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xkcd #3001: Temperature Scales (xkcd.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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In my new scale, °X, 0 is Earths' record lowest surface temperature, 50 is the global average, and 100 is the record highest, with a linear scale between each point and adjustment every year as needed.

https://explainxkcd.com/3001/

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I agree, historically they make sense, but times have evolved and I honestlt believe certain things should belong to the past, just like we abandoned 12 base monetary and measurement systems, except for a single place on earth that just ignores what everyone else does and goes their own way.

In a global world, we should unite things instead of dividing for ideological/political reasons. Still, my own is an ideological reason why the imperial system should disappear, but there are pratical issues it causes, espeically when used internationally in industrial and scientific fields, which is very common.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I think a large portion of it is that governments/institutions/whatever don’t want to pay the large amount of money it would take to replace all signage/software/etc.

The classic “high short term costs for long term benefits” vs. “no (direct monetary) short term costs for ‘future me’ problems”.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I mean the imperial system has it's niche uses too. Fractional measurements are helpful if you're doing multiple of something and you don't want to calculate. What if you have 16 boards and you need to lay them out across 19 feet, what's the width for each board and gap? Well its 19/16 or 1-3/16. And you could say your tolerance is ±1/16. Versus a decimal system, you need to hit 1.1875, with a ±0.0625 tolerance. Yeah no, imperial is better in that case.

Bur imperial does have it's pains, especially once you start working with anything that isn't a multiple of 2. Just wanted to point out it does have some uses.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I think it’s about time we switched to using seconds as the universal time unit. I really hate the messy base 60 conversions we inherited from the Babylonians. Also, month is such a broken unit, and it just makes many calculations unnecessarily complicated.