General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Let's make some more reactionary, xenophobic heads explode: WH Petition for the Metric System [View all]Sirveri
(4,517 posts)Tell a European it's 40 degrees out and he'll turn the AC on. Tell an American and he'll grab a coat. But it ultimately doesn't matter one way or the other, they're all just arbitrary numbers anyways. Why have the freezing and boiling points of water as the zero points? What if I decided to have the boiling and freezing point for steel (and separated them by 100 units). Then all our temps would be negative, but they'd still be the same value, and if we brought up 2 or 3 generations in that system they'd become quite fluent in it. Of course this is as good an argument for simply retaining the current system, since they ultimately don't matter, other than to facilitate communication between 'East and West', so to speak. At which point the question becomes, why the heck should we change instead of them?