Thoroughly non-linear temperatures
Airport weather, when you walk out of the air-conditioned airport onto dusty tarmac and the warm, humid air crawls over you. That’s what it felt like in The City today. It read 35.2°C on a temperature display.
That’s degrees Celsius by the way, it hasn’t been known as “Centigrade”
for over 50 years, so please stop using that term – you’re just adding to
the confusion. Cheers.
So what’s that in the ye olde United States temperature? I’m not very good at non-SI units – I have an instinctive feel for how much a pint of liquid is, how tall 6ft is, etc, and that’s about it. Inevitably I’d usually load up units and try something like this:
You have: 35.2 degC
You want: degF
* 63.36
/ 0.015782828
…then think “hang on, that can’t be right, I seem to remember there was a
problem last time I tried this”. Then check the man page which would tell
me:
The `units’ program can only handle multiplicative scale
changes. For example, it cannot convert Celsius to Fahrenheit but it can convert temperature differences between those temperature scales.
“D’oh, now I remember.” Until the next time I need to convert a temperature,
natch.
Well, as of the current beta-versions (1.7x since 2001 and I only just
noticed), units can handle nonlinear conversion, you just need to use a
different notation:
You have: tempC(35.2)
You want: tempF
95.36
Hurrah!
