Sunday, July 7, 2024
By:
I've had a lot of time to think over this long weekend. With this long weekend, I've been able to formulate my words about a subject I feel strongly about. Celsius is stupid. Let me first back up and say something slightly less controversial. Celsius is stupid for everyday use. Talking about the temperature of a room? A single degree Fahrenheit can make the difference between chilly and nice. Hey, even half a degree Fahrenheit can be useful if the temperature is slightly off. Do you want to adjust the thermostat by 0.2 degrees Celsius? Stupid. You are going outside, what's the temperature? 70s? Nice weather. 50s? A touch chilly, should probably wear longs. Try doing that in Celsius. You go from perfect weather to warm weather in about 7 degrees. I don't mess around with fireworks on the fourth, I don't have seven fingers.
July 4th: Fun day. Stayed inside. Procrastinated until fairly last minute (by that I mean two hours before the fireworks started) to locate a good location. The elevator lobby was perfect. The firework show, however, was kinda underwhelming. It's been a while since I saw a fireworks show (given how late they usually have to start), but I remember them being longer than 20 minutes. That was part of why I rarely went, it started late and went late: a tiring experience. Also, I think some of them misfired causing the area to be shrouded in a thick smoke. Fun.
Okay, you may be asking, but Celsius is metric, and the metric system is better, yada yada yada. What makes the metric system better? Easy conversion between units of the same type. No weird factors of fours and twos between pints, quarts, and gallons, just nice factors of ten. Do you know what doesn't have conversions like this? Temperature. The only temperature scales in metric are Celsius and Celsius plus 273.15. Same with Fahrenheit, you got the standard and it plus 459.7. The only thing stopping a transition to Rankine is scaling things by the right powers of 5/9.
July 5th: I don't care where I'm working, but if I get Thursday off for a holiday, I'm not going in on Friday. It's just a non-negotiable. One skill that I'm recognizing is useful is multitasking items on shopping trips. My meals for this week and the next are pretzels and burgers. I was going to just get some cheese sauce for dipping my pretzels, but then I realized a Dijon mustard would double for a dipping sauce and burger sauce. Win-win.
But, but water boils at 100 degrees Celsius? Let me paint you a picture. You are defusing the bomb, as part of the bomb manual you need to know the boiling point of... ethanol. You're toast either way. (It's 173 F) It takes only two points to define a temperature scale. Since it's only two points, the times these points are relevant are few and far between. And when they are? It's only two points you have to remember.
July 6th: Zoos are fun. It's nice to see animals and slowly come to the realization that they lent out all the animals in the current exhibit you are wandering about. It's also fun to find some tucked-away location while an ungodly number of people stand in line to get into one of the indoor exhibits.
Logging in to write these blogs is always a fiasco. I don't forget my password, no no, it's my username. Most websites let you use either your username or the email you used to register, but not here. Coupled with the insanely aggressive CAPTCHA (I may be a robot given how much it hates me), it sets the tone of my writing sessions (unbridled rage).
July 7th: I have a wide range between what will satisfy my hunger and how much I can eat. Yes, two soft pretzels are enough for dinner given I have a cookie afterward, but I could also down five pretzels with no hesitation. However, I would like to make the pretzels last a decent time so that I don't have to whip up something from scratch in my preciously short weekday evenings. Counterpoint, five pretzels.
Evan Erickson