My daily experience absolutely fits into the 0-50 range.
0C outside means the ground is hard to work with. 32F is such an arbitrary number when dealing is concrete reality outside.
0C outside means the ground is hard to work with. 32F is such an arbitrary number when dealing is concrete reality outside.
Yes, 32 degrees F is arbitrary, but so are several of the milestones in Celsius.
I think my argument is that Fahrenheit is more natural most of the time, but both scales have their sweet spots (which makes sense given their relative nature). But I can't see any clear argument that says Celsius is superior all the time.
You don't cook?
I've used temperatures in the 60 something to 80 something range to measure the inside of food, my oven goes anywhere from 160 to 220 degrees, but water boils when it goes all bubbly. I know that that's at 100 degrees, but I don't do anything with that info.
I don't agree with bmitc's point that Fahrenheit feels more natural. But it seems like that anytime someone has something positive to say about Fahrenheit or imperial measurement, 10 different people need to tell them how wrong they are, and how there can't be anything positive about those systems of measurement. That doesn't seem necessary to me. Especially with temperatures where everyone just remembers a couple of numbers and associates them to a certain feeling or application, and whatever you've used your entire life will feel better or more natural.
Now I think these discussions often go about cherry picking examples and just limit the discussion to outside temperatures is such a cherry picking.
The real power of the metric system comes from going all-in. You can't use everything but the temperature scale. If you would do that it would be even more obvious how disconnected the temperature scale is to the whole system.
0C wear a woolly hat
10C wear a jacket or sweater
20C Teeshirt and jeans weather
30C Teeshirt and shorts weather
40C Get in the shade and keep hydrated
50C You want to avoid this end of the scale
It's almost all defending against the pro-Fahrenheit folks making strange arguments promoting it, like somehow you can't measure your life unless it's in F.
I didn't make that argument. Fahrenheit is more natural in a lot of cases because of the range and delineation between whole number temperatures. Celsius is slightly less so but not all the time.
My entire point, which was lost in the bikeshedding is that it is not "shocking" that the metric system isn't used everywhere in daily experience because non-metric systems were literally invented to be useful and practical. Are they perfect? No. Neither is the metric system for daily human use.
The U.S. is a big place and thus has wide-ranging temperatures, and that probably contributes to resistance to getting rid of Fahrenheit, amongst other things and other measurement systems. The U.S. built a huge amount of modern infrastructure before anyone else and has never experienced a "rebuild" period. For non-engineering purposes, there's no downside to using non-metric units, and a lot of downsides in converting. As the back and forth here shows, there's probably a strong argument to be made that the measuring systems don't matter at all in an ideal world where it's free to convert entire countries back and forth between them. But for some reason, a lot of the world feels very superior for using the metric system.
Again. Not "shocking" as the original comment I replied to mentioned.
Every other argument seems to boil down to "I'm not familiar with it, so it's hard", "dealing with 10s is easier than 5s", and "Fahrenheit has more resolution because I've forgotten decimal numbers exist".
The actual superpower of metric is that all the units relate to each other in simple ways. For instance most liquids you and I deal with on a daily basis have a similar density to water, so if you've got 100g of it, it's going to be ~100ml. You don't need to deal with arbitrary artifacts of the measuring system beyond the unit prefixes.
Fahrenheit being more natural is purely subjective, there's no good reason at all for it.
Keeping the imperial system is just a matter of convinience because Americans are used to it and changing everything is difficult. Also some people think producers of food and any objects to sell might lose some margin by converting and rounding to the next round number of the new unit
You mean "I'm already used to something and I dislike other things."