On Monday 14 December 2009 10:51:33 Paul Trusten wrote:
> Celsius has been the official name for a commonly used SI-derived
> temperature scale for 60 years. Yet, there seems to be some kind of
> tacit agreement among people to continue to call it centigrade. I was
> actually pleasantly surprised to hear a Discovery Channel voice call
> it Celsius for once. People in my department call it centigrade no
> matter how frequently I gently remind them. Do you have this problem?
> Does this happen outside the U.S. ?

I hear "grados centígrados" more often than "grados Celsius" when talking with 
Hispanics. Most of the Hispanics I know are immigrants.

Last week I did a group presentation about air conditioning with a guy who 
works in air conditioning. He had found a table of data about the vapor 
pressure of water (judging from a graph of ammonia I found, water is a 
typical refrigerant) in degrees Fahrenheit and two different pressure units 
(some people, for reasons puzzling to me since I first saw it as a kid, use 
different units for positive and negative gauge pressure). I put the numbers 
in a spreadsheet, converted them, and made a graph. When we made the 
presentation, he didn't know what a kelvin or a pascal is.

Pierre

-- 
I believe in Yellow when I'm in Sweden and in Black when I'm in Wales.

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