• Glide@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    This is actually a super fascinating example of the way data can be displayed in a technically correct way to lead the viewer to completely invalid conclusions.

    • alekks09@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      It’s even more fascinating how everyone is seriously debating over this meme

    • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      That’s medieval units for you. At least they use the same units in the whole country, which is progress compared to how it used to be in the rest of the medieval world. They just didn’t take the last step to modernity.

    • 4lan@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      It’s not even our system. We adopted the system of our oppressors that kept it long after they abandoned it.

      Imperial is not American, some might call it unAmerican

  • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 months ago

    wait 100 F is only 38 degrees?

    Wow that’s funny. I’ve seen so many people complain about extreme heat below 100 F.

    I get that what you’re not used to is difficult but like 38 degrees is a relatively ordinary (now) summer day for me.

    From how people spoke about it I thought 100 F was more lile 45

    • dukepontus@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      I think that if the air is moist enough 38 degrees will overheat the body and kill it. Because the human body sweats to lose heat.

      So some regions on earth are probably less pleasant when the temperature rises. While other regions are more tolarable for humans.

      So there might be a reason why some people complain that they suffer from the heat. There could also be other reasons like their living conditions. A lack of ac and water, or living in a urban heat hell.

      Lets not trivialize experiences of people who suffer.

      • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        11 months ago

        Oh yeah they open up libraries near me cause otherwise people might cark it.

        I’m not trivialising anything, but outside of the tropics you don’t need AC to survive those temps. Just keep wetting yourself down and stay out of the sun and you’ll be right. Unless you’re not in a good state prior.

        • Thrashy@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Keep in mind that a large chunk of the United States is considerably closer to the tropics than Europe is. Washington TC is on roughly the same latitude as Lisbon or Ibiza is. It’s not tropical, but climatically it’s still considered sub-tropical, and large chunks of the country have the summer heat and humidity to prove it.

          • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            11 months ago

            I’m not from Europe. I’m from Australia.

            ATM I live in temperate rainforest, have spent time in tropical heat up in northern QL.

            Until the air gets saturated a lot of ability to cope is a combo of adaptation and conditioning. I wear jeans all year round pretty much and generally don’t run into problems as long as I’m drinking water. People less use to heat don’t move as much blood to their perpheries, probably don’t drink anywhere near enough water, and aren’t used to feeling comfortable in wet clothing (from sweat or from wetting yourself down).

            I spent some time in Thailand and felt like I had found my people when it was a 30 degree day and I put on a jumper, went outside and saw many others doing the same!

          • Wugmeister@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            11 months ago

            Actually Europe’s weather is pretty analogous to the Midwest, thanks to an ocean current dumping lots of warm water to their north. Although that might be changing soon idk

    • gmtom@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Ah yes the obligatory smug comment whenever anyone brings up temperature even tangentially.

      • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        11 months ago

        Oh relax, it’s just funny. You’re welcome to have a giggle when I bitch about it being 18 and you’re like 18? that’s 64! I only heat my sauna to 66!

      • Ashen44@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        I live in a place that has -40°C winters and +40°C summers now 👍

        God I sure do love global warming

      • TheFriendlyArtificer@beehaw.org
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        11 months ago

        Montana, here.

        Nothing quite like when it hits -45°F and you have to start closing off rooms and stuffing blankets into registers and doorway cracks.

        Any kind of outdoor airflow can burn so bad that skin necrosis can begin in just 5 minutes.

        Summer in Arizona is shitty. Winter in the Northern Rockies will straight up murder you.

        • Droechai@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          You shouldnt let the house go below 14-isch degrees since that would create kondensation that might hurt the structure or promote fungal growth. My house is between 15 to 20 degrees in winter and at 15 I can feel my body stiffen due to cold

          • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            11 months ago

            If I had a choice mate I wouldn’t let it haha. I live in Australia, we make houses that don’t qualify as tents in the rest of the world.

            No real insulation (tiny amount in roof but downlights punch a hole through it), single glazed windows, doors that don’t seal. Power costs too much to run heating :') it’s good shit.

              • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                When I moved to Los Angeles, I opened a bank account and while chatting with the bank employee, I found out she’d never seen snow up close. She’d only ever seen it on the mountains in the distance. That boggled my mind.

              • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                11 months ago

                I have had friends from colder places come stay and say they’ve never felt as bitterly cold as winter in Sydney.

                When I spent some time in the snowfields in aus I was actually warm. Turns out if you build houses properly you don’t even really need much heating. Residual heat from cooking and body heat hangs around for a long time, we’d only light the fire mornings and evenings.

    • RobotsLeftHand@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      100F in Houston is a completely different beast than 100F in San Diego. Shade will actually help you San Diego. Nothing will help you in Houston.

          • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            11 months ago

            There are like 1000 permanent residents :p

            Nice place but, good lake, near good mountains, pleasant bushland around.

            I stay sometimes, it’s very timeless. Doesn’t feel like it’s changed much from when I was a kid.

            • _stranger_@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              Houston is the opposite of all those things. Its beaches consistently rank as having the highest fecal contamination in the country. Be glad you know nothing of it.

    • bermuda@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      It really depends on humidity. Humid heat is typically worse and can be really draining both mentally and physically. Dry heat is much more tolerable for humans. As a person who’s experienced both I can concur, the 100F humid heat was borderline horrific.

      38C/100F is probably fine (relatively) in Arizona but in Florida it’ll be pretty terrible. Like when I was in the south for a week it was 98F and the walls were sweating.

