1 kilogram.
When Australia converted from the 'F word' to the 'C word' for temperature in 1972, it took a while for me to get an intuitive sense for it. That is, until I heard something like what you suggest, except that it went: The cold singles - the cool teens - the temperate twenties - the torrid thirties - the fierce forties. The other units didn't give me any trouble and I can still work just as easily in British Imperialist or French Napoleonic. The last bastions of non-metric units were babies and fish - they just sounded so much more impressive when said in pounds and inches.
For babies we do grams/cm. Which is like 2000-3000 grams with like 30cm to a newborn. Meters and kg don't make sense there because they are not granular enough. Once you get above a certain point you then usually only slash a few places and have the standart measurement
For some reason, babies are still described in pounds even in german(y). Not officially mind, but between parents and grandparents. Then again their age is also counted in months for way too long.
I just have to say something, you are absolutely amazing at doing arguments. you pick your words so carefully, and you are just very convincing with how you lay out your videos
What? Is this true? I’m from Norway and in primary school they teach us June July August is summer. Strange that Sweden would have such an informal definition
@@6thdim I’m Dutch and here they teach us that summer runs from 21 June to 21 September. Except for meteorologist. They let summer start on 1 June and autumn starts on 1 September.
thats the official summer. among the swedish people there are high debates as to what makes a summer. for me who lives in the northern part, summer begins when there is no snow or ice on the ground and ends when the first leaf turn orange. but yeah, the 10 degree rule is the one used by metrologists.
@@morganjonasson2947 Ah in that case… then for me summer starts somewhere in March (April if it’s cold for a long time) and ends somewhere in October (November if the cold stays away). Winter is from December till February. Thus my spring and autumn are really short, almost non-existent.
I was talking with a friend in Texas once about this. She said "Celsius is weird," and my reply was "No. 0° is when water freezes, and 100° is when it boils. Everything else is based around that." Her reaction was "Wait, that's it? What's wrong with my country?!" 😂 In all seriousness, though, Fahrenheit is so strange. The only time we use it here, for whatever reason, is baking.
Fahrenheit is more intuitive when talking about the weather (with the hottest temperatures in most places being around 100, the coldest around 0), Celsius is more intuitive in the context of chemistry, cooking etc. (Which makes it funny to me if anyone uses F only for baking),
@@rebeccahicks2392 there's nothing intuitive to me about using Fahrenheit for the weather. 😅 It's just confusing. Like, why does water freeze at 32? Why is 0°F close to -20°C? It doesn't make sense to me. Or most other people I know who aren't American.
@@corinna007 but how often are you concerned about the phase change temperatures of water? and as a corollary, are you only sufficiently concerned about the phase changes of water to base your _intuitive_ sense of temperature around them at sea level pressure, but not so concerned that you wouldn't have a floating temperature scale that changes with altitude (where water doesn't boil at 100 C anymore)? arbitrary is arbitrary, so you might as well use a system that matches your experience, and we just don't experience 100 C in our lives, or else our lives end very quickly.
@@antimatterhorn My town was 40° last summer (and it was miserable), which I think is close to or over 100°F, so if you go by Fahrenheit, then yes, we do get over 100°. But that still doesn't make sense. Water freezing at 0°, which we experience for 6 months in winter every year, makes a lot more sense than 32°. I'm sorry, but Fahrenheit is just strange.
@@antimatterhorn Nah you don't get it. 0° is associated with winter because then the lakes and canals freeze. 20° is room temperature. 30° is summer. Very intuitive.
As someone who used imperial system growing up (Fahrenheit, feet, inches, etc) metric and centigrade are so much easier. Started using Celsius temperatures after high school chemistry showed me how much more sense it made over Fahrenheit. I also like just being different 😂
As a Canadian growing up we kinda use both we use imperial for are road speeds and are temperature but will still use metric for baking and measuring things we say feet and inches it’s kinda a mess
You are totally correct about "approximately 2 metres" in male heights. In Normal Distribution the area near mean is very densed, so the error of 0.2 metres = 20 cm is critical in that context. 180 cm is a normal height for males in Western countries, 200 cm is normal only for basketball and volleyball players.
An inch ( in german Zoll) is 25, 4 mm. A foot is 30,5 cm and a yard 91, 5 cm or 0,915 m. But this is rather rare needed here in Germany. Inches are mostly necessary in tubes context, or sometimes inchbased Gewinde / threads (?) appear.
I'm a 197cm software Developer, and glad for those three missing centimeters, so that I don't hit my head on all the standard 200cm high doors all the time. ;-) Only when they messed up, or added a little to the flooring during renovations I sometimes slam my noggin on the lintel. Or when I wear hiking boots or something with thicker soles.
@@aixtom979 : When i , german, was at school, in 8th class ( grade?) our female main teacher ( Klassenlehrer) became pregnant, so in second half of year we got a new main teacher. This man was exact 2 Meter in height, and had the name Stoffel. He came from a region next to german/ swiss border, where there is a mountain ,Hohenstoffeln' ( high Stoffeln). The teacher told us, that for his height and family name , he got the nickname ,Hohenstoffeln' . A sidenote: Being german and having the name Stoffel is not so funny, in popular german ( slang?) a Stoffel is a boring person, who talks nearly nothing and doesn' t know courtesy and has no interesst in anything.
I grew up in Celsius and since lived in the states for 10+ years. My mental conversion is knowing 0C is roughly 30F, and 35C is roughly 100F, that means every 10F is roughly 5C so you get 0-30, 5-40, 10-50, 15-60, 20-70, 25-80, 30-90, 35-100 and these are good enough for determine what I should wear really.
Fahrenheit also miscalculated when making his scale, since 100F was supposed to be normal human body temperature, when it's in fact 37.78 C. That's not really fever but a bit higher than normal.
0C is 30F 10C is 50F 20C is 70F 30C is 85F 40C is 105F 50C is 120F 60C is 140F 70C is 160F 80C is 175F 90C is 195F 100C is 210F These (except for 10C and 60C) are rounded to the nearest multiple of 5. If someone says it's 78 outside, they either mean it's about 173F or 25C. pick the reasonable one
I just remember the standard points 0 C = 32 F 10 " = 50 " 20 " = 68 " 30 " = 86 " And the 5:9 ratio and it's pretty good for any temperature estimation I need
@@francisdec1615 In fact no... Weirdly enough, the guy used _his horse temperature_ to define his scale. And horses have a normal temperature higher than ours.
LUKE: Celsius: 30 is hot 20 is nice 10 is cool and 0 is ice. 100ºC is water boiling at sea level, go up a mountain to get your tea sooner. 82ºF is 28ºC 61ºF is 16ºC -40ºF = -40ºC And many other convenient conversions.
I live in the US and I have taught myself the metric temperature system by keeping my devices on C. Many of my friends live in other countries so it seemed unfair to make them try to convert when I say, oh it’s hot today, 40 Grad. (Not 104 F.) it also helps that my oven somehow turned to Celsius and I never changed it back. A friend told me to think of the length of a mattress as two meters (ok, that’s cool). I still have a little trouble visualizing how far a Kilometer is, and I couldn’t tell you how many square meters a house or apartment contains. My method on temperature is 10 C=50 F and go up or down by 9 with Fahrenheit. Counting by 9 is a hoot but it has an interesting system - try it. I also keep in mind that for ever 5 degrees in C, F increases by 9. The refrigerator should be 4 degrees. You are right, it’s about the visualization and association of temperature that matters. I had hoped we would begin enforcement of metric, but I see that isn’t going to happen. I can understand 3 cm better than 3/16 of an inch….WTF. Not sure what Americans are afraid of with learning metric. Guess they don’t know that’s how our monetary system is structured.
No one's "afraid of" anything, people simply stick to what they know. If someone needs to measure out something yea long, strictly for personal use, then what does it really matter that they go off the measurements that are intuitive to them (inches) as opposed to a metric they neither have the time nor patience to sit down and learn throughout the course of their busy lives? There is simply no practical incentive for most people to do such a thing, other than some sort of wishy-washy idea of "being sensitive" towards the rest of the world, which...I mean, frankly, bugger the rest of the world's sensitivities. "This life is mine to live and I will live it to the parameters that I see fit" is a more than noble pursuit. That said, I have no issue whatsoever with enforcing the use of metric in schools. Let the little ones, who still have the malleable brains capable of learning new tricks quickly and with minimal practice, be the ones to spearhead a future measured in metric.
The metric system system all evolves around water, water freezes at o degrees boils at a hundred 1 liter of water is 1 kg 10 centimeters x 10 cm x 10 cm of water is 1 kg and is 1 liter 1meter x 1 m x 1m of water is one metric ton
It is quite funny when Americans will use fahrenheit here and not even notice half the time that nobody understands what they mean or cares. And it's a shame. It's not any I'll intention on their part or anyone else, but it is a good example of something being lost in communication, and I do think it if you're traveling somewhere you ought to use the system that is used there. Metric is however universal enough that it does seem reasonable to use it anywhere, even the US. Though I wouldn't expect an American to speak differently for me if I was visiting.
I'm from Quebec so I'm very familiar with Celsius, However when I'm talking to my American friends my trick is: 16 is 61, 28 is 82 , 0 is freezing. The minuses get more tricky. Minus 11 is about 11. And of course minus 40 is minus 40.
When Canada switched to metric temperatures in the '70s, I remember being taught this sort of trick to learn the system intuitively. Thirty years later, when I was visiting Texas and heard the temperature was 53 degrees outside, I did a double-take and then realized I was in the US and it was Fahrenheit
@@lawrenceseguin1865 The official record in Death Valley, California was about 57 Celsius, in the shade, for many years. That may have recently been surpassed. Of course, rocks, concrete, asphalt would likely be much hotter. I've burned my hands from the coins in my pocket.
The last phrase "Sto a fa' la colla" is roman slang and litterally means "I'm making glue" since the temperature is so hot that your skin gets sticky by sweating. Not what you expect to read in an official document lets say. Perfectly executed 💯
I can sympathise a bit with Americans on this: I live in the UK which has been slow to adopt metric. I was largely raised by my grandparents (both parents working), and they would exclusively use Fahrenheit and other old-timey units. It sounded so alien to me, so I imagine for many Americans, it must feel at least as alien when exposed to the units the rest of world use. So I applaud RUclipsrs who increasingly are helping to normalise metric; it will come in time and it's worth the effort. An aside: when I watched Star Trek as a kid, and I heard characters stated to be around 2m tall, I assumed people were taller in the future; just as people in the past were, on average, shorter. I hadn't considered until now that it may have been an error from the writers.
Thanks for the comment. Yes, I think the change will inevitably come. The fact that it hasn’t is tied partially to the dominant role Anglophone nations have played on the world stage (doubtless there is an anti-Napoleonic history in the British recalcitrance). The US and UK export ideas and culture so readily that we rarely feel pressured to adopt different units from the outside world. The sad part is that some Americans or Brits seem to associate the old units with national pride. I find they a shame since there are many things to rejoice in beyond a system of units that, ultimately, makes it harder for Anglophones to interact in the sciences or with people from outside the country.
Metric is being used where it's useful, for the most part, but I don't see it replacing the customary units in the US. The fact is, in day to day life, the "advantages" of the metric system never come into play. The factors of ten conversion is great for doing math and physics, for example. If your measurements are in kilograms and kilometers but your equations are in grams and meters, it's trivial to move the decimal points around to make things work. Daily life doesn't involve math and physics problems for people, though, so that bit of convenience is beside the point. Pay attention to how people actually use the units, and the conversions between units basically never happens. Apartments are listed in square meters or square feet. It's easier in metric to convert to square kilometers or square centimeters than it would for square miles or square inches, but nobody ever will do any of those things so who cares? Similarly, in metric long distances (like city to city) are kilometers, medium distances (down the hall or across the street) are in meters, and short distances are in centimeters. Sure, converting from one to another is easy, but no one would ever say "it's about a 5,000, 000 centimeter drive" or "Tom is the tallest guy I know. He's almost 0.002 kilometers tall!" In the same way, it's miles for long, yards for medium, and feet and inches for short. And the same goes for all the units. If you're doing science, you're probably using metric. If you're not doing science, then it really doesn't matter that much and it won't be worth the effort to switch.
