10 ms·

Fahrenheit is a very sensible system. 0: it's cold. 100: it's very hot. 50: so so depends on what you perceive.

CydeWeys 10y ago
Celcius is way more sensible. 0: Water freezes (cold). 10: Cool. 20: Moderate. 30: Nice and warm. 40: Hot. 100: Water boils. I say this as an American, by the way. We need to stop defending our archaic system. It just makes us look dumb. Literally the entire rest of the world has moved on, and is just laughing at us. But we're digressing now and this comments section isn't about us not getting on board with SI.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  Fahrenheit is probably the only American measurement system that I think does have any value, so I certainly don't say so out of some reflex. The first part of your comment is simply ridiculous: it's "way more sensible" to jam the entirety of moderate temperatures from 0-40 and then randomly have the boiling point at 100[1]? Fitting all but the most excessive ranges of temperature between 0 and 100 is eminently reasonable. [1] Note that I'm talking about the scale used during conversation, generally about ambient temperature (weather). The usual advantage of using the same scale for science and conversation isn't particularly relevant the way it is with, say, meters vs feet. Reckoning ambient temperature is not useful at all for the kinds of temperature-measurement you do in a lab.
  - jazoom 10y ago
    Good point, but Fahrenheit is dead in the water. The scientific community will never accept it, neither will anyone from a metric country.
    - BoorishBears 10y ago
      The American scientific community doesn't "accept" it either (most, if not all Americans in a reasonable school system learn SI units from childhood), and no one is saying Fahrenheit should be used in a scientific context. Fahrenheit is used for weather, and in fact, even "metric countries" have been known to use it.
      - jazoom 10y ago
        I've been known to use it as well. To input in my calculator to convert it to celsius. :)
      - aplummer 10y ago
        definitely we don't use it in the UK or Aus, in fact, the US is the only country where I've ever seen it on a weather broadcast. I really don't know why you would want to be the last country to use it, sometimes "everyone else is using it" is actually a good reason to do something, for example when it's two arbitrary systems of measurement.
      - nightcracker 10y ago
        > Fahrenheit is used for weather, and in fact, even "metric countries" have been known to use it. Sorry but this is just wishful thinking.
        BoorishBears 10y ago
        In England more than one native one more than one occasion has referred to weather in Fahrenheit. It only takes 5 seconds of googling to show it's not an isolated incident. But I'd delete my comment, it's been downvoted ad nauseuem because people are insulted by the idea Fahrenheit might be convince to, this is the kind of hive mind behavior I'd expect on Reddit vs HN
        CydeWeys 10y ago
        Are you sure they weren't humoring you? They could've just converted to Fahrenheit for your benefit. I use SI units all the time when I'm around Europeans (and they're thankful for it). Also, how old were these people you were interacting with? The UK switched to SI quite recently, well within the lifetimes of many living people.
      - xxs 10y ago
        >>even "metric countries" have been known to use it. Name few/any? ---- Even though I do remember the formula C=5/9*(F-32), Fahrenheit has never felt convenient or range non-arbitrary. Zero being the freezing point in Celsius is a lot more important when it comes to weather conditions (provided the autumn/winters are cold enough where you live) - icy roads, clearing/scrapping windshields, skiing, etc. The boiling point is nothing to scoff at even when it comes to simple cooking.
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    Temperature is used for a lot more than ambient air temperature though. It doesn't make sense to have lots of different temperature scales for the different use cases. Best to choose a more generalizable scale that covers all of the common ones well enough. Celcius is the scale that fits that bill.
- donatj 10y ago
  The freezing and boiling point of water is nearly as arbitrary as the freezing/boiling points of iron to my daily life. For science, sure, °C is nice, but for common day to day use, which is the majority of temperature use, °C is senseless. I do not freeze at 0°C, I live in Minnesota and that is shorts weather. I do not boil at 100°C, I'd have been dead for a while. It's useless. Fahrenheit is much better at representing everyday life, the range in which I can be comfortable, below 0 or above 100 I'm better off staying in doors.
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    The freezing point of water has a very significant impact on your daily life (specifically, it marks the demarcation line between rain and snow). It makes way more sense for it to be at zero than at some random number like 32. Also, don't forget that temperature is important for a lot more than just the air temperature. It's also used in cooking, where the boiling temperature of water matters a lot. Every morning I heat water to 98C to make coffee, or 85C to make green tea.
  - yxhuvud 10y ago
    You never cook stuff or puts stuff in the freezer in your daily life? Yikes.
    - donatj 10y ago
      I do but I'm not watching it thermometer for it to happen. I either apply heat until it boils or throw something in the freezer.
- BoorishBears 10y ago
  In what way is the progression you described more sensible? In Fahrenheit the entire "scale" is useful to describe weather. If I turned a knob that set the temperature of a room to 0% rotation, or 0 degrees, the room would be cold. If I set the knob to 100% rotation, or 100 degrees the room will be hot. In Celcius the scale is arbitrarily cut off at 40. The resolution that you can represent a temperature at is severely limited if you don't have a decimal point. I don't know anyone who went to school in the US and didn't learn SI units. Science in the US uses SI units. Fahrenheit is just a very convenient way to express weather on a 0% to 100% scale. >Literally the entire rest of the world has moved on, and is just laughing at us. Maybe young kids with nothing better to do on the internet. As an American born outside of the US who's traveled a lot, one thing people tend to agree on is Fahrenheit is very convenient for weather. The parent post of all of this is provocative nonsense (I mean really, apparently this person doesn't know that we can do instant bank transfers, and fails to understand that sales tax isn't a constant across states and even county lines in some places)
