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Comment by divbzero | Hacker News Reader

Metric might be catching hold bit by bit. I think SI units are also standard for recording patient weight in medical records.

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Just like in 1975... time to try again?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act

I can't believe that there were people who actively worked on killing this effort and actually succeeded. Talk about stupidly reactionary. In general it seems US public policy has suffered since the 70s. There were things like serious efforts for universal health care or metric conversion. These days it's not even imaginable to make a big change in the country.

I work with people like that. They don't like metric simply because it would be something new to learn.

Also… just like in 1875… time to try again again?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_Convention

> The Metre Convention (French: Convention du Mètre), also known as the Treaty of the Metre,[1] is an international treaty that was signed in Paris on 20 May 1875 by representatives of 17 nations (Argentina, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Norway, Switzerland, Ottoman Empire, United States of America, and Venezuela).

At this rate we’ll try again in another 53 years?

Siemens MRI scanners allow you to enter patient height and weight in ‘metric’ and ‘U.S.’ (feet, inches and pounds). It makes me smile.

Immigration from Latin America and Asia are certainly helping SI in the US. However, there is a loooooong way ahead... And forget about Celsius, this one is nowhere to be seen.

(US here). It kind of helps to think of celsius between 0-100 as “percent of boiling water” for me. Living in one of the hotter parts of the world at the time, being able to say the temperature is 40-50% of the way to boiling water really seems a good objective definition of “too hot.”

(European in the US here) The fact that 0F is not "water freezing" (but way worse...) is weirding me out to no end.

Technically 0F is the freezing point of water, just a different type of water.

As a European I find Fahrenheit kind of makes sense on a human scale as 0 and 100 are the upper and lower limits of it being reasonable to be outside. Below 0 is "too cold", above 100 is "too warm" and when it is 50 it is neither warm or cold.

"Several accounts of how he originally defined his scale exist, but the original paper suggests the lower defining point, 0 °F, was established as the freezing temperature of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride (a salt)."

"He rolled the dice very carefully"

Do we have any account for why he wanted it to be a brine? Is it like sea ice instead of fresh water?

It's funny to use that rationalization regarding 0-100 when in reality the rest of the Imperial system is utterly allergic to that sort of scale. 0F and 100F being endpoints for "reasonable" seems a bit of a stretch as well. As a Canadian that's "reasonably cold" and "way too warm".

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