@@edonveil9887 If it's necessary to unify on a single scale then it has to be Kelvin, right? Transition points of pure water at one atmosphere is as arbitrary as anything. The Kelvin scale is an objective measure, not arbitrary at all, where zero is at a point set by physics itself, below which it is impossible to go. So I guess the mnemonic becomes: 303.15 is hot 293.15 is nice 283.15 is cool 273.15 is ice Kelvin is the SI unit of temperature already, so there should be no opposition to using it.
@@carlos_takeshi Tell me you are blinded by the problem, without telling me you are blinded by the problem. The fact that you even consider all of that useless and unfathomable just shows the brain rot you got from the system that makes that hard and obscure. You sound like a blind person raving about how useless sight is because you can always hear danger coming and feel edges on the sidewalk with your cane and why would you ever want to feel danger with your cane ("too late at that point") or hear edges ("sensory overload").
The reason for the weird multiples in older systems is that they were more flexible when dealing with indivisible physical objects, like coins. For example, the old British monetary system - which is actually the Roman system! - had: 1 pound (libra) = 20 shillings, 1 shilling (solidus) = 12 pence (denarii). The penny was sometimes further divided into 4 "farthings", which have no Roman analogue, I believe. The prime factor representation of 10 is 10 = 2 * 5. But for 12, it is 12 = 2^2 * 3. In other words, 1 shilling could be divided evenly into 2 , 3, 4, or 6 groups of actual penny coins. An imaginary base-10 shilling could only be divided by 2 or 5, which would have been far less practical. Today, units like "pence" or "cents" are usually small enough for people not to worry over when rounding up or down. And everyone has learnt in school how to do decimal point arithmetic, and also has a computer at hand to do it for them. We rarely use small coins, and even if we need to, we can be assured that someone somewhere could always exchange them for more convenient ones. But back in the day, you had to work with what coins you had physically available to you, and you may have never learnt to do arithmetic with large numbers. I am 100% pro metric and decimal systems, by the way. This was just to show why non-decimal systems would have made a lot of sense historically.
I was going to say something similar. It’s so easy for people to scoff at the old system but it was smarter than many people give it credit for. 1 shilling = 12 pence and you can break that down nice and evenly into 1/3 as well as 1/2 and 1/4. Something you can’t do with a dollar. Which as you said was important when it comes to coinage
This is exactly why the Imperial system is far superior to metric even today. Also the celsius gradients are much less precise for everyday temperatures. The celsius jumps are much bigger.
20C is room temperature 0C is when ice starts forming So if there's ice outside it's negative temp If it's cold but no ice it's around 10C If it's comfortable it's around 20C If it's hot it's around 30C If you're in the middle east it's about 40C If you're on a desert it's about 50C If you're in a sauna it's about 65-90C Water boils at 100C Oven is usually preheated to 200C
5C is a cold day (41F) 15C is a cool day (59F) 25C is a warm day (77F) 35C is a hot day (95F) 45C is a typical high for Death Valley in the summer (113F) 55C is the bo8undary for rare to medium-rare beefsteak (131F) 60C is the boundary for medium to medium-well beefsteak (140F) 65C is how some lattes are served (149F) 75C is a typical cup of hot coffee (167F) 95C is about the temperature of water to brew coffee or tea with (203F)
Hello, i live in the middle east. might want to change that to 50c. at least where i live summer temp hovers around 50c the rhyme then for me is 30 is cool 20 is pleasant 10 is also pleasant 0 is cool (anything negative) stay home with a heater) from visiting places where it dips into the negatives, i realize that i seem to prefer cool temperatures, but i can still handle 40+
@@bl00dhoney They said Southern New Mexico, 40 is normal for summer there. Or higher. Last time I was there it was 45. Of course they’re going to call 40, not 30, hot. 30 just is not that hot here, especially in Southern NM (I live in Central NM which is a little cooler).
And you don’t explain that water boils at 100, cause you’re in New Mexico and it doesn’t. 😂 (for those not in NM, the elevation causes the boiling point to be lower. It’s 94 in Albuquerque, I know this because I’ve burnt peanut brittle before I realized that you have to adjust temps in candy making at high altitude, so I tested the temp at when my water boils. 202 F or 94 C).
1:20 Just for clarification, metric and SI are not synonymous. There are different flavours of the metric system, SI is but one of them which is the internationally agreed standard. That means there are units that are metric, but not SI and thus not standard. An example is the kilopond, a unit of force. It is very much part of the metric system, but the SI unit of force is the Newton. Another example is mmHg for pressure, metric but not SI. The SI unit for pressure is the Pascal (used to be Bar, but that's another story).
That's an important distinction, as metric and imperial measurements are both SI derived and have been for quite a while. The main difference is how the two sets of measurements choose to divide the measures up and where they choose to put their 0 points. It's rather unfortunate that the public at large is not aware of that.
I guess i use SI as i have never in im whole damn life heard of the Kilopond it mmHg but have always used Newtons, and remember both Bar and Pascal being a measurement of pressure
Hi, the "dollar" was originally a Spanish coin, which was used in America when it as under Spanish rule. Later on the "anglo-americans" started to use it because it was hard to get British coins at the time. After the Declaration of independence the dollar (el dolar) became the official currency of the U.S.A.
This guy reminds me of that cool teacher who makes the seemingly mundane topics extremely interesting, those teachers made my 12 years in the school system bearable.
Some older people in the UK still use fahrenheit. Often swapping to fahrenheit ("It's 100 degrees!!") when its hot and using celsius when its cold ("It's 5 degrees!!")
I read somewhere that newspapers would switch between the two systems for a good headline because people would rather buy a paper with the headline "100°F degrees" than 38°C
You know, 'there'll be three digit temperatures outside!' sounds way cooler to say it's hot that just say 'it'll be 38*C!' The same in reverse for freezeing, 'there're be below zero' sounds better than 'below 30's'.
This is great advice, and exactly how I learned Celsius (and kilograms)! I just switched my devices and lived in the new units without conversion until I developed an intuitive sense of the units. It helped a bit that I was living in Japan at the time, so everyone around me was already in the same units!
I thought I had wasted 12 minutes of my life watching a video with a misleading title , but after spending 3 weeks in Europe I can’t believe how effective this is. Love this channel. Please expand on this system for learning a new language.
Yes!!! I’ve used that little rhyme to teach elementary kids in the classroom and adults on vacation. I found it in an old teachers’ edition of a math book.
For those using/learning the Fahrenheit scale, here's the corresponding numbers from Luke's poem, and I've expanded upon it: 104 is scorching (40C) 86 is hot (30C) 68 is nice (20C) 50 is cold (10C) 32 is ice (0C) 14 is snow weather (-10C) What I would use as an American instead as a rough guide, though this can vary from location to location: 110 is scorching 90 is hot 70 is nice 50 is cold 30 there's ice 10 is snow weather
@@fewwiggle I live in a part of the world where snowfall has happened once in my lifetime in my home. My parents have ever experienced snowfall twice in their lifetime in that same hometown. It also dips below 0C/32F during winter often enough.
@@fewwiggle I live in Wisconsin, and you can have snow at 32F, but there's a good chance that it will melt fairly quickly. Anywhere from about 20F to 32F you will get snow that is wet and heavy. When you get snow around 0F or colder, it is super light like glitter. The super lite snow you can sweep off your driveway, but the heavy wet snow you get around 25F, it will feel like you just went to the gym and did heavy lifting with cardio for an hour after shoveling it.
Thank you! I have been telling people this for years. After they ask about my Android phone temprature. Yes, I am an american who uses celsius daily on all my personal devices in the United States. :-)
The rhyme for outdoor temps seems super easy to remember. Working in healthcare I just memorized two temps...37.0°C & 37.8°C. From there I can figure out if my patient is normal or into fever territory. I also know our fridges for food and meds have to be kept in a range from 1-4°C and the freezer at or below -18°C.
We've been using metric for everything in New Zealand since 1976, however for a few things many people often still use imperial measurements, e.g. baby birthweights in pounds, peoples' height in feet and inches.
Fun fact: The Swedish scientist Anders Celsius who made this scale, put 0 degrees at the boiling point of water and 100 degrees at the freezing point. It wasn't changed until after his death.
It might have upset him, if they had turned it upside down during his lifetime. But it was objectively correct to do so, since raising temperature is also a measure of increased vibrations on an atomic level and increased entropy.
@@katam6471 I think it was because during his time, you rarely had to do with temperatures above the boiling point of water, instead you had to handle temperature below the freezing point far more often. Having 100 set for that freezing point meant that you could go even colder without having to use negative numbers. Edit: I can’t seem to find a source confirming that, so I don’t know if it’s true
1:56 the U.S. actually modeled their dollar after the Spanish dollar. In fact, the Spanish dollar was usable as an official currency until the Coinage Act of 1857. This is also why we had the half-cent, since there were 8 reals in a Spanish dollar. So 12.5 U.S. cents was the rough equivalent of a real.
How Anders Celsius determined his measurement scale: The freezing point of water at 0° and the boiling point of water at 100°. Two universal and reproducable constants of the most important substance on the surface of this planet. A nice decimal scale. How Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit determined his measurement scale: The coldest temperature he could create in his own house by mixing several chemicals together at 0°, the freezing point of water at 32° and "the average body temperature of a healthy human" at 96°. Also, the distances between the units on an actual thermometer are not equal. Now tell me, which one of the two look more scientific, universal and usable to you? (Yes I know, Celsius initially placed the freezing point of water at 100° and the boiling point at 0°, but Carl von Linné switched them around. That doesn't really matter.)
Let's not forget that Celsius was from Sweden. He probably went to a bastu (which most call a sauna) and poured water on the stove. He notes boiling water. Then rolls in snow and notes melting ice. So giving these cases values 0 and 100 made a lot of sense.
Except that it's only true at sea level and if you've got very clean water. Any other condition will lead to those numbers migrating one way or the other. It's a pretty dumb basis for a measurement outside of scientific contexts. And even then, it doesn't make much sense as it's going to look extremely weird when we get off the Earth and onto other planets where it will breakdown even further.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade The sea level condition is also an advantage, because it allows you to measure air pressure/height above sea level by just boiling some water and putting a thermometer in it. As far as I know, Roald Amundsen used this method to measure his ascent of the polar plateau on his way to the South Pole.
Great video 👍 In my experience going the other way around (metric to imperial) it is nice to know there is a conversion formula BUT learning the temperature intuitively (through exposure and practice) is really the way to go. Nowadays I've become used enough to imperial units I'm often able to intuitively convert temperatures between Fahrenheit and Celsius in an instant to a degree or two of accuracy when I need to. It still amazes me when a relative asks me what 78F is in Celsius and my immediate answer (based on what I know it feels like) is correct to the degree.
How to let an italian know you’re a foreigner that’s been living in rome for quite a while: Tell “ao sto affa’ la colla” to the italian person I died of laughter, 10/10 gonna watch again
I'd love to see the pro-metric video. I'm conversant in both because I grew up in a German-speaking household in the US, so I used both. I agree with your reasoning about not learning conversion-- it's like learning language through translation instead of target-language-only input. (That's why my Italian teacher doesn't like flashcards and instead makes us draw our words so that we're not using English.)
Younger generations will easily intuit the size of a meter. A meter is exactly the width of a minecraft block, given that the player character ("Steve") is 1.8 meters tall (slightly taller than Patrick Stewart). Meters were chosen since the original developer (Markus Persson) was from Sweden where metric is the norm.
Most people can't intuit any distance that well. Rule of thumb growing up was its a yard to a door knob, but I heard that about meters too, and the actual distance is neither. The closest I get to intuiting distances is I've held a ruler before, and my foot is about the size of a foot, so I can usually get somewhere within the realm of correctness based on those things, but it's not an accurate way to do anything. If you want to be right you always have to measure it, whether we are guessing the size in meters or feet we are likely to be wrong by some margin every time
Nice catch. Seems like Super Mario blocks are about the same size, assuming Mario is also average-sized when grown to just fit within a 2-block height.
@@matteo-ciaramitaro That's part of what's great about imperial measures. Most of the measures have something on the human body that can be used to approximate it. It's definitely not great accuracy, but it's usually good enough if you're not motivated to get a proper measuring device.
