For reasons that I’ve mentioned before, I prefer to use SI units whenever possible. For me, it’s about practicality — using SI units makes the math easier, since unit conversion requires few or no “magic numbers” to convert from one unit to another.
Having grown up in the U.S., though, developing an intuition for SI units is not always easy. After several decades of exposure to U.S. traditional units, it’s difficult to not think of a nice cool day as “68 degrees” instead of “20 degrees Celsius.”
After Plan A (setting the weather widget on my phone to use Celsius) simply resulted in my not being sure what to wear, at least without mentally converting the reported temperatures back into Fahrenheit, I decided to make up Plan B: a chart, specifically designed as a “Remedial SI” tool to help me and fellow unit-anachronistic residents of the U.S. develop an intuitive understanding of degrees C.
Enjoy.
- A chart to convert degrees Celsius into intuitive meanings. (Click for larger.)
