Riding to work tonight a younger guy presumably hold enough to drive as he was standing beside a truck running at -3 C(26F) say "Wrong Season..." trailed off as I rode past. It was warm enough I didn't even need my long johns or sweater!! This is my first winter riding and -22C (-8F) has been the coldest so far and not quite a blizzard but enough snow to have my pedals hit the snow in spots. My wife now thinks I totally bonkers but loving every minute of it!!
I can't temperature. I read that as -22F at first...I thought you really were insane! Still, -8F is pretty badass!
Join the rest of the world America.
I'm usually in the minority on internet forums with this topic, but I learned both American Standard & Metric in school. I used metric as a member of the US military. I don't find it very advantageous. I prefer AS. I have many reasons for this preference, but that would require an new thread.
Why is that so? Every subsequent unit in the metric system is a multiple of ten of the previous unit. It makes calculations so simple. If I ask "how many ounces of water can you fit in a cylindrical container with a diameter of 3 inches and a length of 1/4 mile? " You don't even need a calculator to answer that with the metric system.
I don't usually need a calculator for AS either. Granted, AS is rather screwed up for historical reasons, but it's actually a base-2 system, and that fact is most evident when looking at volume measurements. Halving or quartering of a volume is something that is downright
natural for the human mind, so it's something that even the illiterate could do in their heads "without a calculator".
Let me illustrate using the standard volume units per wikipedia, bear in mind that many of these are no longer in common use... (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units#Units_of_capacity_and_volume)
The largest AS volume unit is the hogshead,
Half a hogshead is a barrel, but then we have a disconnect, because a barrel is 31.5 gallons.
So let's restart with a bushel, half of which is the half-bushel,
Next we have a peck, half of which is the more commonly known gallon,
Half a gallon is, obviously, a half-gallon
Half of that is a quart,
Half again is a pint,
Half again is a cup,
Half again is a gill,
Then the half-gill,
Then the fluid ounce,
Then the tablespoon, after which things get screwy again.
Also, the pint is (almost) exactly one pound of water, so there is a rational connection to mass measurements as well; even though mass units don't have a consistent relationship.
So, as you can see, AS could stand for some regulatory intervention to fix the historical hiccups, but it's certainly useful in it's own way. American construction workers, I know first had, typically have both AS and metric tools; and dealing with an architect who insists upon using metric blueprints is a universally hated trait. His design team, with their fancy computer programs, can switch back and forth between AS and Metric all day long; but when you are in the field trying to
imagine your work plan, AS in inches, feet & yards are easier to conceptualize in 3 dimensions, if not easier to convert. Also, unit conversion calculators exist for the conversion challenged, anyway; so even that really isn't an issue. Although, I will admit that I hate converting from feet into miles; but that is also a rare problem to have. It sure would be easy to convert meters into kilometers in your head, as it's just a matter of shifting the dot, but how often does the typical European have to convert a small distance unit (feet or meters) into a traveling distance unit (miles or kilometers)? Here, that's only done in elementary math classes, to torture the kids with the idea that they will actually need to know how to do it as driving adults. (Hint, that would be never. Even your GPS app will switch from miles to yards without requiring the user to perform any mental calculations)