This presentation is one of the most practical, knowledgeable, and entertaining on the metric system that I have seen. I am delighted to see that you are a BIG advocate of the metric system, as I am. Moreover, you take exactly the right approach, the intuitive one, not the cumbersome conversion route, which has largely been responsible for anti-metric sentiment on the part of some here in the U.S. I'd love to see more from you on this topic. (As a Classics postgraduate, I follow your channel mostly for the Living Latin, Ancient Greek, and linguistics. I am most impressed with your knowledge of the phonology of those languages at various periods. You ought to write an amplified version of Allen's Vox Graeca and Vox Latina, based on your period charts.)
True. There are lots of well-intentioned videos out there explaining math tricks to do various unit conversions, and those videos do more harm than good. I switched my mobile phone, car, and wall thermostat to Celsius, and within days I had an intuitive sense of Celsius - no unit conversions needed.
I lived in Alabama where it was 100 degrees F. I was moving to the Netherlands. I looked at the map and saw Amsterdam was at the same latitude as Northern Canada, which I've been to and know it's bloody cold. Amsterdam was only 34 degrees in August. They were just above freezing! I went with all this cold weather gear and discovered the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit the hard way as I poured sweat out of my Gortex boots.
Oh, I can already imagine the looks of the people when they saw you looking like a padded cushion in plain Summer. On the flip side, you created your own personal sauna! :D
This is a welcomed and timely video for me. Recently I changed my phone display Celsius. Celsius thermometers for the house. Even my Google speakers and smart clock tell me temperatures in Celsius. This was all so I could learn/use this way to measure temperature. Thank you for the video and validating the way I was doing it.
I'm a Canadian/American dual citizen (in Canada) so I grew up learning both systems. At work we used to take bets on when the first 10+, 20+, and 30+ degree day was going to be each spring/summer.
This explanation is nice, I never hear before about 30 hot, 20 nice, 10 cold, 0 ice. In my country El Salvador 30 is warm it is almost all time that temperature. And it could be nice to hear more arguments.
Been using basically this same guide for years. Totally agree that we just need to quit cold turkey and switch to metric. People will get it pretty quickly. I hope more people see this!
In northern and west-central Italy, 34 makes you beg for the sweet release of death. In the driest parts of the south, 37 just makes you want a granita.
That's not terribly surprising. We all compare the temperature of things against our body temperature and with metric measures, that winds up smack dab in the middle.
Excellent point! I don’t live in Phoenix, but it’s been in the 40°C range for the last few weeks. While I don’t think of 30° as simply warm (I definitely consider it hot), I tend to think of the colors the tv weather people here use on maps. 0° is blue, 10° is green, 20° is yellow, 30° is orange, and 40° is red. In terms of winter time here -10° is cyan, -20° is purple, -30° is light pink. Or as my French teacher in high school told us: 0° is coat, hat, and gloves weather, 10° is a light jacket, 20° is jeans and a t-shirt weather, 30° is shorts and a t-shirt weather, 40° is just stay inside with the A/C weather; -10° is coat, hat, gloves, and scarves weather, -20° is light jacket, coat, hat, two layers of gloves, and scarves weather, -30° is just stay inside with the heater weather. While I definitely couldn’t do the conversion in my head to the exact Fahrenheit temperature, whenever I’m watching a show from some place where Celsius is used and the characters say the temperature I have a reference point from where I live as to the temperature might feel like the characters are describing. I mean, honestly when it was 102° Wednesday, 107° Thursday, 104° Friday, and 106° yesterday I cannot say that knowing the exact temperature in Fahrenheit made any difference. It was just yucky hot so hearing some say 40°, 41°, or a temperature closer to it like 39°, 38° and knowing that’s basically what I call yucky hot, yep I get the idea just fine. I don’t need to do a conversion to know it’s the kind of hot I prefer to stay inside with my A/C and ceiling fans on. :-) Great video!!!!
This is fantastic! My vehicle reads in Celsius I thought about going through the setting to figure out how to change it to Fahrenheit. Now I am choosing to embrace the LEARNING EXPERIENCE. Thx
An advantage to being from Puerto Rico is being exposed both to SI and USCS units regularly. Milk is by the gallon, but gas is by the liter. Speed limits are in miles per hour, but road markers are in kilometers. Land lots are measured in square meters, but houses in feet, and so on. However, we do lean towards the USCS and are more familiar with that one.
@@OntarioTrafficMan Tbf that's everywhere, many people* just interchange between imperial and metric when it comes to things like personal height and weight, and some measures of lengths and volumes when convenient even if metric is the official system * I can only speak for English speakers
For me, "hot" is highly subjective because it depends on humidity and air movement. 30° is nice if high humidity and stagnant air aren't causing you to sweat buckets.
I'm on the US side of the Canadian border, so was used to hearing daily temps in both Fahrenheit and Celsius. It was weird when I moved far from the border for a time and only heard Fahrenheit. Nowadays with so many radio stations using syndicated programming, if they bother to give a weather report at all it'll be only in Fahrenheit (even here on the border). That's so strange.
I'm on board with learning the systems intuitively. When metric-using me spent some time in the US before smart phones, I relied on the newspapers for the weather. First little bit was 'temperature is X F, this is what X F feels like', and could use that as a benchmark. Of course, many years later, I have no idea what the actual temperatures were like, and since I'd been living in Canada prior, and moved back to Australia after, my concept of 'cold' was completely skewed.
The metric system system all evolves around water, water freezes at o degrees boils at a hundred 1 liter of water is 1 kg 10 centimeters x 10 cm x 10 cm of water is 1 kg and is 1 liter 1meter x 1 m x 1m of water is one metric ton
Very interesting post. Regarding temperatures, we were always told to "double it and add 33" That way you knew quickly if it was really hot or if you would need to take a jacket with you. Very interesting mate 👍👍
The metric system system all evolves around water, water freezes at o degrees boils at a hundred 1 liter of water is 1 kg 10 centimeters x 10 cm x 10 cm of water is 1 kg and is 1 liter 1meter x 1 m x 1m of water is one metric ton
An unsung metric victory: In 1959 the US and others redefined one inch as exactly 25.4 mm. Decimal inches are practically metric. In engineering, I find statics problems simpler in US Customary units but metric is far better for motion and flow.
...and yet, when I learned about unit conversions in high school (including odd ones like the Troy Pound vs Avoirdupois, and whatever) I learned the inch as "2.5438..." cm, approximate (I used to be able to remember 5 decimal digits, they might be wrong, it was... 25 years ago 😀 Probably because the book was from the 70s, or earlier.
It was better, but with modern computing equipment, it's not as much of an issue as it was. I do still prefer to use metric units for that, but the difference isn't what it used to be when you can simply define variables to cover the conversion and be done with it. When engineering things that have to interact with things measured with imperial units, one set of items is going to have to be converted one way or the other.
I thought the agreement was a universal definition of the yard between the US and British Commonwealth with a foot defined as a third of a yard and an inch as 1/36th of a yard. Also, I believe Ford starting using decimal inches with the Model T while other manufacturers were using fractional inches.
Three thoughts: (1) in their revolutionary rationality zeal, the French wanted to divide the year into sixteen months and the circle into 400 degrees. Twelve months and 360 degrees were an inheritance from the Babylonians, and removing divisibility by 3 from the number of degrees would have been a nightmare for elementary trigonometry. Think - with a 400 degree circle, what would be the angles of an equilateral triangle? Fortunately, common sense prevailed over self-regarding “rationality”, and all that remains is the name of one of their months in the dish known as Lobster Thermidor. (2) I am quite happy with Celsius temperatures (named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius), but I do keep the old units running in some instances. I have not got to grips with hectares, and in laboratory experiments involving microwaves it is convenient to remember that the speed of light is close to 1 foot per nanosecond. (3) SI units are not the same as the metric system I grew up with, in particular the replacement of the gram by the kilogram as the basic unit of mass. What we call The International System (SI) was published in 1960, based on the MKS units, as a result of an initiative that began in 1948.
The challenge there is that there's 365.25 days in a year, approximately, and the moon goes around the earth about every 4 weeks. IMHO, the most reasonable way of fixing the issue would be to simply go with 30 day months and then each of the first 5 odd months gets an extra day and an extra day gets tacked onto the end of November every 4th year to keep things from migrating around too much.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade Actually, that was the old system. In Roman times the first month of the year was march, since it was a) the month of the Roman god of war Mars and b) temperatures were high enough so that the military could start campaigning. According to legend the year before the founding of Rome also only had ten months (that's why there's December - the tenth month), which they took from the Greeks and Romulus' successor Numa Pompilius added January and February, to make the year a complete solar cycle. At that point in time (around 450 BC) February only had 23 days and the Romans placed a separate, unnamed month after February at regular intervals to push the calendar back. The problem with rearranging the months is, that it solves nothing. Either you have an intercalary 5 day period or you have to divide the days on existing months, but then you only have a few months at some point in the year that have those days. That makes things even more complicated. It's also bad to traverse away from the 12 month system because it just divides so good into common fractions (and that's why many old numerical system were base 60). Also, you can't just tack on a day every four years, because the year is actually a little bit less than 365.25 days long. Further problems with regular calendars is, that now all days are fixed at one day of week. This is bad for example for public holidays that now fall on a Sunday. And what about dates that have to be recalculated? We're talking about things like age-of-consent, buying alcohol, serving in the military. It's really more hassle than worth it.
this is such a useful mental trick to have! thank you! i have been using the imperial system so long it is just ingrained at this point. i play a lot of space travel games so i am fairly used to distance in metric but temperature was a whole different beast for me. BTW i know a simple trick for remembering which side of the ship port and starboard are. its super simple and once you hear/read it you will never forget: Port and Left have the same number of letters. it's that simple. not really a math thing but still useful.
The metric system system all evolves around water, water freezes at o degrees boils at a hundred 1 liter of water is 1 kg 10 centimeters x 10 cm x 10 cm of water is 1 kg and is 1 liter 1meter x 1 m x 1m of water is one metric ton
As a Brit who's been raised using both systems interchangeably, I find it easier to think of it in the same way we would fractions. So to get more accuracy, remember that 100 Meters is 110 Yards. It's actually not quite exact but accurate to about 5% which is good enough for an approximation. Certainly good enough for range finding if shooting or playing golf etc. One ounce is 28 gramms so call it 30 and a pint is 0.56 litres so call it half a litre. Again, it's not exact but good enough for baking etc. A gallon is 4.54 litres. We like to buy our fuel in litres and talk miles per gallon here in the UK 😂🤣😂
if you need to convert the numbers, it's easy. starting with C, double it, lose 10%, add 32. reverse that going the other way, lose 32, add 10%, half it. it isn't perfect, but it's close enough for standard deviation.
I’ll agree that the metric system has advantages sometimes but there is a reason we still use imperial for certain things. Fractions are actually more exact and once you understand them more versatile. But more importantly, Fahrenheit is structured around our experience of temperature, 0 being basically as cold as we typically deal with and 100 being as hot, instead of the boiling and freezing point of water. In a lab use Kelvin/ Celsius
@@sahej6939 below freezing is below 32* F which is the same as 0* C and it refers to the freezing point of water because that causes the environment around us to change. So it’s an important point, but doesn’t change that Fahrenheit is based on the human experience of temperature
@LSFord The American experience of temperature* Again, you look at it that way because Celsius is unfamiliar to you. Whereas to almost everyone else, Celsius is far more intuitive because it's familiar. It also makes more sense in other applications. So there's no reason to think fahrenheit is superior other than the subjective reason that it seems more intuitive to you.
@@nutyyyy no no no, it’s not about an American experience it’s based around all humans. 0 degrees Fahrenheit is about as cold as we feel in our environment, and 100 is about as hot as we feel. Celsius 0 degrees water freezes, and 100 water boils. This isn’t my opinion it’s a fact. Fahrenheit is structured around humans and Celsius is structured around water. I never said 1 was superior to the other but if you’re measuring temperature as it pertains to the human experience, not when water boils or freezes, then I guess Fahrenheit is superior. And if you’re being scientific then you should use Kelvin, so Celsius is useless I guess?
Aviation has given me an intuitive feel for Celsius and millibars (hectopascals to the rest of the world). Probably the weirdest US customary measurement I've come across is air density, which is given in slugs per cubic foot. (One slug is 32.17 pounds, or 14.59 kg, in case anyone is wondering.)
Slugs is a rather unfortunate unit that doesn't much get used these days, obviously outside of some niche areas. But, it's the unit of mass for imperial measures. Because of when the system was developed, there was an emphasis on the measure for force rather than mass, whereas the more recent metric measures placed the emphasis on the mass rather than on the force.
