#metrology

without looking it up, how many centimeters are there in a (US Customary) foot?

I disagree with the "Farenheit uses digits more efficiently for everyday discussions about the weather" thing. A single degree Farenheit seems to me imperceptibly small. A single degree Celsius is roughly the limit of what I find perceptible, but is still a pretty small, insignificant difference. People who say Farenheit uses its digits more effectively seem to be basically just ignoring the 10^0 digit and just using the 10^1 digit instead. That's not efficient. I'm not sure I'd say Celsius is significantly better. "20"/"low 20s"/"mid 20s"/"high 20s" (in Celsius) seems to be about the level of precision people normally use.

This suggests that a temperature scale that's actually optimised for using its digits effectively for everyday use would be roughly a few times the size of Celsius. There happens to be just such a scale, one that pre-dates both Celsius and Farenheit even: degrees Newton. 0°N=0°C=32°F, so we keep the freezing point of water as a nice landmark, very relevant to discussing the weather. A difference of 1°N is roughly 3°C or 5.5°F. A large proportion of normal weather is in the range 0°Q to 9°N, necessitating only a single digit (how's that for efficiency?). A single degree is a small but clear difference, around the level of precision people normally use. If you want to go to fractional degrees, that's fine, but it's marked as something unusually precise. Maybe they'd do that in weather forecasts. 10°N, a clear milestone, is about 30°C or 87°F, which is distincly hot weather. 20°N is roughly the maximum recorded temperature the weather on Earth has reached. The next big milestone, 100°N, doesn't really correspond to anything important I can think of. It's pretty high even for cooking, just slightly higher than the melting point of lead.

Newton's scale does have a major disadvantage that it's not actually clearly defined, since Newton only gave a single reference point, but that's not relevant to the current discussion. Maybe something slightly more fine-grained than degrees Newton would be a little better. I was originally going to use my own made-up scale with units of 2.5°C for this post before learning that the Newton scale already exists.

- Metrology, Classic Amsterdam Subway Graffiti - 2022 -