Windshield temp WAS -12 below here. Temperature 6.

Wish it was like that here, I could bust out the shorts. ;)

When at school did any of you ask or wondered  why Americans use Fahrenheit instead of Celsius ?

Yeah. Fahrenheit is dumb. Our whole system of measurements is dumb. Oz, lb, quarts, gallons, yards... give me Metric!

Neil deGrasse Tyson said that Fahrenheit is how the BODY feels. Celsius is how WATER feels. Kelvin is how MOLECULES feel.

When I was in medical school (late 1980s) the major journals and schools tried to switch to metric and it failed miserably.

Captain Obvious: People don’t like change. Also, half the population has below-average intelligence.

I am all for these type of obviously better changes- metric system, elimination of paper dollars, repeal of Citizen’s United, etc.

As a kid it would have seemed odd to try and remember 32F you'll fall on your rs if you're not careful while walking to school. If somedy says it's "zero degrees" here that's fall on your rs day. Then there's converting to Celsius to do calculations with SI units. Were there many kids in America that just found the whole thing too bewildering? Then there's date formats -- month / day / year -- why?

Michael A full half?!!!

That wasn't an issue because it all we knew.  Conversion wasn't an issue because the only kids who had to do the conversion were in a class to learn to do the conversion.  That was part of the material.  Plus, we also got to learn Rankine. :)

As for dates, I assume that is because that is how it is spoken here.  To speak a date we say the month followed with the ordinal of the day, sometimes with the year.  In conversation, most people will say "June 4th" not "4, June" or "the 4th of June".  I am all in for YMD date format.

Personally, I think a way bigger source of confusion is that the world doesn't operate on single time.  Somehow, we have something like 38 time zones in a 24 hour day?

Thomas Clearly I'm approximating. We could spend a lot of time delving into the full math of it all-- mean, median, etc. And that's before we agree on what is exactly a measure of intelligence! However, as an American, speaking about Americans against the backdrop of the world, I suspect I am safe in saying that half our population has below average intelligence. Lake Webogon excluded, of course.

That attitude comes from a Baby Boomer brought up on Star Trek, who really thought the US and the world would be in a much better place by now and has been smacked by the stick of reality.

Matt Completely agree- get rid of DST, redraw the time zones to make sense. Pick one and standardize YMD, DMY, whatever. And let's get someone from IEEE in here to really get the standardization rolling!

Matt the date thing makes sense when you hear an American say June four or June 4th although here we'd say The 4th of June. I work to an American company and it's been a bit of an education in imperial conversion to metric although we do still stick with miles here but my cyclist friends annoyingly talk in kilometers which I'm always converting to miles in my head.

Stanley we are just doing our part to preserve some of our English Heritage.  ;)

Michael I remember a Lake Wobegon from somewhere, but maybe my memory is fading, putting me below the half-way mark.

Matt I've advocated for years that we should get rid of all time zones; use GMT and 24-hr (military time) clocks. But I have a feeling even my grandchildren will still use the same calendar, clock, and time zones.  :-(