Technology / Gadgets

Spring has come and with it a familiar sadness. In the street below me, young women walk to yoga class—you can tell by their rolled-up mats—with arms that are bare for the first time in months. The thin limbs of the tree outside my window bristle with buds, tender pellets of renewal that would stir Van Gogh.

The wheel of life has turned full circle. But to some of us—those cursed with sensitivity—the change in temperature serves to remind that beneath the shifting finery of Mother Nature lurks a pair of foul-smelling undergarments that have been around, unchanged, nigh on several centuries. I refer to the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales.

Now, I know what you're thinking: You're thinking, "Sorry—what?" Nonetheless, that happens to be the question I have decided to address on this bright, inexpressibly balmy afternoon.

In the professional football community, there is a saying, often uttered in training camp, that a coach who enters the season with a choice of starting quarterbacks is a coach with no quarterback at all. A quarterback, runs the theory, is like a king in that his authority and his ability to lead flow directly from there being one of him. A team with two first-class, viable starting quarterbacks is therefore like a nation with two kings: a dysfunctional hotbed of dissent and unrest doomed to implode into what Shakespeare called "the intestine shock/And furious close of civil butchery"—the only quote by the Bard this correspondent has ever been able to remember, hence my practice of grandly unleashing it at the merest opportunity.

And so it is with our two temperature scales. Generally speaking, the planet favors Celsius, with the significant exception of the United States and the insignificant exception of Jamaica. But the problem isn't one of international favor. If either Celsius or Fahrenheit were actually getting the job done, nations could agree to disagree, much as they have done over kilometers and miles.

No, the problem arises in those many countries, ours among them, where the two scales coexist. Here in the States we use Fahrenheit for weather, Celsius for science, Fahrenheit for body temperature, and Celsius—often—in our discussions of global warming. Seems fairly straightforward all written down like that, but there's more than enough overlap between the discourses to induce a permanent state of wariness in all discussions of matters relating to temperature. However comfortable any given American may personally feel within either the C or F system, he or she must still make allowances for the thermal ambiguity of others. No old man beside a campfire can ever thoughtfully poke the embers with his stick and launch into an epic yarn with the words, "It was 34 degrees that morning . . . ."

Without more information, listeners have no choice but to brace themselves for both Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. Even when there's hardly any ambiguity—a blow-dried weatherman promising 65 degrees for the weekend—there is too often a fleeting sensation of uncertainty, much as when one approaches a glass door with the word "LLUP" or "HSUP" written on it, before the instruction is decoded to the satisfaction of the unconscious.

For a nation with as much invested in its reputation for common sense and decisiveness, I would argue that this constant background dithering is a dangerous drain on mental energy.

How did we find ourselves in such a predicament?

The culprit, of course, is History.