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    Temperature is important for a lot more than just weather. Fahrenheit starts breaking down more once you start using it for other purposes. And why should we have different scales for weather versus other common things like cooking?
    - BoorishBears 10y ago
      Are you really in America? Because I've actually never seen a cooking appliance that didn't use Fahrenheit, I just forgot that's another place where we use Fahrenheit. >And why should we have different scales for weather versus other common things like cooking? Because it's not (currently) useful to measure weather on the planet we call "Earth" relative to the boiling point of water. If/when the ambient temperature starts to move in a direction where it does scale from the freezing point of water to the boiling point of water, we'll have much bigger issues than worrying about what units we're measuring weather in.
      - 10y ago
- grogenaut 10y ago
  The metric system is entirely arbitrary. It's just been recently back-filled to make it seem consistent and reasonable. Look up the original definition of the meter, kilometer, etc. "The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. In 1799, it was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar (the actual bar used was changed in 1889 and 1927). In 1960, the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. In 1983, the current definition was adopted." How is something that is based on the then calculated distance from the equator to the north pole. Why do I say calculated? Well, because: "One of the earliest expeditions to set out with the explicit intention of reaching the North Pole was that of British naval officer William Edward Parry, who in 1827" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole#Pre-1900.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole#Pre-1900... No one had been there yet. So they didn't lay a tape measure down. You couldn't actually even do that. And the earth isn't even flat anywhere so you're measuring an idealized object. Even more arbitrary. But ignore that... ITS BASED ON THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE EARTH... how is that NOT arbitrary? Well it is. That's why all of the new definitions of metric things are being redefined to be as close to absolute constants as they can be: "The metre is defined as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 seconds." But that's still really arbitrary because it comes from the circumference of the earth. And your boiling point and freezing points are also arbitrary because it depends on the altitude you live at. Sure it's at sea level for these numbers... but who lives at sea level? http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9162438 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9162438 looks like 1/3rd to 1/2 (max). Maybe way less. So the Fahrenheit argument is "the numbers that are generally useful to people for air temperature are those that exist in human inhabited or are generally hospitable", eg 0 (pretty cold) to (100) pretty hot with specialized areas knowing more about their end of the spectrum (minnesota, riyadh). Your celsius argument means is that you care about temperatures over 100 (or 140) F up to 212F, or 37.7778 C up to 100C. I really doubt you care actually. You could just have a gague labelled "beef, pork, chicken, black tea, green tea, boiling" and be totally fine. Actually boiling doesn't even matter, it's pretty obivious when things are boiling and since it's a state change it's a very stable temperature. It's valid that it would make things easier if the US was on the metric system. It would be valid to say that india shouldn't go 30 minutes off of the hour to have a solo time zone, because that makes time zones easier, same for indiana (if they still do that). But don't pretend the metric measurements are any less arbitrary than the imperial ones. That's a very earth centric point of view. We should be on galactic measurements by now. You should see how much news.zcombinator.g out at alpha centauri is complaining about the metric system.
shakna 10y ago
The widespread adoption of Celsius seems to describe a different perspective, such as 0 being the freezing point of water.
jazoom 10y ago
You're right that Fahrenheit is probably the least silly of your measurings, since Celsius is just on a different scale and almost as arbitrary. But all the others are just ridiculous. Though, celsius does have the benefit of being on same scale as Kelvin, which is great.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  As an American, I've basically given up on using our units, and think of everything in SI and convert figures to it before doing calculations. To give you an idea of how absurd things are, there are 16 ounces in a pound, but 8 ounces in a cup. When you're trying to make recipes, it sometimes isn't clear if the measurement is by weight or by volume. Oh, and there's three teaspoons in a tablespoon, and two tablespoons in an ounce. Or is it the other way around? Fuck it, I give up, I'm sticking with mL and g where everything makes sense. And I don't even want to get into the differences between the different kinds of tons, pints, gallons, and miles. There are three different kinds of miles in common usage, plus over a dozen historical ones. It's enough to drive you mad.
  - jazoom 10y ago
    Stuff like this really annoys me. I don't think I could ever survive in your country. Maybe if I was born into it I could handle it.
    - CydeWeys 10y ago
      We are at least aware of how terrible our units are for mass, weight, and volume, fortunately, so grams and liters are in widespread usage and understood by most. Unfortunately the recipes haven't caught on to that yet. And people aren't used to using SI units for larger masses. We're not so good about SI units for temperature, speed, and distance though, despite the particular failings of the latter two.
  - hvidgaard 10y ago
    There is one now famous scene from the OCC show, where they demonstrate why the imperial system is quite the pain to work with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pikrntjcbyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pikrntjcbyw