Being so used to the old system I forget everything is also written in metric. I recall learning this "new" system in grade school in the 70s. Way easier to learn, it's base 10 and with 10 fingers sure makes it easier.
I memorized that 0 C = 32 F, 10 C is 50 F, 20 C is 68 F, and 30 C is 86 F. Every 10 degree change in C is 18 degrees in F, or every 5 degree change in C is 9 degrees in F. If you know those numbers, it's very easy to interpolate and get within a degree or two. I also used to live in Fairbanks, Alaska, where everyone knows that -40F = -40C.
I remember golfing in Australia and being about 130 meters to go, so mentally m>yded, then put that number in my head. Then while grabbing a club, I converted that new number to yards again, so I was about two clubs long for my approach shot, and also managed to hit beautifully square on it too, and sailed that shot well past the green.
I've just committed to memory from -40C to 40C to find the general range. That makes the emotional connection and I don't get hung up on the exact temp. Like if someone says it's 30C I feel that emotionally. But what I always scratch my head at when British RUclipsrs are talking how it's sweltering and it's like 30C I'm always confused... but then I used to live in the desert and it would have to hit like 40 before I called it sweltering.
As someone who also got to use Imperial on a nearly daily basis (despite being in a metric-only country), I got to learn that 100F and 37C are incredibly close, both of which you just bat an eye and know people are MELTING outdoors. At the same time, knowing thay 0C is 32F, seeing anyone say any temp below 32F is FREEZING. Amazes me how some say "oh yeah, its kinda on the cold side today, we hit 0F", so trivially!
The freezer at work is kept at something like -7F just to ensure that everything in there will freeze almost immediately. Unfortunately, that also means the people going in there if we're not careful.
where i live, 100F and 0F are the general max high/low max temperatures you can expect here with the vast vast majority of the year staying between the 2 of them. So at least where I live Fahrenheit makes sense for general day to day use.
This was REALLY helpful! Like "Righty Tighty, Lefty Loosey"! I was over 50 when tthis left-hander learned that! Game changer for my brain....As to computers or smartphones...I have always complained that we need a third option vis a vis Celcius/Fahrenheit...and that is "BOTH"! At the same time! That would be soooo helpful...! Thanks..I have subscribed....
New video on how to learn the US system of measures! ruclips.net/video/yrj3h3KhkNY/видео.html 🇺🇸
ERRATA: I know that it’s spelled le Système International, without the final -e. The error occurred by chance, not ignorance. It’s very hard to work with text in videos, and each video takes many days to make, which means the brain tends to filter out errors and interpret typographical errors as correct. If you look, you’ll find typographical errors in all my videos, with text in English or Latin or whatever language.
I apologize for my last comment, it was quite rude. Your video is brilliant, as usual.
The SI is very simple and elegant, so we tend to think it is universal.
As computer programming teacher, one of first exercises I gave to my students was conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit. :-)
Thank you, magister!
40 Celsius = is a fever
35,5 °C en 37,8 °C. = body temperature
What a beautiful tree 🌺🌸🌺🌸🌺🌸🌺🌸🌺🌸🌺🌳
Water freezes at 0, water boils at 100
I also feel the need to point that in 1866 there was no SI As SI is relativly modern iteration of metric system accepted in sience community, developed baised on older wariants and officialy adopted in 1960. Also not all metric units are SI units: litre is not for example, it is just equivalent to cubic decimeter.
As someone who has always used the metric system and never understood the Imperial, I am always terrified for a few moments when I see temperatures in the Imperial, since it either looks like the sun has exploded or it has disappeared. 75 degrees, for example, in celsius would be DEADLY but in Fahrenheit is apparently the equivalent of around 24 degrees Celcius ( a rather nice day).
And 200 pounds sounds like a super obese person. And in kilogrammes, it's just 80 kg,a normal person.
As Mr Fahrenheit was from Gdańsk it is very easy to understand his scale for a Pole. He basically divided temperatures measured in his city by 100. 50F roughly 10C is a default temperature here. Below 50F it is cold, above warm. Half a way to 0 or 100 add "very". Everything beyond 0-100F range is treated as extremely dangerous natural disaster here.
I do the opposite, I’m American so was raised on the imperial system. Whenever I hear people talking about their 24C day a shiver runs through because that’s below freezing in Fahrenheit lol
But hey, 70F is indeed a very nice day to me 😂
80/90 is hot, 70 is nice, 50/60 is cool/cold, 30/32 is ice :D
If you're from Scotland: 30 is death, 20 is hot, 10 is t-shirt weather, 0 is not.
Yeah, I don't think doing ten degree steps is detailed enough. Pretty sure "taps aff" can start at 15 degrees for a lot of folk. 😄
20 is hot? Whaaat
As a Finn I concur.
In the Iberian peninsula: 50 is hell, 40 is hot, 30 lets go to the beach, 20 it's nice but it could be much better, 10 better get my jacket, 0 it's snowing lets go out and play, -10 we better stay at home.
here its like this
40 is hot
30 is nice
20 is cool
10 is ice
-20 - home freezer temperature,
0 - water freezes, winter in New York
5 - fridge temperature
10 - typical cold tap water temp, mid Spring or Autumn in New York
20 - room temperature
30 - hot summer in New York
37 - average body temperature
40 - high fever (requires medical attention)
60 - typical hot tap water temp
100 - water boils
200 - oven temperature (baking, most common)
60 ISNT HOT TAP WATER WHAT THE HELL???
nvm youre right but its 50 here
I would consider 40°.C to 50°.C already as hot water...
@Elias HeronBons The temperature may drop below.
I'll join the others and say taking a 60 degrees shower is probably going to burn your skin
Another "useful" number is 50 degrees, the boiling point of human blood. It doesn't mean we boil blood every day, but it does mean that anything above 50 degrees is a danger for your body. Especially in some of your less huh... thermally insulated organs. Like balls. I'm talking about your balls. Don't put 50 degrees water on your balls.
I’ve been using almost the same thing with my students “0 is ice and 20 is nice”. This is a good way to make it more intuitive.
Entertaining, informative and well produced. 30 is hot, 20 is nice, 10 is cool, and 0 is ice. A game changer 🙂
Thanks for watching!
Weirdly enough, 3d printing is what got me used to millimeters more than anything else. Inches are such a clunky unit when you’re working with that level of precision that they’re functionally useless
3d printing also familiarized me with the Celcius scale, since you have very fine control over the temperature of the nozzle, and you may touch that on accident sometimes. 50C is generally the point where something starts being so hot that you have to take your hand off after a few seconds. Each 10C increment after that shortens the time you can touch it by perhaps a second. IIRC 70C to 80C is where you have to remove your hand immediately. 100C boils water obviously, and most plastics start to melt at temperatures around 200C.
@@carl8703 same here. I usually set my build plate to 50 C and always burn my fingers a bit lol
Most machinists work with thous, which is 1/1000 an inch
@@highvisibilityraincoat that seems like an absolute pain to try and scale though
@@TransSappho Generally you're not working with inches of clearance.
For us Finns
30 is lava
20 is fire
10 is normal
0 too warm
-10 nice
-20 pretty cold
-30 too cold
😂👍
I think that'd finish me off totally
Here in Dallas:
40 is a typical day in the middle of summer.
30 is warm.
20 is nice.
10 is chilly.
0 is freezing.
-10 is about the average lowest temperature throughout winter.
-20 - "Remember that year it was so cold, a lot of power plants went offline and millions lost electricity for a few days so they stayed with friends and relatives and their water pipes froze and busted and their houses were flooded when they returned?"
@@chitlitlah And don't forget to add to the -10 description:may cause a 100 car pileup that will kill 6 people because some people don't know to slow down in adverse weather conditions because they think driving a 4 wheel drive is gonna save their butts...
@@chitlitlah Living in Arkansas, I was gonna say the same thing, but I don't need to now.
Love the Latin version of the rhyme.
It's more than 50 years since Australia decided to move to the metric system, and it's well and truly engrained now.
Well done! You are shining examples to the rest of the English speaking world. Hopefully we’ll adapt soon.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Interestingly, the Metric Conversion Board chose the temperature unit as one of its first concerted targets, for much the same reasons as you outlined...everyone used it and talked about it frequently, and it was relatively easy to get a feel for how it worked without constantly converting back to F.
I was at primary school in the 1970s in Australia, when we changed over to the metric system. I feel lucky to have knowledge in both systems, although I find it difficult to remember all the measurements in the Imperial system because I have become so used to the metric system.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Well you sell coke in 2 litre bottles don't you. That's a start.
I am a retired engineer living in Ireland. My primary school education was exclusively in imperial units (feet, pounds etc). My university courses were a mixture of both. The electrical department used SI but the mechanical department used imperial so I am inherently fluent in both systems.
The most dramatic news story I have come across relating to confusion between imperial and metric units was the incident of Air Canada flight 143 from Montreal to Edmonton on July 23rd 1983 which became known as the "Gimli glider". Air Canada were in the process of converting from imperial to metric and in the confusion between pounds and kilograms meant they loaded only half the fuel needed. Needless to say they didn't make the journey, but the outcome was without casualty and can be viewed on RUclips.
@@noylj1 Yes and no. The younger generation will need to be educated, but the fact it was never made mandatory in the States like it was in GB/Canada is the reason it never was able to take hold. The older generations never fully switch (my Canadian grandparents used nothing but imperial units or used a converter all the time). Sometimes you just need to implement it and let the mess sort itself out, which it inevitably will. Most of science and much of business either already uses metric or will be able to do so in only a couple of years.
@@th3oryO But, there is no mess now. You want to mandate a mess. Make the whole world drive on the right side, since almost everyone already does so it must be the right way, and then we'll consider it. Was this voted for or simply dictated to the subjects?
Or, live your life and leave us alone.
Wasn't the trouble with the Hubble Telescope down to mixing of the two, imperial and metric, and not the correct conversion of one to the other?
@@wildlifeathome no
@@wildlifeathome To test the surface of the mirror, engineers used both a reflective null corrector, which used mirrors, and a refractive null corrector, which used lenses and was supposedly less accurate than the reflective corrector. The null correctors were so sensitive that they could only be used in the middle of the night when there were no vibrations due to passing traffic.
When the reflective null corrector showed an error that had not been detected by the cruder refractive device, it was assumed that the refractive device was poorly calibrated and the mirror was ground to remove the ‘defects’ spotted by the reflective device. When a final check was done with the refractive corrector, it showed a spherical aberration of a quarter of a wavelength but it was assumed that this was to be expected with a crude measuring device. The quarter wavelength error turned out to be a real error. The project’s chief scientist, C. Robert O’Dell, spoke for the team who worked on the project saying: “All of us feel horrible.”
It is thought that the error in the null corrector arose because the lens of the device wouldn’t descend far enough, and, because the operating engineers were close to a deadline, three household washers were inserted into the million-dollar measuring device.
Man, i remember doing this when the Euro was introduced when i was a kid. Multiplied everything by two to get the price in German Marks initially, but before you know it, you've shifted your entire way of thinking about money to the new currency, and now i need to convert when my grandma talks about old prices. Great way of learning how to multiply, though!
Never been to Europe but I was watching a TV show from Spain and the characters kept talking about "Pesetas" and converting it to Euros, by the last season of the show all you would hear was Euros lol..
Circa '15 I was working in the back window of a McDonald's and found a 1 Deutsch Mark coin. IDK how it remained in circulation that long, but I got to keep it! :D
As someone in the US (who thinks the Imperial system is nuts), I've been doing this for about a decade- both my mobile and my computer show Celsius so I have a good intuitive sense for the temperature scale.
Decades ago, during President Carter’s short-lived push to change the US over to metric, a friend complained that she didn't want to have to “convert” gallons to liters and feet to meters and I said she didn’t _have to_ - she just had to have an idea of what those measurements _were_ - it didn’t matter what they happened to be in the other units she was used to. (She didn’t know _exactly_ what a foot or a gallon was, either-no one does-she just had an intuitive sense of what they were.)
Well said. Hopefully someday soon we’ll get a new push for Metric.
Also it’s time to get rid of daylight saving time haha
@@polyMATHY_Luke “Also it’s time to get rid of daylight saving time haha”
I find it funny (well, not really) how every November and March the newspapers are full of stories about how *everyone* _hates_ changing their clocks back and forth (unless you live in…Phoenix(!)-and the rest of Arizona or Hawaii, where DST is not observed). But somehow we still have to do it.
