dfc - you're right, I think, that it's almost always ambiguous temperature references, doubtless because the 'degree' part of the unit name is shared between the three common measures.
As rgarrett88 points out, short distances are often reduced to foot and inch numbers, with the receiver left to intuit context. Sometimes people will assert they hit a hundred, or went from zero to a hundred in x seconds, and weight-lifters are likely to talk about the number they can push ... again reliant upon sender and receiver sharing the same cultural background.
My comment about 'us' being so considerate was somewhat tongue in cheek, natch, though (since I'm speaking for all the rest of us now) we'd really like it if you guys would switch over to metric at your earliest convenience. I won't say ISO / SI, as working in K is just too unwieldy :)
I like to think our rejection of the metric system is because we are standing on principle and reject the semantic inconsistency that is the kilogram. Base measures should not be prefixed;)
Cling onto that raft! I fear it's a combination of NIH (despite the same being said of imperial, Fahrenheit, etc), fear of change, and irrational dislike of the French. Of course, Daniel Fahrenheit was Dutch/German, and Anders Celsius was Swedish.
But if you think kg is frustrating, I'm learning electronics now - every book, when starting to talk about capacitors, says something like 'However, the Farad is not a convenient unit, and you'll most be working with 0.0000000001F capacitors'. Yes, the SI unit is unhindered by a prefix, but you can't but help wish they'd thought more carefully about this before writing it down.
As rgarrett88 points out, short distances are often reduced to foot and inch numbers, with the receiver left to intuit context. Sometimes people will assert they hit a hundred, or went from zero to a hundred in x seconds, and weight-lifters are likely to talk about the number they can push ... again reliant upon sender and receiver sharing the same cultural background.
My comment about 'us' being so considerate was somewhat tongue in cheek, natch, though (since I'm speaking for all the rest of us now) we'd really like it if you guys would switch over to metric at your earliest convenience. I won't say ISO / SI, as working in K is just too unwieldy :)