"Fahrenheit is a bit more convenient for describing the weather" - you might need to show us an example here that is not biased. Because to me, Celsius is a bit more convenient for describing the weather.
And choice of 0/100 for weather is absolutely baseless. You do have below-zero days and in some places it can be over 100. With Celsius you know when it’s going to be ice on the roads and when rain becomes snow.
For someone like me living in a country with the metric system there's no issues with negative values for the temperature. It just mean it's below freezing, which is cold, the more below freezing it is, the colder it is. And inversely the more above freezing it is, the hotter it is. For me 20C feels good, 30C is too hot, 40C is at the point where I can't work anymore, and anything above that doesn't exist around here. 100C is where water is boiling at sea level. Easy.
Another thing that's interesting to me is that going from 300m to 0.3km is automatic, it maps to exactly the same concept to me in my mind, I don't feel like I'm doing any conversion at all and one is not harder to use than the other.
0 degrees C is a cold winter day, 100 degrees C means you're dead
I think he's suggesting that a 0-100 scale for temperature/"relative warmth outside" is more intuitive than a 0-37 scale. It's easier to to place 73 degrees on a 0-100 relative warmth scale than it is to place 18 degrees on a 0-37 scale (unless of course you grew up calibrated to the 0-37 scale and know that 18degrees means you maybe need a light jacket or whatever).
I think it's funny that one of the main benefits of metric is its base-10-ness where things scale so nicely from 1-10-100-1000 etc. but then for temperature we're supposed to be fine with a 0-37? Fahrenheit is basically the 1-100 version of temperature (when it comes to weather).
The other part, which I'm sympathetic to, is that for human scale everyday things, Fahrenheit 0 degrees lines up with really darned cold, 100 degrees with really hot outside of an oven, and the degree size is about twice as granular as Celsius.
And while Celsius degree size is indeed widely used in engineering calculations, you're often using Kelvin as the absolute temperature scale. (Which does use Celsius degree increments of course.)
And then they'll argue that the inch is more convenient than the centimeter because it's twice as large.
That's backwards. Fractions of an inch are in far more common usage than fractions of a centigrade. Ideal might be both a smaller inch and a smaller centigrade, but between the two a smaller inch is more helpful than a smaller centigrade.
its a small advantage, but I think zero indicating when things might freeze is a more useful than "0 degrees lines up with really darned cold"
> zero indicating when things might freeze is useful
Of course it is, parent is being silly.
Picking some other non-zero random number for freezing just seems absurd to me. But that's because Centigrade is what I am familiar with.
Say pick freezing = 12, or 47?. If those numbers for freezing seem absurd to you, then consider that the only advantage that "32" has for you is that you're familiar with it. People will find reasons to defend whichever one they grew up with.
Obviously both can be adapted to. But if you took a group of aliens and asked them to come up with a temperature scale that was only used to convey how cold or warm the temperature felt to humans, they would almost certainly use human body temperature in their design process not the freezing and boiling points of water.
This isn’t to say that Celsius isn’t perfectly fine and superior in most ways. I’m not insulting anyone or attempting to participate in some kind of culture war.
Celsius is obviously a better scale for determining when water freezes. But I’ve never found myself paying attention to that. Mostly because any problems that I’d worry about related to the water freezing happen well below freezing.
But if you find yourself unable to agree that one system has some inherent advantages over another, even if they don’t outweigh the disadvantages, you should step back and think a little more objectively.
This is completely nonsensical. I draw the exact opposite conclusion regarding what some "logical" aliens from planet Vulcan would choose.
> generally falls between -17 and 37.
What are you even talking about? -17 is a complete irrelevance to me, it does not happen, and I often deal with water or objects over 37c. Those are parochial numbers.
Your conclusion is predicated on finding reasons to defend what you're familiar with. There is no objectivity to it. Nor can there be.
