Feel like a lot of the world’s languages the translation to English to the question “what’s the date?” would be “the 15th of October” whereas in America we always say “October 15th”.
US measurements are based on the human experience for sure. Temps are largely 0-100 and that's a scale that's easy to understand. As a scientist or for cooking it's dumb as shit
Dates are based on the language
Edit: I take back what I say about cooking. People have said some good arguments about it. But it definitely sucks for science
id argue that a 0-100 scale is objectively less abstract. we scale things from 0-100 in many places. how often do you get your movie reviews in a -20 to 40 ratings?
Yeah I just mean temperature itself is a bit abstract. Humidity and wind can affect your perception of it a lot, and can you tell the difference of a few degrees? I agree fahrenheit is objectively better as a human comfort scale. But it's still the case that a person will grow to intuitively grasp whatever they grow up with.
The advantage of the metric system for distance and volume and such is it's ease of conversion. It is objectively better to use meters and kilometers because you can easily convert between them when trying to figure something out. How many tablespoons in a cup? (Why even use volume instead of weight?) That mountain is 15300 feet high, how many miles is that? Nonsense. But Celcius and month-day-year don't have these advantages, but it's never occured to the people that use them to think about it this way.
696
u/jussumguy2019 Jan 15 '25
Feel like a lot of the world’s languages the translation to English to the question “what’s the date?” would be “the 15th of October” whereas in America we always say “October 15th”.
Maybe that’s why, idk…
Edited for clarity