In Defense of Fahrenheit
lethalletham.com
lethalletham.com
Everything is relative. The author deems 35 deg C as being "grossly hot", but that is just the average temperature to me where I live. He calls 0 degrees not even cold, but for me, that is almost unbearably cold.
Having a datum of 0 for freezing makes sense, especially for professions like flying (I used to be a pilot). Knowing that you are close to a point when water will turn from liquid to solid can be life saving, and I have no problems with using negatives to determine HOW solid.
Anything that is familiar is easier, that tells you nothing about the thing itself. This seems so obvious to me I wouldn't even think of basing an argument around it. Is the concept of subjective experience that hard to imagine for some people?
I read something like 40% of Americans have never left their country, and about 10% have never left their own state. That means a great deal of them have never experienced a temperature outside of their own.
I think you may be intuitively underestimating the size of the US. I live in Arkansas, which is a fairly mid-sized state. Driving across it at highway speed (70mph/115kph) E/W or N/S takes about four hours. It’s slightly larger than England in area.
Consider someone who lives in Austin, TX. They could drive four hours in any direction and still be in Texas. The US as a whole is approximately the size of all of Europe.
Given that kind of scale, it seems illogical to say that many Americans have “never experienced a temperature outside of their own” merely because we tend to not travel internationally as often as others.
As for comfort zones - I think that’s something of a funny thing. I’ve been to Montreal a couple of times, and honestly felt more at ease there than when visiting New York City, Los Angeles, or Hawaii. There is a huge amount of diversity in terms of culture within the United States.
The other big factor is expense. My wife and I plan to visit Scotland and Italy at some point. We estimated that a week in Scotland for the two of us would cost about $7,000 - $5,000 of which is airfare alone! Consider that the median household income in the US is about $60,000 ($50,000 after federal income taxes). That week in Scotland is approximately the equivalent of two months’ income for a median household! In comparison, a round-trip flight from Heathrow to Istanbul is $330. It’s much, much cheaper for Europeans to travel internationally.
What does that even mean? You can experience temperatures ranging from 0°F to 100°F within six months in New York City. Why would you need to travel to experience different temperatures?
As someone who has grown up with a mix of various Imperial (not US) measures and metric ones, I often find some more intuitive than others even when I am familiar with both.
The most obvious his human height. A tall man is about 6' or more. Most people are some number of inches less than that. Moreover, the inch and not the centimetre is roughly the amount at which you would casually notice two people were slightly different in height.
On the other hand, for horizontal distance, metres (or yards) make more sense than feet. To the extent that when American tell me how far away something is in feet, I just multiply by three before trying to use the info.
I think weight in stones is similarly better than either kilos or or pounds, but I am personally more familiar with kilos.
This is what I though would be blindingly obvious, but apparently isn't.
Wouldn’t you divide (rather than multiply) by three to get the distance in yards, which would be closer to meters?
Though it's true, the alrgorithm for doing the multiplication happens to is `s/feet/yards/`
"I found it annoying to use negative numbers for temperatures that aren't really that cold, and then have 35℃ be grossly hot." living in Sweden i've always used 0 as the "feeling" middle point, temperatures usually ranging between -20 / +30 C, feels very natural.
That saying the task seems quite fun, would be nice to replicate it coming from a celcius background.
I don't have a problem with Centigrade for other stuff, but I think Fahrenheit captures the human ambient environment range better.
Disclaimer: American, where I remember the vain national attempt at metrication as a young child and still have to convert everything mentally when visiting my Australian in-laws
The equivalence to the percent scale also makes it easier to conceive - i.e. if I see my kettle on the hotplate registering 75 degrees C, I immediately think "Oh, it is three quarters of the way to boiling".
Your calculation: 75/100 giving 0.75 which is "three quarters"
Proper calculation: (75+273.15)/(100+273.15) giving 0.933 which is "fourteen fifteenths"
Your tap water is probably more than three quarters the way to boiling.
It sounds like the grandparent is trying to measure how far through the task of boiling their water is, by interpreting degrees Celsius as percentage done.
Maybe they usually make soup or tea by boiling ice cubes. (Perhaps they're Siberian?)
Are they saying that 75 degrees mean three quarters of the way from room temperature tap water to boiling water? Or are they talking about boiling an ice cube, so it's three quarters from 0 Celsius freezing?