Celcius is way more sensible. 0: Water freezes (cold). 10: Cool. 20: Moderate. 30: Nice and warm. 40: Hot. 100: Water boils. I say this as an American, by the way. We need to stop defending our archaic system. It just makes us look dumb. Literally the entire rest of the world has moved on, and is just laughing at us. But we're digressing now and this comments section isn't about us not getting on board with SI.

wutbrodo 10y ago
Fahrenheit is probably the only American measurement system that I think does have any value, so I certainly don't say so out of some reflex. The first part of your comment is simply ridiculous: it's "way more sensible" to jam the entirety of moderate temperatures from 0-40 and then randomly have the boiling point at 100[1]? Fitting all but the most excessive ranges of temperature between 0 and 100 is eminently reasonable. [1] Note that I'm talking about the scale used during conversation, generally about ambient temperature (weather). The usual advantage of using the same scale for science and conversation isn't particularly relevant the way it is with, say, meters vs feet. Reckoning ambient temperature is not useful at all for the kinds of temperature-measurement you do in a lab.
- jazoom 10y ago
  Good point, but Fahrenheit is dead in the water. The scientific community will never accept it, neither will anyone from a metric country.
  - BoorishBears 10y ago
    The American scientific community doesn't "accept" it either (most, if not all Americans in a reasonable school system learn SI units from childhood), and no one is saying Fahrenheit should be used in a scientific context. Fahrenheit is used for weather, and in fact, even "metric countries" have been known to use it.
    - jazoom 10y ago
      I've been known to use it as well. To input in my calculator to convert it to celsius. :)
    - aplummer 10y ago
      definitely we don't use it in the UK or Aus, in fact, the US is the only country where I've ever seen it on a weather broadcast. I really don't know why you would want to be the last country to use it, sometimes "everyone else is using it" is actually a good reason to do something, for example when it's two arbitrary systems of measurement.
    - nightcracker 10y ago
      > Fahrenheit is used for weather, and in fact, even "metric countries" have been known to use it. Sorry but this is just wishful thinking.
      - BoorishBears 10y ago
        In England more than one native one more than one occasion has referred to weather in Fahrenheit. It only takes 5 seconds of googling to show it's not an isolated incident. But I'd delete my comment, it's been downvoted ad nauseuem because people are insulted by the idea Fahrenheit might be convince to, this is the kind of hive mind behavior I'd expect on Reddit vs HN
        CydeWeys 10y ago
        Are you sure they weren't humoring you? They could've just converted to Fahrenheit for your benefit. I use SI units all the time when I'm around Europeans (and they're thankful for it). Also, how old were these people you were interacting with? The UK switched to SI quite recently, well within the lifetimes of many living people.
    - xxs 10y ago
      >>even "metric countries" have been known to use it. Name few/any? ---- Even though I do remember the formula C=5/9*(F-32), Fahrenheit has never felt convenient or range non-arbitrary. Zero being the freezing point in Celsius is a lot more important when it comes to weather conditions (provided the autumn/winters are cold enough where you live) - icy roads, clearing/scrapping windshields, skiing, etc. The boiling point is nothing to scoff at even when it comes to simple cooking.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  Temperature is used for a lot more than ambient air temperature though. It doesn't make sense to have lots of different temperature scales for the different use cases. Best to choose a more generalizable scale that covers all of the common ones well enough. Celcius is the scale that fits that bill.
donatj 10y ago
The freezing and boiling point of water is nearly as arbitrary as the freezing/boiling points of iron to my daily life. For science, sure, °C is nice, but for common day to day use, which is the majority of temperature use, °C is senseless. I do not freeze at 0°C, I live in Minnesota and that is shorts weather. I do not boil at 100°C, I'd have been dead for a while. It's useless. Fahrenheit is much better at representing everyday life, the range in which I can be comfortable, below 0 or above 100 I'm better off staying in doors.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  The freezing point of water has a very significant impact on your daily life (specifically, it marks the demarcation line between rain and snow). It makes way more sense for it to be at zero than at some random number like 32. Also, don't forget that temperature is important for a lot more than just the air temperature. It's also used in cooking, where the boiling temperature of water matters a lot. Every morning I heat water to 98C to make coffee, or 85C to make green tea.
- yxhuvud 10y ago
  You never cook stuff or puts stuff in the freezer in your daily life? Yikes.
  - donatj 10y ago
    I do but I'm not watching it thermometer for it to happen. I either apply heat until it boils or throw something in the freezer.