I'm a physics student, so I think when doing actual science it makes sense to use SI because of how things like volume and lengths are not based on random multiples like 12, 5280, and 16 but 10's. But for average everyday life for most jobs like a fast food worker, a philosopher or an accountant, I don't see why it matters. Most people don't do painful measurements/conversions often enough to justify a costly/headache switch in my opinion. Recipes tell you how many ounces to use, people know how many miles to drive, etc and they don't need to do much calculation in daily life.
When France switched to euros we had to goes this process too. It was a bit weird but it pass. It’s only for old people that’s difficult !
@@youtubehandlesareridiculous, practically speaking, metic and customary units are both good enough for the every day things that most people do. Switching would be a one time cost to society it switching over the physical infrastructure and for the people who grew up with customary units. But afterwards, there are long term benefits: easier imports and exports, easier for tourists to and from the US, easier to speak to and be understood by a global audience, one set of tools and measures, and so on.
When you started explaining the reasons why you taught it this way, I began to notice the similarities with your linguistic teaching philosophy, and I am immediately understood why you have this on your Polýmathy channel. And suddenly I was like, “Bravo, Luke. Bravo.”
Thanks! I’m really glad you like the connexion.
@@polyMATHY_Luke The way you spell connection. First saw that and was confused by it in Lord of the Rings. I thought it was archaic, like ax. But then I learned that neither connexion nor ax are archaic, but they are in fact still in use in America.
Axe without an 'e' looks so wrong.
@@موسى_7
Connection is actually largely considered archaic in America but it's simply considered 'dated' in the UK (& other commonwealth nations I imagine); I say dated because the connexion spelling is actually not as popular with younger people as it once was in Britain and it's steadily losing ground because of this even though some significant institutions still consider it acceptable or preferred use. I prefer it myself honestly and I imagine Luke does too especially because the spelling is a standard alternative English spelling that preserves the Latin spelling of the etymological root of this word (i.e. 'connexio'). The spelling connection won out though as I believe, because the XIXth c. was a time of massive spelling reform and especially spelling simplification (which was most severe in the States) in English and therefore irregular spellings like connection, where the 'ct' morphed into an 'x'-when *logically* it *ought to be* as simple as 'connect'+'ion'-were considered suspect.
@@sirknight4981 Yes, many people will view the word as being derived from the verb 'to connect', which cannot be spelled 'to connex' of course :D
When we converted to metric measures for many things here in Canada in the '70's, it was just easier to switch thinking to metric units rather than to try to convert back to the imperial equivalent. For example, it became easier to think of distances in kilometers alone, particularly when car odometers amd speedometers and all the road signage became metric.
Canada is such in an ambiguous place when it comes to metric (as in measurement) systems... When people about body heights, they talk in feet. About distances, kilometers (although, sometimes in hours). About body weight, mostly in pounds but sometimes in kilos. About recipes, in cups. Oven or water temperature : farenheit. Outside temperature : both celsius and farenheight. Body temperature : celsius. Officially, you are in metric but because of your southern neighbours, you have to keep using imperial in so many fields. Then... above all, you have to deal with US and UK variants of imperial. I guess that's the price to pay when you used to be called British North America :-).
@@WolfgangSourdeau It would be more accurate to say that the reason for the continued use of imperial/US customary units in Canada is because the United States is its largest trading partner which means a high level of integration between the economies of the two nations.
But Canada uses imperial for so many things
What is a third of a Kilometer?
A third of a mile is 1760 feet...
There are 10 millimeters in a centimeter.
There are 10 centimeters in a... uhhh...?
There are 100 centimeters in a meter. Okay, we're going by 100 now.
So there are 100 meters in a... uhhh... crap.
Okay! There are 1000 meters in a kilometer.
Is metric on base 10, or on base 10/100/1000?
@@EpicToadRage
There are 10 centimeters in a... *decimeter*
So there are 100 meters in a... uhhh... *hectometer*
Btw, you also have 1 liter in a 1000 cubic centimeters. And if you will those 1000 cubic centimeters of water, you get 1 kilogram.
When Australia converted from the 'F word' to the 'C word' for temperature in 1972, it took a while for me to get an intuitive sense for it. That is, until I heard something like what you suggest, except that it went:
The cold singles - the cool teens - the temperate twenties - the torrid thirties - the fierce forties.
The other units didn't give me any trouble and I can still work just as easily in British Imperialist or French Napoleonic. The last bastions of non-metric units were babies and fish - they just sounded so much more impressive when said in pounds and inches.
That's nice!
For babies we do grams/cm.
Which is like 2000-3000 grams with like 30cm to a newborn.
Meters and kg don't make sense there because they are not granular enough.
Once you get above a certain point you then usually only slash a few places and have the standart measurement
I like this much better
so that's why australians started to use cunt to show heavy emotions while americans use fuck
For some reason, babies are still described in pounds even in german(y). Not officially mind, but between parents and grandparents. Then again their age is also counted in months for way too long.
I just have to say something, you are absolutely amazing at doing arguments. you pick your words so carefully, and you are just very convincing with how you lay out your videos
Fun fact: "Summer" in Sweden is defined as when the average temperature exceeds 10 degrees Celsius.
Ah, Sweden, the sweet spot. Warm and mild throughout the year but never too hot.
What? Is this true? I’m from Norway and in primary school they teach us June July August is summer. Strange that Sweden would have such an informal definition
@@6thdim I’m Dutch and here they teach us that summer runs from 21 June to 21 September. Except for meteorologist. They let summer start on 1 June and autumn starts on 1 September.
thats the official summer. among the swedish people there are high debates as to what makes a summer. for me who lives in the northern part, summer begins when there is no snow or ice on the ground and ends when the first leaf turn orange. but yeah, the 10 degree rule is the one used by metrologists.
@@morganjonasson2947 Ah in that case… then for me summer starts somewhere in March (April if it’s cold for a long time) and ends somewhere in October (November if the cold stays away). Winter is from December till February. Thus my spring and autumn are really short, almost non-existent.
I was talking with a friend in Texas once about this. She said "Celsius is weird," and my reply was "No. 0° is when water freezes, and 100° is when it boils. Everything else is based around that." Her reaction was "Wait, that's it? What's wrong with my country?!" 😂 In all seriousness, though, Fahrenheit is so strange. The only time we use it here, for whatever reason, is baking.
Fahrenheit is more intuitive when talking about the weather (with the hottest temperatures in most places being around 100, the coldest around 0), Celsius is more intuitive in the context of chemistry, cooking etc. (Which makes it funny to me if anyone uses F only for baking),
@@rebeccahicks2392 there's nothing intuitive to me about using Fahrenheit for the weather. 😅 It's just confusing. Like, why does water freeze at 32? Why is 0°F close to -20°C? It doesn't make sense to me. Or most other people I know who aren't American.
@@corinna007 but how often are you concerned about the phase change temperatures of water? and as a corollary, are you only sufficiently concerned about the phase changes of water to base your _intuitive_ sense of temperature around them at sea level pressure, but not so concerned that you wouldn't have a floating temperature scale that changes with altitude (where water doesn't boil at 100 C anymore)? arbitrary is arbitrary, so you might as well use a system that matches your experience, and we just don't experience 100 C in our lives, or else our lives end very quickly.
@@antimatterhorn My town was 40° last summer (and it was miserable), which I think is close to or over 100°F, so if you go by Fahrenheit, then yes, we do get over 100°. But that still doesn't make sense. Water freezing at 0°, which we experience for 6 months in winter every year, makes a lot more sense than 32°. I'm sorry, but Fahrenheit is just strange.
@@antimatterhorn Nah you don't get it. 0° is associated with winter because then the lakes and canals freeze. 20° is room temperature. 30° is summer. Very intuitive.
I love the metric system! It is much easier to compute measurements using metrics!
As someone who used imperial system growing up (Fahrenheit, feet, inches, etc) metric and centigrade are so much easier. Started using Celsius temperatures after high school chemistry showed me how much more sense it made over Fahrenheit. I also like just being different 😂
As a Canadian growing up we kinda use both we use imperial for are road speeds and are temperature but will still use metric for baking and measuring things we say feet and inches it’s kinda a mess
The last part of the sentence is so true and relatable😅
You are totally correct about "approximately 2 metres" in male heights. In Normal Distribution the area near mean is very densed, so the error of 0.2 metres = 20 cm is critical in that context. 180 cm is a normal height for males in Western countries, 200 cm is normal only for basketball and volleyball players.
An inch ( in german Zoll) is 25, 4 mm. A foot is 30,5 cm and a yard 91, 5 cm or 0,915 m. But this is rather rare needed here in Germany. Inches are mostly necessary in tubes context, or sometimes inchbased Gewinde / threads (?) appear.
I'm a 197cm software Developer, and glad for those three missing centimeters, so that I don't hit my head on all the standard 200cm high doors all the time. ;-)
Only when they messed up, or added a little to the flooring during renovations I sometimes slam my noggin on the lintel. Or when I wear hiking boots or something with thicker soles.
@@aixtom979 Yes, these milli- and centimeters are very important. 🙂
@@aixtom979 : When i , german, was at school, in 8th class ( grade?) our female main teacher ( Klassenlehrer) became pregnant, so in second half of year we got a new main teacher. This man was exact 2 Meter in height, and had the name Stoffel. He came from a region next to german/ swiss border, where there is a mountain ,Hohenstoffeln' ( high Stoffeln). The teacher told us, that for his height and family name , he got the nickname ,Hohenstoffeln' . A sidenote: Being german and having the name Stoffel is not so funny, in popular german ( slang?) a Stoffel is a boring person, who talks nearly nothing and doesn' t know courtesy and has no interesst in anything.
@@brittakriep2938 LOL.
I grew up in Celsius and since lived in the states for 10+ years. My mental conversion is knowing 0C is roughly 30F, and 35C is roughly 100F, that means every 10F is roughly 5C so you get 0-30, 5-40, 10-50, 15-60, 20-70, 25-80, 30-90, 35-100 and these are good enough for determine what I should wear really.
Yeah, you're off by 10% (9F to 5C) but that difference doesn't matter in every day life.
Fahrenheit also miscalculated when making his scale, since 100F was supposed to be normal human body temperature, when it's in fact 37.78 C. That's not really fever but a bit higher than normal.
0C is 30F
10C is 50F
20C is 70F
30C is 85F
40C is 105F
50C is 120F
60C is 140F
70C is 160F
80C is 175F
90C is 195F
100C is 210F
These (except for 10C and 60C) are rounded to the nearest multiple of 5. If someone says it's 78 outside, they either mean it's about 173F or 25C. pick the reasonable one
I just remember the standard points
0 C = 32 F
10 " = 50 "
20 " = 68 "
30 " = 86 "
And the 5:9 ratio and it's pretty good for any temperature estimation I need
@@francisdec1615 In fact no... Weirdly enough, the guy used _his horse temperature_ to define his scale. And horses have a normal temperature higher than ours.
LUKE:
Celsius:
30 is hot
20 is nice
10 is cool
and
0 is ice.
100ºC is water boiling at sea level, go up a mountain to get your tea sooner.
82ºF is 28ºC
61ºF is 16ºC
-40ºF = -40ºC
And many other convenient conversions.
You can get your tea sooner, but it may taste rather flat and you might not be able to get a second infusion out of the leaves.
I live in the US and I have taught myself the metric temperature system by keeping my devices on C. Many of my friends live in other countries so it seemed unfair to make them try to convert when I say, oh it’s hot today, 40 Grad. (Not 104 F.) it also helps that my oven somehow turned to Celsius and I never changed it back. A friend told me to think of the length of a mattress as two meters (ok, that’s cool). I still have a little trouble visualizing how far a Kilometer is, and I couldn’t tell you how many square meters a house or apartment contains. My method on temperature is 10 C=50 F and go up or down by 9 with Fahrenheit. Counting by 9 is a hoot but it has an interesting system - try it. I also keep in mind that for ever 5 degrees in C, F increases by 9. The refrigerator should be 4 degrees. You are right, it’s about the visualization and association of temperature that matters. I had hoped we would begin enforcement of metric, but I see that isn’t going to happen. I can understand 3 cm better than 3/16 of an inch….WTF. Not sure what Americans are afraid of with learning metric. Guess they don’t know that’s how our monetary system is structured.
