Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Heat Wave 34 C (__ F?) - I Don't Understand Fahrenheit

Tell me it's 100 F outside, tell me you set your air conditioning at 71 F, let me know it's 0 F and freezing, I don't care -- I don't understand what you're talking about.

Metric Country
I live in a metric country. However, with 90% of the TV programs I watch being American, I hear a lot about the United States imperial system. More importantly, because the U.S. of A has nearly ten times the population of Canada, it is a major trading partner slash customer of our services. That meant that they forced us to learn imperial in college -- I'm not talking about just feet and inches, they made us learn the harder units like kips and other weird things.

What is 163cm?
Having said all of that, I don't understand a person's height when it's told in metric. I can roughly visualize what a meter and even a kilometer is, but I do not understand heights that are about 2m and below. The reason is probably because I've been given my height in feet and inches my entire life. Everyone on the television and the interwebs, friends, family, and others usually reference their height in imperial too.

At some point, I decided to do the math for my height in centimeters as a reference point. I am 5'4", otherwise known as 163cm.

For the Good of the Nation
So, it's come to this. I am now going to attempt to do the math for a bunch of temperatures in Fahrenheit. The formula is easily found online: F = C(9/5) + 32 or C = [F - 32](5/9).

Google now sports a conversion tool just by searching the right words too. Regardless, I'll go in 10 C increments.

0 F = -17.8 C
10 F = -12.2 C
20 F = -6.7 C
30 F = -1.1 C
32 F = 0 C
40 F = 4.4 C
50 F = 10 C
60 F = 15.6 C
70 F = 21.1 C
80 F = 26.7 C
90 F = 32.2 C
100 F = 37.8 C
110 F = 43.3 C
120 F = 48.9 C
130 F = 54.4 C
140 F = 60 C
212 F = 100 C

It is currently 82.4 F and we have the air conditioner set at 80.6 F. The A/C has been running non-stop for hours despite the stupidly high thermostat temperature because of how hot it is outside. Indoor temperature shows as 82.4 F right now. FML.