BoorishBears 10y ago
In what way is the progression you described more sensible? In Fahrenheit the entire "scale" is useful to describe weather. If I turned a knob that set the temperature of a room to 0% rotation, or 0 degrees, the room would be cold. If I set the knob to 100% rotation, or 100 degrees the room will be hot. In Celcius the scale is arbitrarily cut off at 40. The resolution that you can represent a temperature at is severely limited if you don't have a decimal point. I don't know anyone who went to school in the US and didn't learn SI units. Science in the US uses SI units. Fahrenheit is just a very convenient way to express weather on a 0% to 100% scale. >Literally the entire rest of the world has moved on, and is just laughing at us. Maybe young kids with nothing better to do on the internet. As an American born outside of the US who's traveled a lot, one thing people tend to agree on is Fahrenheit is very convenient for weather. The parent post of all of this is provocative nonsense (I mean really, apparently this person doesn't know that we can do instant bank transfers, and fails to understand that sales tax isn't a constant across states and even county lines in some places)
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  Temperature is important for a lot more than just weather. Fahrenheit starts breaking down more once you start using it for other purposes. And why should we have different scales for weather versus other common things like cooking?
  - BoorishBears 10y ago
    Are you really in America? Because I've actually never seen a cooking appliance that didn't use Fahrenheit, I just forgot that's another place where we use Fahrenheit. >And why should we have different scales for weather versus other common things like cooking? Because it's not (currently) useful to measure weather on the planet we call "Earth" relative to the boiling point of water. If/when the ambient temperature starts to move in a direction where it does scale from the freezing point of water to the boiling point of water, we'll have much bigger issues than worrying about what units we're measuring weather in.
    - 10y ago
grogenaut 10y ago
The metric system is entirely arbitrary. It's just been recently back-filled to make it seem consistent and reasonable. Look up the original definition of the meter, kilometer, etc. "The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. In 1799, it was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar (the actual bar used was changed in 1889 and 1927). In 1960, the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. In 1983, the current definition was adopted." How is something that is based on the then calculated distance from the equator to the north pole. Why do I say calculated? Well, because: "One of the earliest expeditions to set out with the explicit intention of reaching the North Pole was that of British naval officer William Edward Parry, who in 1827" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole#Pre-1900.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole#Pre-1900... No one had been there yet. So they didn't lay a tape measure down. You couldn't actually even do that. And the earth isn't even flat anywhere so you're measuring an idealized object. Even more arbitrary. But ignore that... ITS BASED ON THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE EARTH... how is that NOT arbitrary? Well it is. That's why all of the new definitions of metric things are being redefined to be as close to absolute constants as they can be: "The metre is defined as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 seconds." But that's still really arbitrary because it comes from the circumference of the earth. And your boiling point and freezing points are also arbitrary because it depends on the altitude you live at. Sure it's at sea level for these numbers... but who lives at sea level? http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9162438 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9162438 looks like 1/3rd to 1/2 (max). Maybe way less. So the Fahrenheit argument is "the numbers that are generally useful to people for air temperature are those that exist in human inhabited or are generally hospitable", eg 0 (pretty cold) to (100) pretty hot with specialized areas knowing more about their end of the spectrum (minnesota, riyadh). Your celsius argument means is that you care about temperatures over 100 (or 140) F up to 212F, or 37.7778 C up to 100C. I really doubt you care actually. You could just have a gague labelled "beef, pork, chicken, black tea, green tea, boiling" and be totally fine. Actually boiling doesn't even matter, it's pretty obivious when things are boiling and since it's a state change it's a very stable temperature. It's valid that it would make things easier if the US was on the metric system. It would be valid to say that india shouldn't go 30 minutes off of the hour to have a solo time zone, because that makes time zones easier, same for indiana (if they still do that). But don't pretend the metric measurements are any less arbitrary than the imperial ones. That's a very earth centric point of view. We should be on galactic measurements by now. You should see how much news.zcombinator.g out at alpha centauri is complaining about the metric system.