I feel the same way! And everyone thinks I'm a weirdo for it.
No one's "afraid of" anything, people simply stick to what they know. If someone needs to measure out something yea long, strictly for personal use, then what does it really matter that they go off the measurements that are intuitive to them (inches) as opposed to a metric they neither have the time nor patience to sit down and learn throughout the course of their busy lives? There is simply no practical incentive for most people to do such a thing, other than some sort of wishy-washy idea of "being sensitive" towards the rest of the world, which...I mean, frankly, bugger the rest of the world's sensitivities. "This life is mine to live and I will live it to the parameters that I see fit" is a more than noble pursuit.
That said, I have no issue whatsoever with enforcing the use of metric in schools. Let the little ones, who still have the malleable brains capable of learning new tricks quickly and with minimal practice, be the ones to spearhead a future measured in metric.
To help make it easier, a metre is about the same as a yard. On a side note, a metre is the unit of measurement, and a meter is a device.
The metric system system all evolves around water,
water freezes at o degrees boils at a hundred
1 liter of water is 1 kg
10 centimeters x 10 cm x 10 cm of water is 1 kg and is 1 liter
1meter x 1 m x 1m of water is one metric ton
It is quite funny when Americans will use fahrenheit here and not even notice half the time that nobody understands what they mean or cares. And it's a shame. It's not any I'll intention on their part or anyone else, but it is a good example of something being lost in communication, and I do think it if you're traveling somewhere you ought to use the system that is used there. Metric is however universal enough that it does seem reasonable to use it anywhere, even the US. Though I wouldn't expect an American to speak differently for me if I was visiting.
I'm from Quebec so I'm very familiar with Celsius, However when I'm talking to my American friends my trick is: 16 is 61, 28 is 82 , 0 is freezing. The minuses get more tricky. Minus 11 is about 11. And of course minus 40 is minus 40.
When Canada switched to metric temperatures in the '70s, I remember being taught this sort of trick to learn the system intuitively. Thirty years later, when I was visiting Texas and heard the temperature was 53 degrees outside, I did a double-take and then realized I was in the US and it was Fahrenheit
In the U.S. Southwest deserts, temperatures can get up to 53 degrees Celsius, in the shade.
frankly Texas can feel that hot sometimes
@@lesliefranklin1870 It was early April in DFW so it was definitely 53 Fahrenheit! 😁
@@lawrenceseguin1865 The official record in Death Valley, California was about 57 Celsius, in the shade, for many years. That may have recently been surpassed. Of course, rocks, concrete, asphalt would likely be much hotter. I've burned my hands from the coins in my pocket.
I mean, knowing Texas...
The last phrase "Sto a fa' la colla" is roman slang and litterally means "I'm making glue" since the temperature is so hot that your skin gets sticky by sweating. Not what you expect to read in an official document lets say. Perfectly executed 💯
I can sympathise a bit with Americans on this: I live in the UK which has been slow to adopt metric. I was largely raised by my grandparents (both parents working), and they would exclusively use Fahrenheit and other old-timey units. It sounded so alien to me, so I imagine for many Americans, it must feel at least as alien when exposed to the units the rest of world use. So I applaud RUclipsrs who increasingly are helping to normalise metric; it will come in time and it's worth the effort.
An aside: when I watched Star Trek as a kid, and I heard characters stated to be around 2m tall, I assumed people were taller in the future; just as people in the past were, on average, shorter. I hadn't considered until now that it may have been an error from the writers.
Thanks for the comment. Yes, I think the change will inevitably come. The fact that it hasn’t is tied partially to the dominant role Anglophone nations have played on the world stage (doubtless there is an anti-Napoleonic history in the British recalcitrance). The US and UK export ideas and culture so readily that we rarely feel pressured to adopt different units from the outside world.
The sad part is that some Americans or Brits seem to associate the old units with national pride. I find they a shame since there are many things to rejoice in beyond a system of units that, ultimately, makes it harder for Anglophones to interact in the sciences or with people from outside the country.
Metric is being used where it's useful, for the most part, but I don't see it replacing the customary units in the US. The fact is, in day to day life, the "advantages" of the metric system never come into play.
The factors of ten conversion is great for doing math and physics, for example. If your measurements are in kilograms and kilometers but your equations are in grams and meters, it's trivial to move the decimal points around to make things work.
Daily life doesn't involve math and physics problems for people, though, so that bit of convenience is beside the point. Pay attention to how people actually use the units, and the conversions between units basically never happens.
Apartments are listed in square meters or square feet. It's easier in metric to convert to square kilometers or square centimeters than it would for square miles or square inches, but nobody ever will do any of those things so who cares?
Similarly, in metric long distances (like city to city) are kilometers, medium distances (down the hall or across the street) are in meters, and short distances are in centimeters. Sure, converting from one to another is easy, but no one would ever say "it's about a 5,000, 000 centimeter drive" or "Tom is the tallest guy I know. He's almost 0.002 kilometers tall!"
In the same way, it's miles for long, yards for medium, and feet and inches for short.
And the same goes for all the units. If you're doing science, you're probably using metric. If you're not doing science, then it really doesn't matter that much and it won't be worth the effort to switch.
@@carlos_takeshi would it make sense to have three temp scales, one for weather, another for medical use, and third for cooking?
@@edonveil9887 If it's necessary to unify on a single scale then it has to be Kelvin, right? Transition points of pure water at one atmosphere is as arbitrary as anything. The Kelvin scale is an objective measure, not arbitrary at all, where zero is at a point set by physics itself, below which it is impossible to go.
So I guess the mnemonic becomes:
303.15 is hot
293.15 is nice
283.15 is cool
273.15 is ice
Kelvin is the SI unit of temperature already, so there should be no opposition to using it.
@@carlos_takeshi Tell me you are blinded by the problem, without telling me you are blinded by the problem.
The fact that you even consider all of that useless and unfathomable just shows the brain rot you got from the system that makes that hard and obscure.
You sound like a blind person raving about how useless sight is because you can always hear danger coming and feel edges on the sidewalk with your cane and why would you ever want to feel danger with your cane ("too late at that point") or hear edges ("sensory overload").
The reason for the weird multiples in older systems is that they were more flexible when dealing with indivisible physical objects, like coins. For example, the old British monetary system - which is actually the Roman system! - had: 1 pound (libra) = 20 shillings, 1 shilling (solidus) = 12 pence (denarii). The penny was sometimes further divided into 4 "farthings", which have no Roman analogue, I believe.
The prime factor representation of 10 is 10 = 2 * 5. But for 12, it is 12 = 2^2 * 3. In other words, 1 shilling could be divided evenly into 2 , 3, 4, or 6 groups of actual penny coins. An imaginary base-10 shilling could only be divided by 2 or 5, which would have been far less practical.
Today, units like "pence" or "cents" are usually small enough for people not to worry over when rounding up or down. And everyone has learnt in school how to do decimal point arithmetic, and also has a computer at hand to do it for them. We rarely use small coins, and even if we need to, we can be assured that someone somewhere could always exchange them for more convenient ones. But back in the day, you had to work with what coins you had physically available to you, and you may have never learnt to do arithmetic with large numbers.
I am 100% pro metric and decimal systems, by the way. This was just to show why non-decimal systems would have made a lot of sense historically.
I was going to say something similar. It’s so easy for people to scoff at the old system but it was smarter than many people give it credit for. 1 shilling = 12 pence and you can break that down nice and evenly into 1/3 as well as 1/2 and 1/4. Something you can’t do with a dollar. Which as you said was important when it comes to coinage
This is exactly why the Imperial system is far superior to metric even today. Also the celsius gradients are much less precise for everyday temperatures. The celsius jumps are much bigger.
I worked healthcare for three decades. We used metric measurements, and military time. Very easy when you get used to it. And thanks for the rhyme!
20C is room temperature
0C is when ice starts forming
So if there's ice outside it's negative temp
If it's cold but no ice it's around 10C
If it's comfortable it's around 20C
If it's hot it's around 30C
If you're in the middle east it's about 40C
If you're on a desert it's about 50C
If you're in a sauna it's about 65-90C
Water boils at 100C
Oven is usually preheated to 200C
5C is a cold day (41F)
15C is a cool day (59F)
25C is a warm day (77F)
35C is a hot day (95F)
45C is a typical high for Death Valley in the summer (113F)
55C is the bo8undary for rare to medium-rare beefsteak (131F)
60C is the boundary for medium to medium-well beefsteak (140F)
65C is how some lattes are served (149F)
75C is a typical cup of hot coffee (167F)
95C is about the temperature of water to brew coffee or tea with (203F)
Hello, i live in the middle east. might want to change that to 50c. at least where i live summer temp hovers around 50c the rhyme then for me is
30 is cool
20 is pleasant
10 is also pleasant
0 is cool
(anything negative) stay home with a heater)
from visiting places where it dips into the negatives, i realize that i seem to prefer cool temperatures, but i can still handle 40+
here in Czech Republic, room temperature is more like 24°C becuase we are used to be naked at home :-D
Yeah I'm in southern New Mexico, I explain Celsius to friends as 40 is hot, 30 is warm, 20 is room temp, 10 is brisk/chilly, 0 is freezing
30 is hot. 40 is too hot
@@bl00dhoney That's also a reasonable way to put it lol. It was just shy of 40 today, and I can confirm, it was too hot
Let’s be real. 30 is hot and 40 is a heat wave anywhere else in the US. 😂
@@bl00dhoney They said Southern New Mexico, 40 is normal for summer there. Or higher. Last time I was there it was 45. Of course they’re going to call 40, not 30, hot. 30 just is not that hot here, especially in Southern NM (I live in Central NM which is a little cooler).
And you don’t explain that water boils at 100, cause you’re in New Mexico and it doesn’t. 😂 (for those not in NM, the elevation causes the boiling point to be lower. It’s 94 in Albuquerque, I know this because I’ve burnt peanut brittle before I realized that you have to adjust temps in candy making at high altitude, so I tested the temp at when my water boils. 202 F or 94 C).
1:20 Just for clarification, metric and SI are not synonymous. There are different flavours of the metric system, SI is but one of them which is the internationally agreed standard. That means there are units that are metric, but not SI and thus not standard. An example is the kilopond, a unit of force. It is very much part of the metric system, but the SI unit of force is the Newton. Another example is mmHg for pressure, metric but not SI. The SI unit for pressure is the Pascal (used to be Bar, but that's another story).
mm of mercury is metric? Well, it's not inches of mercury now I think about it, so it is metric.
That's an important distinction, as metric and imperial measurements are both SI derived and have been for quite a while. The main difference is how the two sets of measurements choose to divide the measures up and where they choose to put their 0 points. It's rather unfortunate that the public at large is not aware of that.
Also Celsius vs kelvin and m/s vs km/h
I guess i use SI as i have never in im whole damn life heard of the Kilopond it mmHg but have always used Newtons, and remember both Bar and Pascal being a measurement of pressure
When it was introduced in Australia we had a memory: Frosty 5's, Tingling 10's, Temperate 20's, Thirsty 30's and Firy 40's. I think it worked well.
Hi, the "dollar" was originally a Spanish coin, which was used in America when it as under Spanish rule. Later on the "anglo-americans" started to use it because it was hard to get British coins at the time. After the Declaration of independence the dollar (el dolar) became the official currency of the U.S.A.
This guy reminds me of that cool teacher who makes the seemingly mundane topics extremely interesting, those teachers made my 12 years in the school system bearable.
Some older people in the UK still use fahrenheit. Often swapping to fahrenheit ("It's 100 degrees!!") when its hot and using celsius when its cold ("It's 5 degrees!!")
In Canada Celsius is used for weather and Fahrenheit is for cooking. For body temperature it's a toss up.
I read somewhere that newspapers would switch between the two systems for a good headline because people would rather buy a paper with the headline "100°F degrees" than 38°C
You know, 'there'll be three digit temperatures outside!' sounds way cooler to say it's hot that just say 'it'll be 38*C!' The same in reverse for freezeing, 'there're be below zero' sounds better than 'below 30's'.
actually some younger people still use fahrenheit in the UK
This is great advice, and exactly how I learned Celsius (and kilograms)! I just switched my devices and lived in the new units without conversion until I developed an intuitive sense of the units. It helped a bit that I was living in Japan at the time, so everyone around me was already in the same units!
