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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

I don't see anything idiotic about Fahrenheit. With distances I can see why powers of ten make a difference, but we don't vary temperatures by orders of magnitude in regular life.

Nor do I spend much time around freezing or boiling water. Fahrenheit has 9/5th more specificity.

Is the point that it's different than the rest of the world? I can see that point, but am I missing anything particularly bad about the Fahrenheit scale?

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I'm a thermodynamic engineer by trade. We spend a lot of time around freezing and boiling water. Even more, we spend a lot of time in Kelvin land.

I've a particular hatred of Fahrenheit :)

> Is the point that it's different than the rest of the world? I can see that point, but am I missing anything particularly bad about the Fahrenheit scale?

Mainly that it doesn't make any sense. Why was 32F made the magical number for the freezing point of water? The "well known" temperatures like freezing/boiling points of water are based on observations after the scale was invented. The secrets to the F scale died with Fahrenheit and today nobody knows for sure what 0F actually means.

So what, it gives much more granularity than Celsius, that’s the OPs point, and it’s why it makes sense to use it.

You can basically approximate a 1F change to 0.5C change (or 0.55C) for non scientific purposes.

  50F -> 10C
  51F -> ~10.5C
  52F -> ~11C

Unless you hate decimals, I don't think there's much granularity gained.

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