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Comment Re:Which users? (Score 1) 269

A lot of people said the same thing about XP. Then Microsoft forced them to upgrade. They will do the same to you.

But, I won't. I haven't bought any Windows software in a long time, and I'm continuing that trend. I play games on it, and it will continue to run my old games well after EOL so that's fine. I also have some automotive service software, but that will do fine in a VM.

Windows 7 is really fantastic to use in a lot of ways, and I've enjoyed it. I'm enjoying it right now. But Microsoft has gone full asshole. They were always pretty damned bad, of course — I've ranted and railed about them time and again, as mentioned nearby. But they always sort of pretended they cared about the user experience until recently.

Comment Re:Simple answer (Score 1) 942

Beyond the reason of 'that's what I grew up with', how is the Fahrenheit scale more comprehensible than the Celsius scale?

Beyond the reason of "I didn't write it", what was wrong with the comment that was already there which asked the same thing, to which replies have actually been left, and is this a sock puppet to the account with the mod point that your comment received?

Comment Re: Simple answer (Score 0) 942

In the centigrade system, we solve this higher resolution issue by adding decimals, just as Fahrenheit does, such as 37.8 degrees.

Yes. We don't use the decimals. Nobody says "It's going to be 73.2 degrees and sunny today!" because that would be stupid. You cannot feel a difference of less than 2 degrees Fahrenheit, so why would anyone comment upon it? By comparison, centigrade requires you to use fractional degrees, because you can feel changes of less than 1 degree. The direct compatibility between centigrade and Kelvin scales is utterly irrelevant to the average person, who is never going to make use of it, and so it can safely be ignored during the scope of this discussion. Being better for some scientists who ought to be able to handle conversion is not an argument for everyone using it.

I am divided on the issue of English-style measures for volume; certainly, it's handy enough in the kitchen, but I don't have any trouble dealing with liters and dividing them down. In terms of measurements of distance, I am firmly in the metric camp. But when it comes to discussing the temperature of the air, which is what most people use a temperature scale for most of the time, the Fahrenheit scale simply makes more sense. The right tool for the job, please.

Comment Re:Simple answer (Score 1) 942

What makes Fahrenheit more comprehensible?

Because the numbers are bigger, but not so big that they're unwieldy. There's more variation. Arguably, there's more variation than is actually needed, because the average person cannot detect a variation in [air] temperature of less than two degrees Fahrenheit. But you get to talk about a broader range of temperatures, so the numbers seem more different. Since most people are unlikely to ever encounter weather far outside the 0-100 scale, it's very useful and it immediately makes extreme temperatures evident. This easily justifies having gradations smaller than what can be felt, or meaningfully used while cooking.

Comment Re:ET would disprove God (Score 1) 534

Sects like the Catholic church have already managed to adapt to the fact of evolution and the age of the Earth without much effort; they stopped taking the early books of the Old Testament literally a long time ago. (It's the New Testament that's really important for most Christians.)

Yes, that is truly a testament to their ability to cherry-pick from a book in which their savior says that he is the law, that he comes not to replace the law... and who himself was a member of an ascetic sect big on the Word.

Comment Re:The last sentence in the summary... (Score 2) 232

What I still haven't seen in is just 1 climate model that explains most of the observed current and historical data

The reality is that the world is too complex and weather too chaotic to come up with 1 model that you're going to be able to plug what we know of what happened in the weather into and get out a simulation that follows what actually happens. The proof of this is that weather forecasters are commonly completely wrong, and they're dealing with the best-quality records we've got (e.g. the extensive weather doppler radar network in the USA) and only have to make predictions about rainfall, temperature, and cloud coverage for a day or a week in advance.

Our maps are just barely up to the task of modeling global weather in the way that you want, where we get to make specific predictions. Our understanding of localized weather patterns is inadequate to the task. However, that still doesn't prevent us from being able to make broad, generalized predictions from what we know of physics. And given that what we do know broadly fits the global warming narrative which in turn agrees with what we know of physics, there's no particular reason to doubt the overall picture. The globe is warming, and we're doing things which physics says should warm it. There are natural mechanisms which will serve to bring the system back into balance, like for example spreading extent of sea ice, but these mechanisms have literally never had to clean up a mess like the one we've made and it's unclear whether we're going to make it through the reset process because we don't actually know what that looks like. We've perturbed the regular cycle that we could have expected to survive in a somewhat unpredictable way, but we can still make some predictions. Just as the world is not black-and-white in the way that denialists want it to be when they argue that it's colder where they are so there can't be global warming, our lack of complete certainty does not make us completely unable to make predictions. If it did, then we would never be able to do anything, because we often find that our understanding is superficial — yet our previous models still enabled us to make useful predictions.

Comment Re:The last sentence in the summary... (Score 3, Interesting) 232

But what you can't argue against is the fact that the ice is melting at all, although that doesn't stop some people here from cherry-picking one particular type of ice (sea ice), saying that it has expanded as if that is the complete argument against the total ice loss.

It's worse than that. They're actually claiming that extent is counterevidence against loss of ice mass. Some of them don't even realize that's what they're claiming. Either way, this finding proves them wrong.

Comment Re:Simple answer (Score -1, Flamebait) 942

The argument that people "understand" imperial - particularly with temperatures - comes up a lot. But most people don't really use the measurements, and just learn their meaning by rote. The fact that 78F is a warm day is through experience, and it has no meaning beyond "warm day". As such, it as a system of measurement is about as useful as any other, and intellectual inertia says stick with what you know.

Centigrade is bollocks for discussing the weather, however. The very point of the Fahrenheit scale is its comprehensibility, and it is indeed good for that. Sure, you have to remember a couple of numbers, but most of us can manage that and in any case, only the freezing temperature and the comfortable temperature are really relevant for most of us anyway. The average person knows that boiling temperature has been reached because of whistling or bubbling.

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