Continuing Education

Today, Daniel and I were checking the weather on my iPhone (yeah, I totally just said that to sound cool), and the temperature was 45 degrees. So, I sang to him that it was "fowerty-fahve degwhees," which is my crude rendition of a line from the song "Beds Are Burning" by Midnight Oil. I'd never realized it before, but as I thought about the words to the song, it occurred to me that a) Midnight Oil is from Australia, and b) Australia probably measures temperature on the Celsius scale. From that, plus the fact that the full line from the song is "the western desert lives and breathes in fowerty-fahve degwhees," I concluded that 45 degrees is probably pretty warm to them. So I Googled it (you can view the process here), and sure enough, 45 degrees Celsius turns out to be 113 degrees Fahrenheit. Definitely not the chilly western Australian desert I'd previously subconsciously imagined. I also learned for the first time in my life exactly what the conversion process between the two systems is. It's just C = (F - 32) x 5/9, or F = (C x 9/5) + 32. I'm not sure how I failed to learn this in school, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was taught but not extensively tested because the teachers knew we'd never need it. It definitely didn't feel like, "Oh, yeah, I remember this." It felt like completely new information. Which is fine. Now that I'm an adult, I am a lot more interested in the type of information that I'll never have a legitimate use for than I ever was as a student. Like all that Base 6 stuff in math class. Raise your hand if your using that in your current job. Exactly. I can see no hands. There you go.