> What are you even talking about? -17 is a complete irrelevance to me, it does not happen,
It lines up with 0F, which in most of the US is about as cold as it gets. You could be more specific and lick the weight 95% percentile coldest yearly low and get -19 or -16 or something. The specific number is irrelevant. The point is that a scale where the daily values generally fall between 0 and 100 is something that most people would admit is a point in that scale’s favor.
That doesn’t mean that Fahrenheit is better than Celsius. It does mean that there are objective advantages to it for some purposes.
If you can’t sit down and analyze Fahrenheit, Celsius, and Kelvin and make a list of pros and cons for each, you’re just being stubborn.
"most of the US" . And yet you think that a group of aliens looking at planet Earth would anchor on that region. This makes no sense. It is what I meant by "parochial".
> The specific number is irrelevant.
Lets set the zero point to an irrelevant number, it's be great!
> does mean that there are objective advantages to it for some purposes.
Sure, I agree. In some places.
> If you can’t sit down and analyze
I can. But if you don't know better than to avoid focussing on that, you're missing the mere familiarity that was emphasised repeatedly.
Then imagine a group of Aliens is building a scale for the United States of America, which in context is the only relevant country since this entire discussion is about the US switching to Celsius. It doesn’t actually have to be aliens. Just a neutral party with no bias towards an existing scale.
> I can. But if you don't know better than to avoid focussing on that, you're missing the mere familiarity that was emphasised repeatedly.
Familiarity is obviously the reason that the US is a metric holdout. No one has ever argued otherwise.
The only point I am making in this entire forsaken thread is that for the very specific purpose of air temperature in the United States, F has a nice advantage to C in that the numbers normally line up 0 to 100 and that all other things being equal humans find scales from 0-100 pleasant.
Multiple People in this thread who have no familiarity with Fahrenheit have agreed with this.
Because it is slightly nicer scale in this specific place for this specific purpose, no one is going to voluntarily switch the way that some people voluntarily switch to grams when baking or mm when working with small objects.
Rubbish. Absolute nonsense. It's very useful.
But, each system has points where you can say that it is more convenient . You could defend Fahrenheit all day. I could counter with Celsius usefulness. "below zero" being a synonym for "below freezing" is one of those.
But you miss the context - you will defend whichever one you grew up with. You look for reasons to defend what you know. It is mere familiarity, nothing more.
Of course it does. That’s my entire point. For the intended purpose of measuring air temperature there are some advantages to Fahrenheit. Celsius is not self evidently superior in that regard. Therefore no one using Fahrenheit is going to change unless forced.
The freezing point of water is useful for some things, but I’ve never paid particular attention to 32F because almost all of the bad things I need to worry about related to freezing water happen much lower than that.
So making 32F the 0 point of the scale has few objective benefits to me.
Well, that's you, it's not me. 0F is a completely useless benchmark where I am, it never happens. And someone north of you will want a lower point. This is all parochial.
But you miss the context - you will defend whichever one you grew up with. You look for reasons to defend what you know. It is mere familiarity, nothing more.
What I’m saying is that a scale where most most values on most days fall between 0-100 is objectively better than a scale where they fall between -17 and 37.
There are only 2 states in the country where the average winter lows are below 0 and they have tiny populations. So 0 isn’t set at a perfect temperature for the purpose of air temperature in the US, but it’s not too far off from it.
> But you miss the context - you will defend whichever one you grew up with. You look for reasons to defend what you know. It is mere familiarity, nothing more.
I didn’t grow up using metric, but I use grams for baking and generally use mm for designing things. Despite the difficulties (most recipes in the US aren’t metric).
And there are several people in this thread who report that they grew up with Celsius and have never used Fahrenheit, but they agree that for air temperature it’s a nice scale.
Someone from the tropics might say 8°F is really darned cold, or 15°F, or whatever.
And that's only length. It gets worse outside of length. Like WTF is an ounce?
And then there's the hundredweight, where "hundred" actually means "eight"...