For those who prefer metric, the rest of the world awaits your arrival.

trivia: there’s at least a dozen water ices. the differences are, i think, in the form the crystals take, how precisely the water molecules arrange themselves. most of these forms only exist in unusual conditions of pressure and temperature, and “ice nine” is no more unusual or deadly than the other ones. wikipedia might have an article, but it’s too early in the day for me to go looking.

(also, note that most of my post is tongue in cheak; I actually prefer Fahrenheit, mostly because I’m used to it. But if you’re going to say its a stupid system to use because of how arbitrary it is while proclaiming the virtues of Celsius, it is a tad hypocritical; Kelvin really is the most non-arbitrary method of measuring temperatures).

Celsius is just as arbitrary. Why use the freezing and boiling points of water?

ask a cook. Kelvin’s a decent enough scale, but i don’t think Celsius knew there was an absolute zero point at the time — and besides, we’re ugly bags of mostly water, not inflated bags of molecular hydrogen.

Heh. IIRC from fifth grade, he added salt or something to water and ice.

Yup. The salt/ice water bath was the coldest temperature he could create at that point in time, which is why he set it as 0. 100 degrees was supposed to be the average temperature of the human body, but either his body temperature was higher than normal or his measurements were a bit off.

Celsius is just as arbitrary. Why use the freezing and boiling points of water? Why not hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, or perhaps oxygen? Kelvin is the only sensible temperature scale.

The IMF is low on my list of good independent auditors, but half a loaf is better than none.

which of his orifices did that dude pull his zero point out of, anyways

Heh. IIRC from fifth grade, he added salt or something to water and ice.

If we cared what the international community thought, we’d be metric.

no, actually, if you cared about not constantly wasting time and introducing math errors through doing pointless stupid unit conversions that nobody can ever remember quite how to get right, you’d be metric. the international community don’t much care if you do waste your time getting your math wronger than it has to be, so long as you’re willing to trade with them in sensible units.

(i can just about manage to understand inches and miles, although i’m still converting to kilometers a lot to really grok distances. volume units here are wack, and i’m doing liters in my head, thankyou verymuch. a pound is just under half a kilo, so that’s only slightly wack, but fahrenheit degrees are right out. which of his orifices did that dude pull his zero point out of, anyways…?)