Nicely done
I thought I had wasted 12 minutes of my life watching a video with a misleading title , but after spending 3 weeks in Europe I can’t believe how effective this is. Love this channel. Please expand on this system for learning a new language.
I’m glad you found it useful!
Yes!!! I’ve used that little rhyme to teach elementary kids in the classroom and adults on vacation. I found it in an old teachers’ edition of a math book.
Great!
For those using/learning the Fahrenheit scale, here's the corresponding numbers from Luke's poem, and I've expanded upon it:
104 is scorching (40C)
86 is hot (30C)
68 is nice (20C)
50 is cold (10C)
32 is ice (0C)
14 is snow weather (-10C)
What I would use as an American instead as a rough guide, though this can vary from location to location:
110 is scorching
90 is hot
70 is nice
50 is cold
30 there's ice
10 is snow weather
"68 is nice" - we were so close guys
60 is nice
Hmmmm, at least on our bit of the earth, isn't snowfall more common around 32 rather than 14F ?
@@fewwiggle I live in a part of the world where snowfall has happened once in my lifetime in my home. My parents have ever experienced snowfall twice in their lifetime in that same hometown. It also dips below 0C/32F during winter often enough.
@@fewwiggle I live in Wisconsin, and you can have snow at 32F, but there's a good chance that it will melt fairly quickly. Anywhere from about 20F to 32F you will get snow that is wet and heavy. When you get snow around 0F or colder, it is super light like glitter. The super lite snow you can sweep off your driveway, but the heavy wet snow you get around 25F, it will feel like you just went to the gym and did heavy lifting with cardio for an hour after shoveling it.
Thank you! I have been telling people this for years. After they ask about my Android phone temprature. Yes, I am an american who uses celsius daily on all my personal devices in the United States. :-)
NOICE
You are a rare enlightened being
"Madò sto a fa a colla" is the most beautiful and romantic way of saying you're sweating, and nobody can convince me otherwise
The rhyme for outdoor temps seems super easy to remember. Working in healthcare I just memorized two temps...37.0°C & 37.8°C. From there I can figure out if my patient is normal or into fever territory. I also know our fridges for food and meds have to be kept in a range from 1-4°C and the freezer at or below -18°C.
We've been using metric for everything in New Zealand since 1976, however for a few things many people often still use imperial measurements, e.g. baby birthweights in pounds, peoples' height in feet and inches.
In the last weeks in Italy even 30°C would have been "nice", the new hot is at 40°C.
Your pronunciation of "aó sto a fa' a colla" was perfect
Fun fact: The Swedish scientist Anders Celsius who made this scale, put 0 degrees at the boiling point of water and 100 degrees at the freezing point. It wasn't changed until after his death.
It might have upset him, if they had turned it upside down during his lifetime. But it was objectively correct to do so, since raising temperature is also a measure of increased vibrations on an atomic level and increased entropy.
@@francisdec1615 Yes, I've always wondered why he did it the way he did.
@@katam6471 I think it was because during his time, you rarely had to do with temperatures above the boiling point of water, instead you had to handle temperature below the freezing point far more often. Having 100 set for that freezing point meant that you could go even colder without having to use negative numbers.
Edit: I can’t seem to find a source confirming that, so I don’t know if it’s true
Fun Fact: It was Carl von Linné, the father of biological taxonomy, who switched the scale around.
@@untruelie2640 Fun fact: Also a Swedish scientist if I'm not mistaken.
1:56 the U.S. actually modeled their dollar after the Spanish dollar. In fact, the Spanish dollar was usable as an official currency until the Coinage Act of 1857. This is also why we had the half-cent, since there were 8 reals in a Spanish dollar. So 12.5 U.S. cents was the rough equivalent of a real.
Very cool
About time someone uses RUclips to educate with real, useful, and relevant information. Thanks, I hope your channel goes far
Thanks very much
That Phoenix roast was WARM! 😂😂😂
How Anders Celsius determined his measurement scale: The freezing point of water at 0° and the boiling point of water at 100°. Two universal and reproducable constants of the most important substance on the surface of this planet. A nice decimal scale.
How Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit determined his measurement scale: The coldest temperature he could create in his own house by mixing several chemicals together at 0°, the freezing point of water at 32° and "the average body temperature of a healthy human" at 96°. Also, the distances between the units on an actual thermometer are not equal.
Now tell me, which one of the two look more scientific, universal and usable to you?
(Yes I know, Celsius initially placed the freezing point of water at 100° and the boiling point at 0°, but Carl von Linné switched them around. That doesn't really matter.)
Let's not forget that Celsius was from Sweden. He probably went to a bastu (which most call a sauna) and poured water on the stove. He notes boiling water. Then rolls in snow and notes melting ice. So giving these cases values 0 and 100 made a lot of sense.
The funniest part about the average 96°F body temperature debacle was that 100°F was indeed *a* body temperature. Of a pregnant woman. 😂
Except that it's only true at sea level and if you've got very clean water. Any other condition will lead to those numbers migrating one way or the other. It's a pretty dumb basis for a measurement outside of scientific contexts. And even then, it doesn't make much sense as it's going to look extremely weird when we get off the Earth and onto other planets where it will breakdown even further.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade For scientific purposes there is the Kelvin scale.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade The sea level condition is also an advantage, because it allows you to measure air pressure/height above sea level by just boiling some water and putting a thermometer in it. As far as I know, Roald Amundsen used this method to measure his ascent of the polar plateau on his way to the South Pole.
Great video 👍 In my experience going the other way around (metric to imperial) it is nice to know there is a conversion formula BUT learning the temperature intuitively (through exposure and practice) is really the way to go. Nowadays I've become used enough to imperial units I'm often able to intuitively convert temperatures between Fahrenheit and Celsius in an instant to a degree or two of accuracy when I need to. It still amazes me when a relative asks me what 78F is in Celsius and my immediate answer (based on what I know it feels like) is correct to the degree.
Well done!
How to let an italian know you’re a foreigner that’s been living in rome for quite a while:
Tell “ao sto affa’ la colla” to the italian person
I died of laughter, 10/10 gonna watch again
I'd love to see the pro-metric video. I'm conversant in both because I grew up in a German-speaking household in the US, so I used both. I agree with your reasoning about not learning conversion-- it's like learning language through translation instead of target-language-only input. (That's why my Italian teacher doesn't like flashcards and instead makes us draw our words so that we're not using English.)
I appreciate you teaching us the correct way, and your hat is nice
🤠
Younger generations will easily intuit the size of a meter. A meter is exactly the width of a minecraft block, given that the player character ("Steve") is 1.8 meters tall (slightly taller than Patrick Stewart). Meters were chosen since the original developer (Markus Persson) was from Sweden where metric is the norm.
Most people can't intuit any distance that well. Rule of thumb growing up was its a yard to a door knob, but I heard that about meters too, and the actual distance is neither. The closest I get to intuiting distances is I've held a ruler before, and my foot is about the size of a foot, so I can usually get somewhere within the realm of correctness based on those things, but it's not an accurate way to do anything. If you want to be right you always have to measure it, whether we are guessing the size in meters or feet we are likely to be wrong by some margin every time
Nice catch. Seems like Super Mario blocks are about the same size, assuming Mario is also average-sized when grown to just fit within a 2-block height.
@@cmyk8964 2 m is the standard door height and bed length in the metric world.
@@matteo-ciaramitaro That's part of what's great about imperial measures. Most of the measures have something on the human body that can be used to approximate it. It's definitely not great accuracy, but it's usually good enough if you're not motivated to get a proper measuring device.
For distances: Normal walking speed (swift, but not hasty) is ~ 6km/h or 100m/minute.
This presentation is one of the most practical, knowledgeable, and entertaining on the metric system that I have seen. I am delighted to see that you are a BIG advocate of the metric system, as I am. Moreover, you take exactly the right approach, the intuitive one, not the cumbersome conversion route, which has largely been responsible for anti-metric sentiment on the part of some here in the U.S. I'd love to see more from you on this topic. (As a Classics postgraduate, I follow your channel mostly for the Living Latin, Ancient Greek, and linguistics. I am most impressed with your knowledge of the phonology of those languages at various periods. You ought to write an amplified version of Allen's Vox Graeca and Vox Latina, based on your period charts.)
True. There are lots of well-intentioned videos out there explaining math tricks to do various unit conversions, and those videos do more harm than good.
I switched my mobile phone, car, and wall thermostat to Celsius, and within days I had an intuitive sense of Celsius - no unit conversions needed.
Grātiās tibi agō, Luciī. I have always wanted to understand Celsius and thanks to you, I can now 😁
As a Phoenix resident I approve of this message!
I lived in Alabama where it was 100 degrees F. I was moving to the Netherlands. I looked at the map and saw Amsterdam was at the same latitude as Northern Canada, which I've been to and know it's bloody cold. Amsterdam was only 34 degrees in August. They were just above freezing! I went with all this cold weather gear and discovered the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit the hard way as I poured sweat out of my Gortex boots.
Oh, I can already imagine the looks of the people when they saw you looking like a padded cushion in plain Summer.
On the flip side, you created your own personal sauna! :D
This is a welcomed and timely video for me. Recently I changed my phone display Celsius. Celsius thermometers for the house. Even my Google speakers and smart clock tell me temperatures in Celsius. This was all so I could learn/use this way to measure temperature. Thank you for the video and validating the way I was doing it.
Well done! That’s the for-real intuitive trick. Thanks for the comment
I'm a Canadian/American dual citizen (in Canada) so I grew up learning both systems. At work we used to take bets on when the first 10+, 20+, and 30+ degree day was going to be each spring/summer.
This explanation is nice, I never hear before about 30 hot, 20 nice, 10 cold, 0 ice. In my country El Salvador 30 is warm it is almost all time that temperature. And it could be nice to hear more arguments.
In Italy 30 is hot but bearable, 20 might be cold outside and warm inside
As a Finn I imagine you'all are fire elementals from now on.
Been using basically this same guide for years. Totally agree that we just need to quit cold turkey and switch to metric. People will get it pretty quickly. I hope more people see this!
I didn't get it until I heard the Latin part. Now I will never forget it 👌
In northern and west-central Italy, 34 makes you beg for the sweet release of death. In the driest parts of the south, 37 just makes you want a granita.
I’m intuitive with metric except temperature which I have never gotten the *feel* of. So, your little system is very helpful.
That's not terribly surprising. We all compare the temperature of things against our body temperature and with metric measures, that winds up smack dab in the middle.
Excellent point! I don’t live in Phoenix, but it’s been in the 40°C range for the last few weeks. While I don’t think of 30° as simply warm (I definitely consider it hot), I tend to think of the colors the tv weather people here use on maps. 0° is blue, 10° is green, 20° is yellow, 30° is orange, and 40° is red. In terms of winter time here -10° is cyan, -20° is purple, -30° is light pink. Or as my French teacher in high school told us: 0° is coat, hat, and gloves weather, 10° is a light jacket, 20° is jeans and a t-shirt weather, 30° is shorts and a t-shirt weather, 40° is just stay inside with the A/C weather; -10° is coat, hat, gloves, and scarves weather, -20° is light jacket, coat, hat, two layers of gloves, and scarves weather, -30° is just stay inside with the heater weather. While I definitely couldn’t do the conversion in my head to the exact Fahrenheit temperature, whenever I’m watching a show from some place where Celsius is used and the characters say the temperature I have a reference point from where I live as to the temperature might feel like the characters are describing. I mean, honestly when it was 102° Wednesday, 107° Thursday, 104° Friday, and 106° yesterday I cannot say that knowing the exact temperature in Fahrenheit made any difference. It was just yucky hot so hearing some say 40°, 41°, or a temperature closer to it like 39°, 38° and knowing that’s basically what I call yucky hot, yep I get the idea just fine. I don’t need to do a conversion to know it’s the kind of hot I prefer to stay inside with my A/C and ceiling fans on. :-)
Great video!!!!
Thanks! Great comment
Yeah, right...now I gotta remember colors to temperature? I remember 61f=16c, and 82f-28c
This is fantastic!
My vehicle reads in Celsius I thought about going through the setting to figure out how to change it to Fahrenheit. Now I am choosing to embrace the LEARNING EXPERIENCE. Thx
Well done!
Thank you for teaching me this . I think I’ll remember it better now.
