Household Temperature

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

See, that's how it starts. Oh well I guess, it really can't hurt in parenthesis.... writing the parenthesis is such a pain I'll just leave them out..... Oh, that's too confusing.... hell, I'll just leave the Fahrenheit off.

People should be able to work it out from context, although it is helpful to post the units. 70 C is the temperature of the inside of my car on the hottest day of summer after the car has been parked in the sun all day (I still have the partially melted thermometer), so it's not possible for people to keep their houses at that temperature! So Fahrenheit must be the units. Yesterday evening, that same thermometer reported that inside my home, the temperature was a nice 24 degrees after a pleasant summer's day. For 24 degrees to be pleasant, the units must be Celsius.

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

That's the slippery slope that predicates the total destruction of truth justice & the American way.

No, wait that was Bush.... never mind.

I agree, Bush seems to be doing more to Americans than a working knowledge of the metric system ever will.

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

But I use Fahrenheit. I think in Fahrenheit. I write in Fahrenheit. Why should I stop and find a conversion table to translate Fahrenheit into Centigrade (Celsius) every time I write a temperature?

Don't panic, nobody's asking you to change. If you ever need to convert F to C, just remember the formula: C = 5/9 (F-32), and the reverse is: F = 32 + 9/5 C. But you don't really need to remember that. Temperate twenties, thermal thirties and flaming forties should be good enough. I don't know where the inside car temperature of 70 C fits on that scale, except to say that 60 C will kill bacteria in hot food, some meats are cooked when the inside temperature reaches 70 C, and had I left eggs inside my car that day they would probably have been cooked. (That gives me an idea for a new and unusual recipe for coddled eggs, along the line of The Manifold Destiny.)

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Do I have to post the Kelvin numbers too? And what about all the other units of measurement?.... distance?... weight?... volume?

Just post the units to which you are accustomed. As long as you don't mind my posting in Celsius, kilometres and litres when the occasion arises. The only difficulty I have with US measurements is where the conversions are different to British measures, otherwise I can manage them well enough. I know that a mile has 63,360 inches and that the path from inches to miles is an interesting journey with numbers like 12, 3, 5+1/2, 4, 10 and 8 (multiply those numbers together and you get 63,360).

That is what comes of growing up during the time of Metric conversion. My late father loathed Metric, but I learned Metric in school, so it was natural to become fluent in both systems. He was even suspicious of decimal currency when it was first introduced.