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Truth. I once paid nearly $500 for a set of 17 certified, calibrated wooden pencils, with documentation showing that each one met their rated hardness levels of 9H thru 6B. And for $500, they don't even come with erasers, that is an added-cost option.

https://www.gardco.com/product/pencil-hardness-test-kit-astm...

Cap your meal off with a NIST 1196a standard issue cigarette? I am told they taste like drywall and taxes.

https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2020/02/nist-releases-...

Perhaps you would prefer some standard issue meat.

https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/sial/nist1546a

It’s frightening that… NIST is doing the very thing it was established to do back when it was called the Bureau of Standards?

That’s a biased view that leads to a scale only convenient for people living in particular latitudes. Now talk to someone living near the equator like Singapore, and 0F is unimaginably cold (even 40F is basically unheard of), and 100F is very hot but not extraordinarily so. Then you talk to someone living close to the arctic and the converse is true.

All this talk about 0F to 100F being frequently encountered probably reveals your local climate conditions more than it helps define a useful global standard for all humans. We should accept that humans live in more diverse conditions than we intuit and such a scale probably won’t be useful for all.

This has always been my primary argument in favor of Fahrenheit. It makes sense for humans, which is all a majority of the population really cares about. In addition, it's more granular. Sometimes turning the thermostat up or down by 1C could be too much, where 1F is just right.

In science and math, I can see where having round numbers for commonly used temperatures would be useful, but if 0C and 100C are the only places that happens, it's not that hard to memorize 2 numbers.

Celsius maps nicely to the temperatures observed in a typical Finnish sauna. 100C is among the highest typical sauna temperatures (very relaxing in dry air), and afterwards you cool off with water around 0C

Also, having 100C as water temp for black tee and 80 for green tee is nice to remember

OF will still kill you faster than 100F, and most folks aren't comfortable at 50F.

It inspires the following idea: A nonlinear scale where ~72F is 0, and +X represents the same level of heat discomfort as -X represents cold discomfort.

This makes sense if weather is the main focus. For things like cooking Celsius is great though.

I actually came around to Fahrenheit for the exact same reason. 0°F and 100°F are kind of the top and bottom of the temperature range I’m going to be experiencing and anything outside that is waaay too hot or cold. In Celsius a large portion of people have to flip to negative numbers regularly during the normal year, and everything between 45°C and 100°C is completely unused.

Except 0F being “really cold” and 100F being “really hot” is a personal bias of yours based on where you’ve lived. It’s not true for everyone or everywhere.

And even if it were true, it still wouldn’t work. 100F in a dry environment is nice while, in a humid environment, 100F is awful. Same for 0F, a dry and static 0F is fine while a wet and windy 0F is killer.

Also for things like hvac temps Celsius is rather too coarse where as 1F is right around the perceivable difference.

That’s 02025 thinking.

> (There is a reason it is common to drop the century when talking about years,

Yep.

> humans are less skilled at numbers over 100)

No, the reason is that the century is constant and therefore carries no information. Where the century isn't constant, it never gets dropped.

The US is technically metric in that the units are defined in terms of the metric equivalent. A US inch is exactly 2.54cm.

Nothing screams freedom more than using ancient terms like horsepower and measuring tires in inches and percentages.

The other day I heard an American talk about a TV being 65 inches. Took me a while to understand they had a 165 centimeter diagonal television.

ahem U.S. Customary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units

The reference point is the triple point, and invariant.

You can centrifuge it. Heavier molecules move closer to the bottom. Repeat until you reach the desired purity.

You need shitloads of ordinary water to extract a liter of heavy water. And I'd be surprised if there's any superheavy water in that, because tritium radioactively decays.

Fun fact: Heavy water is slightly toxic to humans. If you only drank heavy water, you'd die as it shifts the chemical reactions in your body out of balance. A moderate amount is fine though.

There are a variety of ways to do it, but you'd want to be careful that you don't attract attention from your local nuclear regulatory agency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Production_methods