  • merc@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    Saturday Night Live actually had a good sketch about this a few weeks ago:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk

    Washington: "We fight for a nation where we choose our own laws… choose our own leaders… and choose our own systems of weights and measures.

    I dream that one day, our proud nation will measure weights in pounds, and that 2000 pounds shall be called a ton."

    Rebel: “And what will 1000 pounds be called sir?”

    Washington: “Nothing. Cause will have no word for that.”

    Washington: “Distance will be measured in inches, feet, yards and miles. 12 inches to a foot!”

    Rebel: “12 feet to a yard…”

    Washington: “If only it were so simple. 3 feet to a yard.”

    Rebel: “And how many yards to a mile?”

    Washington: “Nobody knows.”

    Rebel: “Ok, how many feet to a mile?”

    Washington: “5280, of course! It’s a simple number that everyone will remember.”

  • Wugmeister@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 months ago

    I think the two points missing from most debates are

    1. The imperial system does a damn good job at measuring things the way a human would. A foot is roughly the length of a big foot. A single degree farenheit is just big enough that you could guesstimate it with enough practice. If the temperatures are negative, you dump sand on the roads instead of salt.

    2. It’s like seven units of measurement in a trenchant. You never have to convert gallons to cubic miles. You never have to convert from dots to angstoms, and nobody has ever had to convert the surveyors mile to the nautical mile. It feels schizophrenic because claiming it’s one singular system is like saying Italian, French, and Portuguese languages are all regional dialects of Europeanese.

    My point isn’t “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”, I’m saying for the average non-scientist there may be a logical reason why we like it so much

      • turmacar@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        No no. The rest of the world is constantly out of sorts on what common measurements are. It’s like how monolingual non-English-speaking people are constantly aware they’re not speaking the natural language of English.

        /s

      • 4lan@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Lol is it?

        Think of all the different numbers you have to divide different units in our system by to convert.

        numbers are base 10 for every single society on earth. Metric units always scale by 10. It’s literally perfect for how we interpret numbers

  • thorbot@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Another fucking imperial versus metric meme, never seen this before. Most of us use metric already, shut the fuck up

    • 4lan@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      As an American I approve this comment.

      I’ve been into 3D printing for a few years and it has forced me into metric. Now my brain works in millimeters and it’s way better

      Our countries insistence on using imperial is evidence of our resistance to change. Even the creators of the system have abandoned it

  • Thranduil@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Mother tell the children not to check the temps. Tell the children not to read my books what they mean what they say.

    Sorry i read Danzig so I though of the band

  • Thaumiel@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Hard agree with metric for the most part. I forever stand by Fahrenheit for temperatures you experience, and Celsius for science. I don’t want to have to use decimals in my everyday life, but that’s just me

    And really, K is the ideal temperature unit for scientific purposes, since there’s actually a hard starting point, rather than picking an arbitrary state change at an arbitrary pressure of a kind of arbitrary compound.

    • adriaan@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      The measurement for temperatures you experience really does not matter outside of what you’re used to, do you think non-Americans get confused about how cold 6°C or 23°C is?

      • Squirrel@thelemmy.club
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        11 months ago

        Temperature scale doesn’t matter in daily life, so I hate that there’s always this argument about which scale makes more sense. Knowing what a given temperature feels like is no more difficult than remembering that water freezes at 32 degrees fahrenheit and boils at 212.

        I’m all for a system based around multiples of 10, but for temperature, even Celsius isn’t done that way, other than 0 and 100.

        • shrugal@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          Every temperature scale in our usual range is pretty arbitrary at the end of the day, but you have to admit that the fixpoints of Fahrenheit are particularly useless in everyday life.

      • TheSealStartedIt@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Americans always say they prever Fahrenheit over Celsius because the measurment is more exact. Also Americans: "The weather is in the fifties today.“

        They just like to find excuses why they prefer the things that they are used to. It’s human nature.

      • bigschnitz@aussie.zone
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        11 months ago

        It gets way easier for “feel” of weather too! In most habitable places in the world, 0°C is around as cold as you’ll regularly see (also a handy number for when you need to watch for ice). Similarly, 40°C is around as high as most habitable places get, also a nice easy number to work with.

        In fahrenheit, these numbers are 30 and 105, I mean I can get rounding down for ease of use but you’re moving the reference points a lot to make it 25 to 100 for what you usually see and that’s certainly not more intuitive than 0-40

        • SimplyATable@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Consider it as a general scale from 0-100. First third is freezing, second third is alright, the rest is kinda bleh. Above or below the scale, take caution when you’re outside

        • Jarix@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          I didnt forget, i said pretty good frame of reference because it didnt feel necessary given the context of people using it for real world everyday things. Which is typically at “fuck it, close enough” for most people to not have to worry about

          If i said perfect, excellent, amazing, the best then i might concede your point, but i didnt so i dont however correct you are that there are other factors that can change the points of reference

  • Rosco@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    Americans saying that F° is a more human and relatable temperature measurement, how many times have you been to Dantzig in the 18th century again? Do you even know where Dantzig is? Because i’ve seen water freezing quite a few times before.

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    I’ll grant that farenheit has merit, but for me, the foot/inches distance works a bit better for casual measurements, and stuff that doesn’t have to be very precise.

    Beyond maybe someone’s height, I’d rather work in metric. I’m also very much in favor of celsius and I still have trouble converting between the temperature scales. I grew up with temps in degrees C, and height and some sort distances in feet/inches. IDK, I’m weird.

    The date thing drives me nuts though.