Doing climate research in Fahrenheit in 2025 gives me second hand embarrassment.
If they used an absolute scale like Kelvin, then sure it would be an objectively better standard, but Celsius has been defined via the Kelvin scale for over 70 years now, the same as Fahrenheit.
I don't understand why this is always breought out when farenheit is criticized, as if the 0F-100F thing is the "killer app" for temperature scales.
curiously, nothing in the southern hemisphere?
I prefer metric otherwise but for temperature Fahrenheit just “clicks” in ways that Celsius doesn’t.
The Polish city of Gdańsk, of the then Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was also born there at the time. [1]
> He defined 0 degrees as the coldest measurement, 100 the hottest measurement.
Nope. It was neither about the temperatures in Gdańsk, nor about the temperature of his wife, btw. ;) [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gabriel_Fahrenheit
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FahrenheitIf you're not tying your scale to human-specific temps, why not just use Kelvin? At least that won't go negative.
If there was a design, it's not clear what the intent was. It seems about twice as precise as it needs to be (i certainly can't perceive 1F°—for all intents and purposes, 70 feels about the same as 69 and 71) and doesn't seem to correlate to any scale that is immediately based off the needs of humans. At least compared to celcius.
I wonder if using a lower resolution scale dulls the senses like other forms of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
I'm sure I could feel the difference if i split myself between two rooms with one degree difference. I just don't think this is a useful granularity—I typically move the thermostat by 2-5 degrees at a time.
The percentage of global population where the 0F..100F range is not a reasonable approximation of the temperature range they will experience is small. It's not perfect - no such range could, when humans live almost everywhere on the planet. But it's not bad ...
Neither 0F nor 100F are anything special for humans. It's "very cold" long before 0F and "very hot" long before 100F. 50F is nothing special either.
Room temperature is 72F.
I guess it depends on the cows
20 is nice.
10 is cold.
0 is ice.
Not hard to remember for converting Celsius to how humans typically perceive temperature.
I like my room at 73F, not 72F or 74F, and I can feel the difference. That's 22.77C. :-/
(On the other hand a lot of Americans consume fava beans.)
US units are pinned to Metric standards anyway. We're just using the most creative ratios. :)
It was a dream once I got a metric tape measurer and realized that using centimeters eliminates the need to do annoying conversions.
Remembering is more about what you are used to here.
I suspect you wouldn't notice if it changed by a degree.
On a scale from 0-100, you have very cold and very hot.
Or you’ve got from 0-45. Where 0 is “meh” cold and 45 is incredibly warm.
So you’ve got a nice little 0-100 scale that all humans are going to experience just living that goes from very cold to very hot.
Or you’ve got a useless 0-100 scale that the bottom just means freezing, and ignores every pain point of being really cold below that, and anything really greater than 50C only has practical applications in cooking.
The further away from room temperature, the less we can distinguish. All our senses work logarithmically like that.
0 = ice 100 = steam
That is pretty intuitive if you ask me. And for gravy comfortable room temp is about 25
I guess it doesn’t happen often, but I saw some upper-90’s temperature in the Portland, Oregon area. It feels relatively mild actually, compared to New England 90’s, I’m pretty sure because it is so dry. The lighter air just carries the heat away, rather than having it stick to you.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/dwo/202501/html/IDCJDW6136.202...
This is in the cooler south west corner of a large state ( 3x size of Texas )
[0] Apparently the story is disputed.. But the way I was taught it was: 100F == typical healthy human and 0 F == lowest temperature in Danzig in the winter 1708/1709. This makes it (by construction) a more natural fit to human experience (especially one in northern Europe) https://web.archive.org/web/20131015045624/http://www.deutsc...
What we really need is a new system of units...
A metre is much the same as a yard or an adult arm span. Not a problem.
Pretty much all carpentry and cabinet making is done in mm alone, the width of a fat pencil mark.
1400mm is shy of a metre and a half (1500mm), cross piece spacing might be 300mm (about a foot).
No need to have feet, inches, quarters and thirds mixing up the page, just use mm everywhere.
A gram is fine for small mass measurements, a kilogram is a good unit for heavier masses - very human scale being the same as a litre of water and more or less a litre of milk.
It really comes down to familiarity, there's nothing intrinsically difficult about metric (and much that is more intuitive than odd imperialial units and the whacky intra unit conversion factors).
E.g. can picture lumber expressed in cm or mm very easily. E.g., if you work with beams that are 48mm / 5 cm or 98mm / 10cm a lot then those sizes becomes second nature. Just as easy to picture as 2 inch, 4 inch, 1/2 inch, 3/4 inch etc that is in use in US.
And saying that something is 200m away is exactly as intuitive as however many feet that is. A large meter has a usecase.
I feel square metres for houses is very natural unit and square feet sounds awkward (each patch of house area is so small you can do nothing with it, a square metre gets you somewhere..).
Making yet another system of units sounds like massive pain and as someone who are used to metric I see no advantages.
As a kid, one of my science educators spoke about the many benefits people gain from becoming familiar with basic units. I bought in and did so during the big metric push that happened around that time.
I ended up more familiar with Imperial units.
Then, later in life, I entered a young industry, with strong users of metric, Standard International units.
So I did the work to build familiarity just as I did long ago. Took half a year and today I enjoy the benefits.
And those are:
Ease of understanding unit values meaning in my daily life.
Ease of expression of same to others.
Greater accuracy estimating.
Easier computation and unit checks.
And so on...
It goes by the name "two four" here as well informally due to long tradition (and yes, I once did wonder why 2-by-4 is smaller than 2 by 4 inches and looked it up), but you will not see it written anywhere, in writing it is always in mm after planing.
The oral words for lumber dimensions before planing is the only context as an adult I have met inches except in US.
Wouldn’t it be nicer if a litre, a gram and a cubic metre of water were equal, rather than 1 cubic metre, 1000 litres, 1,000,000 grams?
Side note that in Europe drinking products are often labelled in centilitres whereas Australians use millilitres. I wonder whether this indicates some difference in the way the two groups think about volume, or maybe it is just the fallout of some other constraint, like translations limiting the space available.
Still, the ergonomics seem to be on the side of Metric, taking into account the ease of conversion between units when all are base ten.