When I was 16, I went to high school in California for half a year as an exchange student. I am from Germany and as a junior, I would have had something like my 4th or 5th year of chemistry in school, but out of necessity (or laziness) I took beginner's chemistry.

For exercises I had been paired with two girls who used to try to make fun of me (I think; I never really figured out what their deal was), and asked me stupid questions about myself or Germany. I remember they once asked laughingly whether I like oranges because I was wearing a t-shirt with an orange print.

Well, then one day, there we go. Converting exercises. You have students from 9th to 12th grade in groups of 3-4, trying to convert imperial measurements to metrics. And then metrics to metrics. Basically, for a couple of weeks, we just converted stuff like 14 cm to mm or dm. I forgot so much about my time abroad but the most vivid memory I have is of the girls looking at each other (after a couple of days and repeated explanations) and one says "the decimal system just makes no sense" and the other one quietly and slowly nods in agreement. I ask them how it makes no sense. "Well it just makes no sense." It's just base 10 everything and the rest is practice, it's not different from inches to feet. "No but you see this makes sense. There are 12 inches in a foot", continued by a list of how many shmekels make up a whoopsiedoodle and how many dingelings fit into a hybotron.

I understand how you first have to get accustomed to new units and how conversion might need practice when you aren't familiar with the prefixes, especially when you aren't too experienced in the stem field. But I am still flabbergasted by the statement that having a system where everything is just base 10 and then you shift the decimal point around makes no sense. We are talking about fellow juniors here. How do you make it to age 16/17 never having heard of a decimal point or having trouble with base 10 conversion? HOW CAN YOU SAY IT MAKES NO SENSE?! It's the simplest, most logic based system there is!

It may be that or it may be that our entire educational system has turned into shit through decades of low pay for teachers weeding out all the best people.

I am a US STEM professor.

Prove it! What is the speed of light in anacondas/average Snapchat duration?

Edit: around 10^11 anacondas per average daily snapchat usage among US teens

I have a theory that Americans are great at math because they regularly work with base-12 systems.

Kelvin: Zero is the freezing point of the universe

Is that true about fahrenheit? I've never heard that before.

Sauna competitions

I appreciate how you just dropped this casually like of course everyone knows about Sauna competitions.

I think it means dead as in trying to live in a 100° environment. Kind of like the survival rule of 3s, where you can survive 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water, 3 hours in an extreme environment, and 3 minutes without air.

I guess it could say "unsustainable" instead of dead, but that's less snappy.

It's the opposite. I've lived in both modern, and backward countries.

When you're driving somewhere and you see "50" to your destination, it's infinitely preferable for that to be Km rather than miles. Makes every journey shorter

Oh for FCK's sake...

Americans are out here needing 100 degrees of magnitude between "it's really cold outside" and "it's really hot outside" while ignoring the scientific uses of anything outside of those values and you expect them to understand decimals?

How many "it's really hot outside" until iron melts, or water boils, or meat cooks? Fuck knows. But I'll be damned if I use punctuation in my maths, this country was founded on addition and subtraction and that's all the founding fathers ever needed, now gtfo with your letters and periods and symbols in my mathematics.

It only makes sense if you grow up with Fahrenheit. Otherwise Fahrenheit isn't how humans feels since most of us have no concept what these number mean.

If I would just go with 0 - cold 100 - hot I would assume 50 - perfect. But 50 is still chilly. 70-80 feels like it should be getting hot but that's the most comfortable temperature.