John,

You saved me the trouble of sending what I just wrote, almost exactly
what you wrote.

Jim

On Jan 31, 2006, at 10:33 AM, John Bange wrote:

>> 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"
>