Interpreting degrees Celsius as a percentages is not an intuitive way of measuring time elapsed to boil tap water, because 75% between freezing and boiling doesn't mean 75% of the time required to boil has elapsed, since you're starting from room temperature when you boil tap water, not freezing.
If folks want a single temperature scale that works in a fry pan, around Moscow and on Proxima Centauri, there's always Kelvin ...
It doesn't. It's just a number which denotes a temperature. You'd quickly get used to celsius if you switched to it.
This is different from an intuition argument. My wife, an Australian, finds nothing intuitive about 72 F as room temperature, just as I don't find anything intuitive about 22 C. You're right I'd adapt if I had to, but no one lives anywhere for very long at 72 C.
Why? I don't think I'll die at 110 degrees Fahrenheit and that's off the scale. And I routinely make use of things which get hotter than I can live in. I don't live in my kettle or my oven.
Again, I'm making my argument about weather. Clearly for other arbitrary temperatures this doesn't apply. If you're actually arguing for a single temperature scale for cooking, weather and anything else, then I think most people will end up concluding it'll be what you're most used to working with.
Eventually. 80 C is normal sauna temperature.
> I found it annoying to use negative numbers for temperatures that aren't really that cold
All Australians understand perfectly well that anything below 20C (or 25 above the Tropic of Capricorn) is cold.
So it's the least bad american unit. If I was suddenly forced to switch from C to F I'd just adjust. It's not that bad.
The others such as distances and volumes are insane and of course not because of the units but because of being non-decimal. Example: figuring out the volume of a swimming pool given its dimensions. Which length unit would you measure the pool in, in order to have a calculation for the volume (in gallons) that doesn't require a calculator? (A: a unit that is 6.14 inches long)
However, everything else falls flat.
Nobody actually uses decimals with celcius, because nobody can tell the difference between 8.2 degrees and 8.7 degrees. It's just 8 and 9.
Zero being freezing is a critical number to know, because that's when you can get black ice (+/- wind-chill) and snow.
Knowing that 35 is grossly hot is no more difficult than knowing -32 is freezing.
Celcius has simple ranges: Below 0: it's freezing, bundle up 0-10: it's cold outside, wear a jacket 10-20: good for physical activity, sweater and light jacket required 20-30: it's comfortable outside 30+: stay in the shade
That said, all our appliances (oven, barbecue) use Fahrenheit and I have no idea what temperature to cook at in celcius.
I think the biggest factor of c/f preference is just what you grew up with and are most accustomed to using every day.
It surprised me when we recruited a developer from Canada, and on his second day at work he asked what temperature he should have set the oven to. I learned that Canada has appliances labelled in "American".
180°C is the most common oven temperature required, outside 160-200°C is unusual for normal cooking.
Warming (180-200F)/90C
Low 300F/150C
Med 350F/180C
High 400F/200C
Broil
There's a surprising inconsistency in Canada for units because of our proximity to the US. For body weight and height, nearly everyone uses lbs and feet/inches, but official records (on my driver's license for example) uses kg and cm. Like you said, most appliances are F. Distances are in km but property sizes are still often in sqft (because lots of products come from the US). The list goes on.
Huh? I probably do more than 50% of my cooking outside that range.
I gave the temperatures based on my experience of cooking "normal" things, like roast meat, roast vegetables, chips, bread and cake.
They happen to correspond to Wikipedia's idea of "Moderate" temperatures:
I was having an online discussion with someone in an electronics forum the other day, and we were talking about the ideal temperature for a soldering iron for a contact point using a particular type of solder and potentiometer.
He kept talking about setting the iron at 300 degrees. Now, my iron DOES have a setting up to 400 degrees, but in Celsius. He was talking in Farenheit, and had I not double checked with him, I would have fried my electronics to a crisp.
Although, I've never owned an oven without a fan-assist.
(And for what it's worth, Tesco's frozen pizza and chips should be cooked at 180°C and 200°C respectively, or 200°C and 220°C without a fan oven.)
For those of us who don't live somewhere that ever gets black ice, this is not a critical reason.
Also, I suspect that wind-chill does not work how you think it works.
