I will stand up for Fahrenheit as originally conceived, for the convenience it was intended to provide: easy calibration and marking of thermometers. As origina

I will stand up for Fahrenheit as originally conceived, for the convenience it was intended to provide: easy calibration and marking of thermometers. As originally designed, the reference points -- a self-stabilizing brine mixture, and human body heat -- make it easy to set up a situation where the difference between any two adjacent already-marked points is a power of two, after which filling in the rest is just a matter of marking halfway points between previously-marked points. Unfortunately, that got ruined by a later reaction to Celsius; the Royal Society redefined in terms of freezing/boiling of water, fixed those at exactly 32F and 212F, and as a result the original second reference point was no longer exactly 96 (it became 98-ish).