Dawn mission hiding out after lightning threat The threat of lightning has forced NASA to postpone the launch of the Dawn mission to the asteroid belt by 24 hours. The warning came as engineers were preparing to fuel the Delta II rocket that will carry the probe into orbit and beyond. The temperature of the rocket's second stage had also risen too high to allow fuelling to …
In your article you refer to American Fahrenheit, and the real money being Celcius.
In a land where we buy petrol by the litre but have road signs in mph I don't think we should be too robust in our condemnation of alternative measurement units.
And some of us prefer the real mccoy that the US sometimes offer. Everyone knows that when temperature is measured in Fahrenheit it is warmer.
And when I'm measuring for curtains give me feet and inches any day.
So there.
Come on now Andrew, you know that the only reason we still have miles on the road signs is because a) it was too tedious to change them all over to kilometers, and b) it's easier to say 70 miles because it sounds less than the 120 kilometers it really is.
Are you one of those who still count money in sixpence and shillings?
70 mph = 112.65408 km/h < 120 km/h
Not by much, but perhaps just enough to get you fined if you are driving in the UK with a km-speedometer.
However, it is too tedious to change everything over to km. We should all convert to furlong per fortnight (1.0 furlong/fortnight = 1.0 snailpace) instead.
but Daniel Fahrenheit was German.
Also, it's still widely used in the UK, perhaps not for scientific purposes, but it's used nevertheless (witness last year's headlines about the temperature reaching 100 degrees - they didn't mean Celcius!).
It seems to me to be just a less than subtle dig at our friends across the pond and it isn't necessary.
Now we're talking sense (....am I on the right forum?). Yup, I'm still got a couple of sixpences lying around somewhere, and thrupenny bits, and old pennies, and half crowns, florins, and ten bob notes. I've seen a lot of things change during my lifetime and I reckon I might just see out the fiver being transmogrified to coinage.
What's wrong with having 240 pence in the pound anyway? Or 1,760 yards per mile?
Fahrenheit is dead simple by comparison. For example if the thermometer reads 100F then I know it's hot, and 50F is time to put the string vest on. But exactly where is the touchy-feely-boily-freezy point in Celcius (or to give it its correct name, Centigrade)?
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