shakna 10y ago

The widespread adoption of Celsius seems to describe a different perspective, such as 0 being the freezing point of water.

jazoom 10y ago

You're right that Fahrenheit is probably the least silly of your measurings, since Celsius is just on a different scale and almost as arbitrary. But all the others are just ridiculous. Though, celsius does have the benefit of being on same scale as Kelvin, which is great.

CydeWeys 10y ago
As an American, I've basically given up on using our units, and think of everything in SI and convert figures to it before doing calculations. To give you an idea of how absurd things are, there are 16 ounces in a pound, but 8 ounces in a cup. When you're trying to make recipes, it sometimes isn't clear if the measurement is by weight or by volume. Oh, and there's three teaspoons in a tablespoon, and two tablespoons in an ounce. Or is it the other way around? Fuck it, I give up, I'm sticking with mL and g where everything makes sense. And I don't even want to get into the differences between the different kinds of tons, pints, gallons, and miles. There are three different kinds of miles in common usage, plus over a dozen historical ones. It's enough to drive you mad.
- jazoom 10y ago
  Stuff like this really annoys me. I don't think I could ever survive in your country. Maybe if I was born into it I could handle it.
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    We are at least aware of how terrible our units are for mass, weight, and volume, fortunately, so grams and liters are in widespread usage and understood by most. Unfortunately the recipes haven't caught on to that yet. And people aren't used to using SI units for larger masses. We're not so good about SI units for temperature, speed, and distance though, despite the particular failings of the latter two.
- hvidgaard 10y ago
  There is one now famous scene from the OCC show, where they demonstrate why the imperial system is quite the pain to work with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pikrntjcbyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pikrntjcbyw