An advantage to being from Puerto Rico is being exposed both to SI and USCS units regularly. Milk is by the gallon, but gas is by the liter. Speed limits are in miles per hour, but road markers are in kilometers. Land lots are measured in square meters, but houses in feet, and so on.
However, we do lean towards the USCS and are more familiar with that one.
Cool, I didn't realize/realise that Puerto Rico was like Canada and the UK in using a crazy mix of measurement units.
@@OntarioTrafficMan Tbf that's everywhere, many people* just interchange between imperial and metric when it comes to things like personal height and weight, and some measures of lengths and volumes when convenient even if metric is the official system
* I can only speak for English speakers
For me, "hot" is highly subjective because it depends on humidity and air movement. 30° is nice if high humidity and stagnant air aren't causing you to sweat buckets.
In Ireland 26 is Satan's armpit while 30 in Spain is doable
Another important one: when it's 0° or lower you know to expect ice, so you're cautioned against slippery surfaces
Quite so!
USMA meeting brought me here. Excellent explanation! Best way to learn a new system is to work with it directly.
Hi, Retro! Thanks for watching the video. I agree!
I will always sew, cook and watch my weight in Imperial units. But I am working on learning those Celsius temperatures.
I'm on the US side of the Canadian border, so was used to hearing daily temps in both Fahrenheit and Celsius. It was weird when I moved far from the border for a time and only heard Fahrenheit. Nowadays with so many radio stations using syndicated programming, if they bother to give a weather report at all it'll be only in Fahrenheit (even here on the border). That's so strange.
I'm on board with learning the systems intuitively. When metric-using me spent some time in the US before smart phones, I relied on the newspapers for the weather. First little bit was 'temperature is X F, this is what X F feels like', and could use that as a benchmark. Of course, many years later, I have no idea what the actual temperatures were like, and since I'd been living in Canada prior, and moved back to Australia after, my concept of 'cold' was completely skewed.
The metric system system all evolves around water,
water freezes at o degrees boils at a hundred
1 liter of water is 1 kg
10 centimeters x 10 cm x 10 cm of water is 1 kg and is 1 liter
1meter x 1 m x 1m of water is one metric ton
Very interesting post. Regarding temperatures, we were always told to "double it and add 33"
That way you knew quickly if it was really hot or if you would need to take a jacket with you.
Very interesting mate
👍👍
The metric system system all evolves around water,
water freezes at o degrees boils at a hundred
1 liter of water is 1 kg
10 centimeters x 10 cm x 10 cm of water is 1 kg and is 1 liter
1meter x 1 m x 1m of water is one metric ton
The rhyme is great! I was taught take degrees F, double it, subtract 10 per cent, add 32
Thank you. I admit your rhyme helps.
I live in England, where 26C for more than a couple of days at a time is a national emergency 🤣
An unsung metric victory: In 1959 the US and others redefined one inch as exactly 25.4 mm. Decimal inches are practically metric. In engineering, I find statics problems simpler in US Customary units but metric is far better for motion and flow.
...and yet, when I learned about unit conversions in high school (including odd ones like the Troy Pound vs Avoirdupois, and whatever) I learned the inch as "2.5438..." cm, approximate (I used to be able to remember 5 decimal digits, they might be wrong, it was... 25 years ago 😀
Probably because the book was from the 70s, or earlier.
It was better, but with modern computing equipment, it's not as much of an issue as it was. I do still prefer to use metric units for that, but the difference isn't what it used to be when you can simply define variables to cover the conversion and be done with it. When engineering things that have to interact with things measured with imperial units, one set of items is going to have to be converted one way or the other.
I thought the agreement was a universal definition of the yard between the US and British Commonwealth with a foot defined as a third of a yard and an inch as 1/36th of a yard. Also, I believe Ford starting using decimal inches with the Model T while other manufacturers were using fractional inches.
Three thoughts: (1) in their revolutionary rationality zeal, the French wanted to divide the year into sixteen months and the circle into 400 degrees. Twelve months and 360 degrees were an inheritance from the Babylonians, and removing divisibility by 3 from the number of degrees would have been a nightmare for elementary trigonometry. Think - with a 400 degree circle, what would be the angles of an equilateral triangle?
Fortunately, common sense prevailed over self-regarding “rationality”, and all that remains is the name of one of their months in the dish known as Lobster Thermidor.
(2) I am quite happy with Celsius temperatures (named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius), but I do keep the old units running in some instances. I have not got to grips with hectares, and in laboratory experiments involving microwaves it is convenient to remember that the speed of light is close to 1 foot per nanosecond.
(3) SI units are not the same as the metric system I grew up with, in particular the replacement of the gram by the kilogram as the basic unit of mass. What we call The International System (SI) was published in 1960, based on the MKS units, as a result of an initiative that began in 1948.
1 hectare is a square with sides 100 by 100 meters
The challenge there is that there's 365.25 days in a year, approximately, and the moon goes around the earth about every 4 weeks. IMHO, the most reasonable way of fixing the issue would be to simply go with 30 day months and then each of the first 5 odd months gets an extra day and an extra day gets tacked onto the end of November every 4th year to keep things from migrating around too much.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade Actually, that was the old system. In Roman times the first month of the year was march, since it was a) the month of the Roman god of war Mars and b) temperatures were high enough so that the military could start campaigning.
According to legend the year before the founding of Rome also only had ten months (that's why there's December - the tenth month), which they took from the Greeks and Romulus' successor Numa Pompilius added January and February, to make the year a complete solar cycle. At that point in time (around 450 BC) February only had 23 days and the Romans placed a separate, unnamed month after February at regular intervals to push the calendar back.
The problem with rearranging the months is, that it solves nothing. Either you have an intercalary 5 day period or you have to divide the days on existing months, but then you only have a few months at some point in the year that have those days. That makes things even more complicated. It's also bad to traverse away from the 12 month system because it just divides so good into common fractions (and that's why many old numerical system were base 60). Also, you can't just tack on a day every four years, because the year is actually a little bit less than 365.25 days long.
Further problems with regular calendars is, that now all days are fixed at one day of week. This is bad for example for public holidays that now fall on a Sunday. And what about dates that have to be recalculated? We're talking about things like age-of-consent, buying alcohol, serving in the military.
It's really more hassle than worth it.
this is such a useful mental trick to have! thank you! i have been using the imperial system so long it is just ingrained at this point. i play a lot of space travel games so i am fairly used to distance in metric but temperature was a whole different beast for me.
BTW i know a simple trick for remembering which side of the ship port and starboard are. its super simple and once you hear/read it you will never forget: Port and Left have the same number of letters. it's that simple. not really a math thing but still useful.
The metric system system all evolves around water,
water freezes at o degrees boils at a hundred
1 liter of water is 1 kg
10 centimeters x 10 cm x 10 cm of water is 1 kg and is 1 liter
1meter x 1 m x 1m of water is one metric ton
My brain will never think that way!
As a Brit who's been raised using both systems interchangeably, I find it easier to think of it in the same way we would fractions. So to get more accuracy, remember that 100 Meters is 110 Yards. It's actually not quite exact but accurate to about 5% which is good enough for an approximation. Certainly good enough for range finding if shooting or playing golf etc.
One ounce is 28 gramms so call it 30 and a pint is 0.56 litres so call it half a litre. Again, it's not exact but good enough for baking etc. A gallon is 4.54 litres. We like to buy our fuel in litres and talk miles per gallon here in the UK 😂🤣😂
if you need to convert the numbers, it's easy. starting with C, double it, lose 10%, add 32. reverse that going the other way, lose 32, add 10%, half it. it isn't perfect, but it's close enough for standard deviation.
I’ll agree that the metric system has advantages sometimes but there is a reason we still use imperial for certain things. Fractions are actually more exact and once you understand them more versatile. But more importantly, Fahrenheit is structured around our experience of temperature, 0 being basically as cold as we typically deal with and 100 being as hot, instead of the boiling and freezing point of water. In a lab use Kelvin/ Celsius
but is freezing 🥶 35 or 0?
The expression “below freezing”, does it mean below 0 or below 35? When ice is forming on the ground?
@@sahej6939 below freezing is below 32* F which is the same as 0* C and it refers to the freezing point of water because that causes the environment around us to change. So it’s an important point, but doesn’t change that Fahrenheit is based on the human experience of temperature
@LSFord The American experience of temperature*
Again, you look at it that way because Celsius is unfamiliar to you. Whereas to almost everyone else, Celsius is far more intuitive because it's familiar. It also makes more sense in other applications. So there's no reason to think fahrenheit is superior other than the subjective reason that it seems more intuitive to you.
@@nutyyyy no no no, it’s not about an American experience it’s based around all humans. 0 degrees Fahrenheit is about as cold as we feel in our environment, and 100 is about as hot as we feel. Celsius 0 degrees water freezes, and 100 water boils. This isn’t my opinion it’s a fact. Fahrenheit is structured around humans and Celsius is structured around water. I never said 1 was superior to the other but if you’re measuring temperature as it pertains to the human experience, not when water boils or freezes, then I guess Fahrenheit is superior. And if you’re being scientific then you should use Kelvin, so Celsius is useless I guess?
Aviation has given me an intuitive feel for Celsius and millibars (hectopascals to the rest of the world). Probably the weirdest US customary measurement I've come across is air density, which is given in slugs per cubic foot.
(One slug is 32.17 pounds, or 14.59 kg, in case anyone is wondering.)
How many wasps per cubic toe does that correspond to?
@@tomkot 😄
Slugs is a rather unfortunate unit that doesn't much get used these days, obviously outside of some niche areas. But, it's the unit of mass for imperial measures. Because of when the system was developed, there was an emphasis on the measure for force rather than mass, whereas the more recent metric measures placed the emphasis on the mass rather than on the force.
Switched my phone setting to Celsius about a year ago. Good vid:)
Well done!
Being so used to the old system I forget everything is also written in metric. I recall learning this "new" system in grade school in the 70s. Way easier to learn, it's base 10 and with 10 fingers sure makes it easier.
I'm from Southern Spain... I'd say 40 is hot, 30 is nice, 20 is cool, 10 is cold and 0 is ice.
Same as Italy then
Thank you for the video.
I memorized that 0 C = 32 F, 10 C is 50 F, 20 C is 68 F, and 30 C is 86 F. Every 10 degree change in C is 18 degrees in F, or every 5 degree change in C is 9 degrees in F. If you know those numbers, it's very easy to interpolate and get within a degree or two. I also used to live in Fairbanks, Alaska, where everyone knows that -40F = -40C.
Me too! I did the same to learn Fahrenheit as a non-American
Subscribed!
Greetings from London :)
Welcome!
I remember golfing in Australia and being about 130 meters to go, so mentally m>yded, then put that number in my head. Then while grabbing a club, I converted that new number to yards again, so I was about two clubs long for my approach shot, and also managed to hit beautifully square on it too, and sailed that shot well past the green.
as a portlander, 30 is way too hot, 20 is hot, 10 is nice, and 0 is cool
I've just committed to memory from -40C to 40C to find the general range. That makes the emotional connection and I don't get hung up on the exact temp. Like if someone says it's 30C I feel that emotionally. But what I always scratch my head at when British RUclipsrs are talking how it's sweltering and it's like 30C I'm always confused... but then I used to live in the desert and it would have to hit like 40 before I called it sweltering.
As someone who also got to use Imperial on a nearly daily basis (despite being in a metric-only country), I got to learn that 100F and 37C are incredibly close, both of which you just bat an eye and know people are MELTING outdoors.
At the same time, knowing thay 0C is 32F, seeing anyone say any temp below 32F is FREEZING. Amazes me how some say "oh yeah, its kinda on the cold side today, we hit 0F", so trivially!
The freezer at work is kept at something like -7F just to ensure that everything in there will freeze almost immediately. Unfortunately, that also means the people going in there if we're not careful.
where i live, 100F and 0F are the general max high/low max temperatures you can expect here with the vast vast majority of the year staying between the 2 of them. So at least where I live Fahrenheit makes sense for general day to day use.
This was REALLY helpful! Like "Righty Tighty, Lefty Loosey"! I was over 50 when tthis left-hander learned that! Game changer for my brain....As to computers or smartphones...I have always complained that we need a third option vis a vis Celcius/Fahrenheit...and that is "BOTH"! At the same time! That would be soooo helpful...! Thanks..I have subscribed....
This is epic! Thank you from an old American!
Thanks for watching and commenting!