See, that's what I love about Celsius: when I need to convert into Celsius for whatever strange reason, all I have to do is subtract 273 from the real temperature. (But for some reason, it's difficult to find household weather or cooking gadgets that report the temperature using the reasonable scale, so I add/subtract 273 an awful lot. *sigh*)
The fun of course comes when you photoshop together a very official looking fake procamation from the head of the engineering college (who had a reputation for being a prat anyway) declaring that all future temperature measuerments should be done in the Rankine scale, to bring all measurements from the college into accordance with the college's new policy regarding "international synergistic collaborationism".
Which gets posted up on the engineering college's various notice boards on 1st of april, where upon the humble biologist responsible discovers to their horror that engineers occasionally use that scale in all seriousness for some purposes, leading to the entire engineering faculty starting to convert every bit of temperature data they had into Ra° for about a week before the bits of the college that would have had to replace their very expensive equipment started to complain to the head of the college, at which point the whole thing fortunately unraveled without costing anyone much money.
(of course the problem with nobody these days having much of a background in classical languages is that nobody noticed that the college's emblem with latin motto, which was in the scanned letterhead that the photoshop was a development of, had had its motto replaced with "IGNARUS IS, EGO SOCIUS GALLO")
I know, isn't it horrible? Fahrenheit at least has the excuse of 'legacy system', but Rankine says you went to all the effort of changing your temperature scale without changing it to something sensible.
the humble biologist responsible discovers to their horror that engineers occasionally use that scale in all seriousness for some purposes
To be fair, biologists also commit their share of "stupid unit" offences. My pet peeves there are people who measure quantities of gas in "cubic cm", and pressure in "millimetres mercury".
Which leads to abominations like the barrer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrer): 10-11 (cm3 O2 ) cm cm-2 s-1 mmHg-1
The fucked up thing about the barrer is that the Cm3 O2 thing is a molar amount, so there's avagadro's number and two different conversion factors secretly hidden in there as well as the... everything else involved.
Don't get me started. I had to work with the wretched things for years, and the first thing I did was convert them to SI like nature intended. It doesn't help that we were working in a context where we were also dealing with actual volumes of gas (which, since we weren't at standard temperature and pressure, didn't equate to their nominal volumes).
Also, cm/g/s units, ugh. It's like somebody took all the measurement systems I most despise and grafted them together into a Frankensteinian monster.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-31 03:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-31 04:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-31 08:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-31 09:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-31 02:59 pm (UTC)Which gets posted up on the engineering college's various notice boards on 1st of april, where upon the humble biologist responsible discovers to their horror that engineers occasionally use that scale in all seriousness for some purposes, leading to the entire engineering faculty starting to convert every bit of temperature data they had into Ra° for about a week before the bits of the college that would have had to replace their very expensive equipment started to complain to the head of the college, at which point the whole thing fortunately unraveled without costing anyone much money.
(of course the problem with nobody these days having much of a background in classical languages is that nobody noticed that the college's emblem with latin motto, which was in the scanned letterhead that the photoshop was a development of, had had its motto replaced with "IGNARUS IS, EGO SOCIUS GALLO")
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-31 06:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-01 12:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-01 12:09 am (UTC)To be fair, biologists also commit their share of "stupid unit" offences. My pet peeves there are people who measure quantities of gas in "cubic cm", and pressure in "millimetres mercury".
Which leads to abominations like the barrer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrer): 10-11 (cm3 O2 ) cm cm-2 s-1 mmHg-1
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-01 01:07 am (UTC)...I'd like to buy a vowel...
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-01 01:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-01 02:12 am (UTC)Also, cm/g/s units, ugh. It's like somebody took all the measurement systems I most despise and grafted them together into a Frankensteinian monster.