> Non-intuitive?  Water freezes at 0, boils at 100.  How is that not
> intuitive??
>
> Not so much non-intuitive as under-descriptive. Freezing and boiling of
water are really only convenient marking points for scientists and
engineers. The freezing and boiling point of water at sea level are, in
fact, utterly arbitrary marking points! Why not the boiling point of
alcohol? Or the freezing point of mercury? When most people talk
temperature, they're talking weather. In that regard, the Fahrenheit scale
has a more appropriate scaling. Most human-habitable areas experience
temperatures that range inside 0-100F for the most part. Centigrade, though,
is optimized for science, which marks the same temperature range as -17 to
37C. This results in a rather overly-coarse degree of resolution, forcing
the use of an awkward decimal place for certain applications. The metric
system is indeed very logical and rational, but it lacks the same degree of
seat-of-the-pants convenience the older systems. The fact that we have
calculators now has obscured for many people the fact that (10 fingers
notwithstanding) we can't easily do decimal math in our heads. Our brains
are MUCH better at estimating halves, thirds, quarters, etc. The original
French metric system is very much a product of the "Age of Enlightenment",
with science and rationality being emphasized over tradition. This resulted
in a quite a bit of reasonably useful traditional baby being thrown out with
the bathwater. The metric system is great, but there are several places
where, for reasons of internal consistency based on scientific convenience,
it fails to achieve the same degree of conventional utility as the system it
replaced.

--
John Bange
'90 Vanagon - "Geldsauger"