Worst was where they switched without even mentioning it. One paragraph they're still using F and said "The lowest recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60.8 degrees.", then the very next paragraph, with no talk of changing units, they talked about people dying "though temperatures never fell below freezing and ranged as high as 45". Just because the second story happened in England..?
That's still 45 degrees Fahrenheit. They were talking about outside temperature, not core temperature.
I'm also questioning if you have a sense of either temperature scale. It's quite funny to think that it could reach 45 C in England at all, much less that people would freeze to death in it.
My bad, of course you're right. And no, not a great sense of temperature scales - in the UK I pay attention when it's down around freezing (in Celsius) and in LA I pay attention when it's hot, 100+ in Fahrenheit. Other than those two occasions I guess I don't really notice or care.
Edit: funnily enough, 45C turns out to be the hottest temperature I've personally experienced, the day LA set it's record high in September 2010.
- Celsius scale is based on water freezing at 0C and boiling at 100C. That's 32F and 212F, respectively.
- 45C is about halfway between 0C and 100C, so it's about halfway between 32F and 212F.
- Normal body temp 98.7F or 36C.
- Also -40C == -40F. I looked this up once because I was out on a day that where the wind chill was -40F. I thought that I did something wrong when the conversion came out exactly the same. ;-)
Gets you to within a couple of degrees for commonly experienced temperatures, plenty close enough for most purposes. 45C ~= 120F. The true value is 113F.
They do use kilocalorie that is defined with degrees of celsius though. It isn't as bad here, but unit mixing is extremely annoying in aviation books in canada. In the same chapter of "From The Ground Up" you can see nautical miles, statutory miles, multiples of thousands of feet for height (took me a while to realize a mile is not a multiple of 1000 feet, wtf?), degrees of celsius, pounds, kilograms, kilopascals, millimeters of mercury and so on. At least I haven't seen degrees of fahrenheit anywhere...
I also find it completely strange that here in the US people tend to use feet as a sub-division of miles, but the mile/foot relation is not trivial: 1 mile == 5280 feet. And why would you need so many units for length? mile, yard, feet, inch... All (apparently) unrelated.
The metric system on the other hand, is so elegant and simple. Only one unit: meter.
Growing up in the US, we're exposed to these units our entire lives. End result? When my GPS tells me to turn right in a quarter mile, I can eyeball that distance. If it told me to turn in 400 meters, it'd make me pause a bit.
When I buy a gallon of gas, I know what I can expect to get from it. I know roughly how much a gallon is and how much a liter is, but I'd have to do math to tell you how far my car will go on a liter of gas. Don't even ask me me how many liters I need to travel 100 km…
It doesn't help that gasoline is sold only by the gallon, fuel efficiency is given in miles per gallon, speed limits are in miles per hour, and mile markers give our position on our highways and number our exits. Non-SI units are burned into our brains and our infrastructure all over the place. Grow up in that world, and the awkward math doesn't seem all that bad compared to having to get your bearings in a whole new system.
(That's not to say we shouldn't be switching to metric… but there are definite downsides for a population so used to our strange way of doing things.)
Besides, these length units do have integer relationships with each other: 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, and 1760 yards to a mile. I find the first two easy to remember, and the third easy enough to calculate by remembering that one mile is 5280 feet.
But a yard is 0.9144 meters, making a foot 30.48 cm and a mile ~1609 m. Math within metric is easy. Math within our silly units is slightly more complicated, but we get used to it. Conversion between the systems is messy.
It's worth saying that lots and lots of countries have gone through this conversion process, sometimes multiple times -- think of all the countries colonized by the British (and thus converted from their existing systems to the British measures), who then sensibly converted to metric at some point after independence.
All of them were equally wedded to the pre-change system (fixed in mental habits, etc.), of course; there's nothing special about the American situation.
There's obviously a cost, but it's most severe for the older generation (whose mental habits are so ingrained they have real trouble adjusting) -- even for younger adults, your brain adapts to the new system after using it regularly for a while. AFAICT (I moved from the US to a metric-using country 7 years ago) it's never quite the same as the system you grew up with, but I'm pretty comfortable with it now.
It's something like learning bad words in another language -- they never gain the burned-in power of expletives in your native language, but your ears certainly learn to perk up when you hear them, and you can use them perfectly well.
Summing up -- quit whining, America, switch to better measurement systems, and the difficulties will smooth out more quickly than you think. :)
Worst was where they switched without even mentioning it. One paragraph they're still using F and said "The lowest recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60.8 degrees.", then the very next paragraph, with no talk of changing units, they talked about people dying "though temperatures never fell below freezing and ranged as high as 45". Just because the second story happened in England..?