> That said, all our appliances (oven, barbecue) use Fahrenheit and I have no idea what temperature to cook at in celcius.
Spare a thought for those of us in enlightened civilisations that have to deal with myriad north-american based cookbooks ... but having said that, it'd take you a couple of weeks, with maybe a post-it note in the kitchen for the duration, to get the hang of the conversion rate.
Whereas in Fahrenheit mode the toggle moves the temperature up or down by a single degree, which seems cleaner and simpler to me (not to mention the F display uses 2 digits, while the C display uses 3).
The °F display must use three digits as well when it's more than 37°C, which isn't that rare (at least for me, maybe not where you live).
Yeah, climate control won't go that far of course. It also does use half degrees (only between 19°C and 23°C in my car).
> For many people that's Celsius, but for many others it's Fahrenheit.
That second 'many' is disingenuous. For about 90% of the planet's population it's Celsius, and for about 10% it's Fahrenheit.
Author also has some pretty arbitrary and bewildering requirements, including wanting a scale of 0 to 100, yet also avoiding any 3-digit numbers.
Any claims about 'intuition' are misguided -- Celsius makes more sense because a) most people use it, and b) it maps onto the rest of the SI units.
That I happen to feel comfortable at a somewhat arbitrary 21 (c) is not a sufficient or satisfactory reason for other people to let go of deprecated temperature scales.
I thought only the US and a few very small countries use Fahrenheit, which is not more than 5% of the world population?
The metric system is all weighted and related from temperature to mass to distance. This is what makes it so useful for Science, and frankly, every day use.
What? Freezing point of water is one of the most important things with temperature outside. Will it snow or rain? Will the lake freeze or melt? Will the road be slippery or not. That is like... the most important thing about temperature and outside.
However, I agree that the boiling temperature of water is not much used outside in a daily life.
its only being done as a symbol of "freedom" from the EU loving french.
Even in a chemistry lab, Celsius isn't that great, it's Kelvin that actually has an advantage. And Rankine would be about as good.
The other problem with Celsius and the boiling point is that the boiling point changes depending on air pressure, which changes depending on elevation. So it's not always 100°C.
But Celsius interacts with other units nicely. So when you actually need some precision, Celsius works nicely. Kelvin is of course the one to choose when talking about scientific matters, but Celsius works well enough for everyday things and when precision is needed.
Metric seems pretty anthropocentrist to me, since humans are 50-60% water, while the universe is 75% hydrogen.
In the Universal Hydrogen Metric system, 0 °H would be -259.2 °C, and 100 °H would be −252.87 °C.
You get the same step size as Fahrenheit, so you can adjust your house temperature without a decimal. (some of us care) It is also good enough for industrial food processing without that decimal, for example in canneries.
You get a correct zero. Fahrenheit and Celsius are just wrong. Think about the meaning of something like "twice as hot", which is a thing people say. With a correct zero, there is no need for negatives unless you are doing quantum physics research. If you aren't convinced, imagine we had a weight scale that used 0 for a very small adult and 100 for a very large adult.
All the normal temperatures people deal with, including oven temperatures, are exactly 3 digits. The 3-digit numbers 100 to 999 are like Fahrenheit from -359.67° to 539.33°.
The year is Reiwa 1, it's 51° F out, and I weigh 9.92 stone. Deal with it.
Celsius on the other hand gives you additional information about the state of water at this temperature (0C frozen, 100C boiling).
The author didnt talk about the correct physical unit, Kelvin, which tells you about the possibitiy of the temperature (no Kelvin values below 0).
Here's how that looks when compared with Fahrenheit:
0F == -35 Ch
10F == -24 Ch
20F == -13 Ch
32F == 0 Ch
40F == 9 Ch
50F == 20 Ch
60F == 32 Ch
70F == 42 Ch
80F == 53 Ch
90F == 64 ChThe advantages of this system:
* 40-60 would be considered about ideal.
* Each 10 degree "band" has a feeling, similar to Fahrenheit.
* Converting to metric would be really easy.
Disadvantages:
Why would that be an advantage? I consider about 20–25°C ideal. Why is it worse than some other range?
> * Each 10 degree "band" has a feeling, similar to Fahrenheit.
As a user of the celsius scale, each 10 degree "band" already has a feeling to me.