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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

> It's not that hard to remember 32 for ice. With Celsius you need to deal with negative temperatures all the time, and worse, the size of the degrees is too coarse.

Well, the whole world manages to deal with °C and only America and a handful of backwater countries insist on using °F.

"Too coarse" is absurd. People just measure to the nearest 0.5°C if you want to get all fussy, but that's not normally the case. It's 12° out? Wear a jacket. 12.0 vs. 12.5° isn't going to change that.

It keeps the numbers smaller. Temperatures here flop between -40°C and +40°C, so the numbers never get large. Meanwhile in the US you see temperatures of 100°F all the time as well as negative ones like -30°F. It's a much wider spread for no real reason.

I hope you know the only reason America didn't get with the program and metricize like it was fully intending to do in the early 1980s is because Reagan was an asshole.

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I'm onboard for metric - just not for temperature.

Just because you manage to deal with C doesn't make it better.

Do you see the parallels? You tell Americans all the benefits of metric, they don't care. You tell Europeans all the benefits of Fahrenheit, they don't care.

People don't want to change.

> It keeps the numbers smaller.

No, it doesn't. You need 3 digits since you need the decimal (-20.5).

I can't think of a weather station that uses decimals, the forecasts and current temperature reports are almost always whole numbers. My Nest thermostat goes to the closest 0.5°C because I guess why not, but even that seems overkill. Most systems go to the nearest whole degree.

Decimals are only for those who are making a fuss over nothing unless they're doing something that requires precision, like chemistry or in rare cases cooking.

There's no benefits to Fahrenheit. If you want to argue they're both arbitrary, fine, but the entire world uses °C, so get with the program.

Good luck getting the US to ever change. I'm personally on the side that Fahrenheit is more useful for day-to-day usage, because it has a range calibrated to the temperatures experienced in the part of the world I happen to live in. But it would take a whole generation to get people to change their frame of reference into Celsius, which isn't likely to happen, because the biggest interaction people have with temperature is the daily weather report, and it's primarily older people that watch the news.

I could get on board with kilometers, if I had to, because the conversion factor is simple enough to do in your head (roughly 3/5), but trying to figure out what anything is in Celsius is just a little too complicated.

So, 40 or 50 Degree for when it's dangerously hot is too hard to remember, just like 32 for freezing is somewhat easier than 37 for body temperature?

Why let's just change the numeral base to 5, or use roman numerals for that matter. Then scientists can finally stop to convert some arcane unit to get to the Standard International Base Unit, ie. Kelvin. At least everyone gets to convert their numbers then and it's only a division by two, too.

</rant>

It's more that you can't tell the difference between 30C and 30.5C. No one ever forecasts temperatures using decimal degrees here in Australia.

You only need decimals for highly accurate measurements, but at that point you'd need decimals for Farenheit as well.

> You tell Europeans

Erm, how about the rest of the world?

Judging by the title of this thread, I think the GP meant to type Europans, not Europeans.

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