I always love when Americans start getting into why Fahrenheit is superior. They’re like it just makes more sense for weather. Yeah, if you’re American. The rest of the world is gonna be like 70? Am I dead?
It's ridiculous that anyone thinks either is "more logical" outside of a scientific context. They're both arbitrary and people like the one they're more familiar with.
@skinnylatte I’m going to wade right into this, probably because I feel like being abused today for some reason.
Speaking only about temperature, Fahrenheit, while weird, is a more human scale in my view. As humans, having five more of a thing is generally considered a little more, not a lot more. Translating that to temperature, 5 more F is a little change, while 5 more C is a large change and will be felt as such by our bodies, either internally or externally.
One could argue that anchoring 100C to when water boils, at sea level-ish atmospheric pressure, is as arbitrary as making 0F the point at which some specific solution of water and salt freezes. At least we can all agree that -40 is really cold.
This isn’t me arguing that F is better than C. I’m just sharing my reasons for preferring F over C when speaking of temperatures experienced by me as a human.
@mikey_in_sd It’s a more human scale.. for American humans who understand it. I live here and I don’t understand the difference between 70 and 80 now but I can do 21.5 and 25.5 intuitively. Because that’s what units are acceptable because of familiarity, and not objectively better, but objectively more people are familiar with metric units.
@skinnylatte Pure water at standard pressure freezes at 0 Celsius. Even on earth the pressure is not constant enough that you can safely say water freezes at 0C boils at 100C, and in labs or space it is even less true. And water easily absorbs impurities so getting pure water is hard.
@bluGill@skinnylatte That's splitting hairs. As a general frame of reference to gauge what the weather is going to feel like when you go outside, water freezing at zero is good enough.
@skinnylatte it is what you are used to. If I define a new scale where water freezes at 0 and boils at 1 your argument says that is good enough as well. Or I can make water boil at 1000000. Or maybe I want to make normal body temperature 100? In my garage I care about when the temperatures that O1 tool steel hardens and tempers at, so maybe 0 and 100 should be based on those?
@skinnylatte I'm a champion of the imperial system, mainly because the metric system is equally arbitrary and stupid but without any of the usefulness of the imperial units. For example, 0 fahrenheit is "as cold as it gets in the winter" and 100 is "as hot as it gets in the summer", which is a more humane than setting the thermostat to "22.5".
@wschenk The imperial units are useless and arbitrary if you live in the rest of the world, without them. :) native Celsius users know and understand intuitively the difference between 22.5 and 25.5, the way I still don’t intuitively understand the difference between 72 and 80 as a foreigner who lives in America. Intuition on units are borne from familiarity, not objectivity
@skinnylatte also with Celsius, 42 degrees is where most proteins denature. Given the importance of proteins for us and the number 42, it’s a very important characteristic. 😄
@skinnylatte Imperial makes more sense then metric users give it credit for, but consistency with the rest of the world is far more useful than the few random places where it makes more sense (outside of those random places both metric and imperial make equally little sense).
@skinnylatte pure water freezing at zero at some pressure is random as well. People who use C are used to it. Kelvin with absolute zero makes sense, but I've never seen any justification what a unit of temperature should be. I'm not sure if physics can give us anything or not - but we don't use it if so.
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