American things

Fahrenheit is like pinball machines that score in the eleventy-millions just for the sake of having big numbers

antipodeans loving Reese’s cups when you guys have Tim Tams made not a lot of sense to me either.

Reese's cups are bad and gross. Most American chocolate is bad, but the "chocolate" in Reese's is the orange plastic cheese slice of American chocolate

110. Orange plastic "cheese" slices

sic and silby really getting controversial up in here

You haven’t lived until you’ve had to sit down with a dataset containing strings in a mix of MMDDYY and YYMMDD format and have to somehow disambiguate which is which

I had to do something like that last week, importing data from an old website we are revamping, but with MMDDYY and DDMMYY. Whoever decided to make the date fields strings should be harshly punished. In the end I just read them all as DDMMYY unless that threw an error then tried MMDDYY. Thing is this is a UK-only system so what kind of disgusting savage was putting in MMDDYY anyway. Never mind the entries that were 01 Janurary or 5 Feburrrarrary.

Oh my god that’s some amateur hour database management right there

Tell me about it. Then they had address, phone and email all in one text column. I wrote a parser for that and had to handle about 20 different ways of prefixing a telephone number. T., T:, Te:, Tel:, P:, Ph:, etc etc ad nauseam.

month date year is truly nonsensical

reeses peanut butter cups are not my favorite, they are kinda gross tbh i can only eat 1 or 2

Veg it's terrifying how much sugar or corn syrup is in almost everything here, and how little food content is in so many food items

Not in the produce section. That's where all the action is.

Now listen, I'm fine with all you Cape people shuffling around in this safe place, registering your discomforts with some of the oddities of American culture like peanut butter or too many stripes on a flag.

But come on. My man sic:

Fahrenheit is like pinball machines that score in the eleventy-millions just for the sake of having big numbers

Here's what you get when you watch the Australian weather report, all ten seconds of it: "Today, it was 23. Tonight, it will be 18. Tomorrow, looking at a high of 23." It's all too broad and general! Fahrenheit lets you denote more exact measurements of temperature. I mean, you all say the average human body temperature is "37" whatever that means. We say 98.6. And where 99 is a mild fever and 97.5 means your thermometer isn't working right, that's a big deal!

And here's something: for those exact reasons, I'm all in favor of the U.S. using kilometers instead of miles. I've already mentioned somewhere on this board how Missouri uses mile-markers for every two-tenths of a mile. Being able to say "my car's broken down at KM 82.5" would be much more accurate than just saying "Mile Marker #51".

We're not trying to run up the score with hot, hot days of 108º. We're just being very, very specific!

otm

I think of low temperatures in centigrade and high temperatures in Fahrenheit. Or I used to. After Brexit it will all be Fahrenheit.

100 boils, zero freezes, 23 is nice. Easy!

that it was minus two in Seattle yesterday is more impressive than saying it was twenty-eight point four

how Missouri uses mile-markers for every two-tenths of a mile.

in a lot of places it's every one-tenth. i won't stop until every highway is demarcated in one inch increments.

(xp) Exactly!

how a TV-announced city-wide temperature actually feels is so dependent on where you are, how the wind is, what the clouds are doing, whether a cat is sitting on you etc etc, that the supposed precision of Fahrenheit is irrelevant http://i.somethingawful.com/forumsystem/emoticons/emot-colbert.gif

the supposed precision of Fahrenheit

Also pretty sure that it is possible to tell whether someone has a mild fever using a digital thermometer in *checks* basically every country in the world

Jesus fuck please get this argument off of ILX and back on whichever tumblr / subreddit it came from

Probably the one called "American things" tbrr

Why not just have it where 0 is freezing and 10 is boiling. Then you can just say, "Oh, it's nice today. It's only 2. Hope it doesn't get all the way up to 3!"

Here's what you get when you watch the Australian

world

weather report, all ten seconds of it: "Today, it was 23. Tonight, it will be 18. Tomorrow, looking at a high of 23." It's all too broad and general!

but the difference between 18 and 23 isn’t massive. it’s not even a layer of clothing. also as sic said there’s so many other factors (humidity being a huge one) that being vague about the number for a forecast (which turns out to be wrong anyway) is fine. the difference between 22 and 23 isn’t perceptible at all, so i don’t know why anyone who’s not a scientist needs to distinguish between 68 and 69.

Fahrenheit lets you denote more exact measurements of temperature. I mean, you all say the average human body temperature is "37" whatever that means.

it means 37.0

We say 98.6. And where 99 is a mild fever and 97.5 means your thermometer isn't working right, that's a big deal!

oh so that just means you need to buy a celsius thermometer

it's a 0-100 scale where 0 is "about as cold as it ever gets" and 100 is "about as hot as it ever gets", that seems like a pretty good scale for describing the weather to me...

That's wildly inaccurate but I'm giving you benefit of the shorthand doubt

Humidex for the warm months

Wind chill for the cold months

universal scale:

nonsense
freezing
cold as fuck
cold
cool
nice
bit warm
kinda hot
bloody hot
fucking hot
nonsense

American cheese
string cheese
Velveeta
government cheese
Cheez Whiz
Philly cheesesteak

And the best worst cheese of all time, provel

"stop talking about American things on the American things thread" is a pretty fun example of the totalitarian nature of American cultural entitledness, good job Tombot

wow just further proof of american thing #1: america is #1

jk our country is terrible

*takes roll call of Celsius nations who have planted their flag on the moon*

measuring and showing your dick to see whose is bigger

Yes we definitely invented that

You invented measuring it in Fahrenheit

*takes roll call of Celsius nations who have planted their flag on the moon*

• trying to win arguments with “the moon”

*counts number of higgs bosuns in his penis*

Higgs boatswains?!?!

What a disaster for European science and on a personal level my penis, trevor

Should a Boatswain's Mate meet eligibility requirements, he can elect to become an SO (formerly SEAL), SB (formerly SWCC), ND (Navy Diver), or EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician).

Clarification:

The construction " , Trevor" at the end of a sentence is a reference to English classic colour commentary in football.

My penis is not named Trevor.

which begs the question

If you're not close enough to read the name on the collar then you can safely presume you were not meant to know

It's "Kielbacca" isn't it

Lug Lámfada

Log Lambada

month date year is truly nonsensical

Month/Day/Year is like Minutes/Seconds/Hours, ie insane.

month day year is so obviously insane and stupid that it's kind of awesome

ok i'm not saying you have to like it or agree with it but there is a logic. if someone asks you a date, like, what's your birthday, a very common way to say it is "august twelfth, 1979" (if that is in fact your birthday) i.e. MM DD YYYY

"when's your birthday?"

"december second"

"you're insane and stupid"

But I suspect folks from DD MM YY areas would be more likely to say 'twelfth of August, 1979'.

Well, it makes slightly more sense than Australians putting wickets before runs in a cricket score - or should I save that for an Australian Things thread?

"remember, remembith, november fifth!"