OT Fahrenheit

23 minutes unless there is something wrong with my math. Now had you said 23 miles away at 100 kph...

Harry K

Only if you have 100 minutes in your hours.

There's definitely something wrong with your math.

23 km / 100 kph = 0.23 hours, or 13 minutes 48 seconds.

Absolutely it's a stupid example -- although the demonstration of its stupidity could have been better done, e.g. "If you're going 60 mph, a 300 mile trip also takes five hours. If you're only using one set of units, it doesn't make any difference what they are."

I knew that didn't sound right when I wrote it but couldn't see where :)

Harry K

THE metric unit of time is the second. Minutes and hours are not metric.

I suppose you'll be leading the charge, then, to have vehicle speedometers changed over to meters per second? Don't forget the speed limit signs, too.

"KPH" is not really a metric unit. It's a hybrid of metric (kilometer) and something else (hour).

Converting some (non-metric) time units to metric:

1 minute = 60S (60 seconds) 1 hour = 3.6KS (3.6 kiloseconds) 1 day = 86.4KS 1 month (approx.) = 2.6MS (2.6 megaseconds) 1 year (approx.) = 31.56GS (31.56 gigaseconds)

Few (if any) people use metric for everything.

Note that I never said I recommended doing it this way.

Time calculations would be a lot easier if we didn't have to deal with TWO important natural cycles (day and year). The year isn't even a multiple of the day (days per year is approximately 365.24).

If you can't go 100MPH, you could try figuring half that (50MPH) and approximating the value for 60MPH. Experience should be helpful in this case.

Reality does tend to be inconvenient sometimes. Notice how it fails to step out of the way at those times.

It's probably an artifact of conversion. People use fractional degrees C, only because they're used to degrees of a certain size, not because such a size is in any way better.

I have such a thermometer too. Usually the accuracy of the thermometer is so low that the extra digit provides no useful information. I round those numbers almost automatically. One night the low was 32F (the actual display was 31.8F).

When does a french guy eat dinner? 648,000 o'clock ;-)

Water pipes are above-ground in South Florida?

I need to live somewhere it freezes so last year's insects die.

Dick

So?

Brian

A French woman will always keep you waiting longer than an American... ;)

Mine are very accurate, and yes when I record the temperature I round it. The real issue is that most people use thermometers to determine temperatures that are constantly changing. Check a digital one with an outside probe attached. The inside temperature is in a housing that is heavy enough to act as a heat reservoir so the temperature changes slowly, while the outside one has hardly any heat sink.

I have a dual sensor thermometer sitting on a file case in my office. Under carefully controlled conditions both the internal and the outside sensors read the same. In actual practice the outside and inside sensors seldom read the same even though the sensors are only 5 inches apart. I can walk past the sensors (about 2 feet away) and stir the air enough that the outside sensor changes 0.4-0.5 degrees.

Outside, temperatures often fluctuate so much that anything less that a degree makes no sense. I find it hilarious to listen to the weatherman say excitedly say that the first freezing night of the fall was 27 degrees. What he never says is the period. That low of 27 degrees may have existed less than a minute and most likely less than 5 minutes and the time below 32 degrees may have been less than 10 minutes.

Yup

That is a problem but we deal with it. In real life I lived in Md and the insects did just fine from year to year. The predators live all year long here too. You just have to recognize the good guys and not kill them indiscriminately. A healthy population of tree frogs keeps the roaches down.

Right, it's a distance and it is metric. Last I knew, light traveled at approximately 3x10^8 m/sec.

A year is roughly 31,536,000 seconds. So light travels

9,460,800,000,000,000 m/year. Simplified, 9.5x10^15