Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

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> (1)

They're natural, sure, but not really natural in a way that directly affects the most common everyday use case for temperature: the weather.

Fahrenheit's 0-100 is for now approximately the range of "normal" weather for the continental US, which is a useful if accidental property for Fahrenheit as a weather temperature system. Celsius's use of water's boiling point as a value for 100 is a nice property from an aesthetic perspective but means that it doesn't use the full 100 degrees when representing any earth-based climate.

> (2) ... (3)

Both of these aren't really advantages if you treat the scales as arbitrary, which in either case you are for most real-world uses of either scale. Water's boiling point at sea level is totally irrelevant when you're measuring the temperature of the outdoor air, a human body, or a steak.

> (4)

Only matters if you're actually doing work that needs to translate to and from Kelvin, which most people will never do in their entire lives.

> (5)

Standardizing would be helpful for sure, but it's not obvious that it would be worth the headache of making the switch given that the only real advantage to Celsius for most use cases is the mere fact that it's a standard.

> Fahrenheit's 0-100 is for now approximately the range of "normal" weather for the continental US, which is a useful if accidental property for Fahrenheit as a weather temperature system.

Only if you live in the continental US - and even the continental US has parts where that generalisation doesn’t hold true. From a global perspective, there’s nothing special weather-wise about 0 Fahrenheit or 100 Fahrenheit-where I live, it has literally never been that cold (our record daily minimum is positive even in Celsius), while days of 38 Celsius or above are infrequent but far from exceptional. As a global standard, Fahrenheit has no meteorological advantage over Celsius - and indeed, Celsius is the global standard for meteorology, used by >95% of the planet

> Standardizing would be helpful for sure, but it's not obvious that it would be worth the headache of making the switch given that the only real advantage to Celsius for most use cases is the mere fact that it's a standard.

You are ignoring all the costs incurred by immigrants and international travellers having to learn to juggle two different systems in their heads, the obstacle it poses to international communication (e.g. “40 degree day” means radically different things in American vs Australian English), products having to support both units and then having configuration settings to change them, people being inconvenienced when they can’t work out how to change the units setting, publications forced to include both units to ensure all readers understand, etc. Those costs are ongoing and cumulative over time, whereas the cost of switching is a once-off which most of the world has already paid

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