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I'm British and always used to think that Fahrenheit was stupid but I've warmed up to it (pardon the pun) after spending some time in the U.S. Celsius is obvio

I'm British and always used to think that Fahrenheit was stupid but I've warmed up to it (pardon the pun) after spending some time in the U.S. Celsius is obviously more useful in a scientific context, but 99% of the time when I'm talking about the temperature, I'm not doing a scientific experiment, I'm asking "how hot/cold is it outside?" In that context I actually find Fahrenheit to be a more intuitively useful scale once you get used to it. Celsius crams the entire range of likely outdoor temperatures into a narrow range with awkwardly-sized units that don't provide enough information. If someone tells me it's 15C outside, how many layers do I need to wear? I still don't have a good feel for it from the number alone, even after spending most of my life in countries where Celsius is the norm. But in Fahrenheit, things make more obvious sense. 0 F means "insufferably cold", 100 F means "insufferably hot", and to get a meaningful idea of what the weather feels like on my skin, I just need the range: it's "in in fifties" or "in the seventies" etc.. It takes some getting used to, but I actually quite like it. Thanks, America! (I'd also make a similar argument that feet and inches are a much more intuitively meaningful scale than centimetres for measuring human height. But that might be my British bias.)

Dalewyn 3y ago
Like you, I also find celsius more useful for knowing how hot some thing is while fahrenheit is more useful for knowing how hot some where is. I also find inches, feet, miles etc. more intuitive than meters for basically everything. "so-and-so meters" or "such-and-such kilometers" doesn't describe anything to me, give it to me in inches/feet/miles so I can visualize the damn thing. Moral I suppose is that metric is great for describing the universe, but the problem is we're dumb apes.
- Epa095 3y ago
  I suppose the moral is that we relate to whatever measurement we grew up to and are used to. I have no problem visualising meters and kilometers, and I am as dumb an ape as you.
globular-toast 3y ago
> Thanks, America! Erm, they didn't invent it. Most (all?) American units were inherited from British. Farenheit was invented in Europe. I have also warmed to Imperial/American units for certain things. A lot of simple recipes are easier to remember in ounces than in grams. For example, 5 ounces of flour and 4 ounces of butter gives you enough shortcrust pastry for a 9 inch tin. Inches seem about the right size, but centimeters are too small. People's heights tend to fall around 5-6 feet which is nice, or 150-180/1.5-1.8 which is kind of awkward. Basically, imperial measurements seem much more "human" while metric seems based on arbitrary universal constants like the speed of light which have absolutely no bearing on our lives. None of this means that "cups" are a sane way to measure ingredients for cooking, though. There's just so many reasons why it's bad but even just from a laziness point of view it's an extra thing to wash up.
- perilunar 3y ago
  > while metric seems based on arbitrary universal constants like the speed of light Um, No. Metric is based on the size of the Earth and the density of water. The original definition of the meter was "one ten-millionth of the distance from the pole to the equator", making the circumference of the Earth 40,000 km or 40 Mm. The kilogram was originally defined as the mass of one litre of water. (1 m³ = 1000 kg). It wasn't arbitrary.
  - arrowsmith 3y ago
    Well yes but those measurements are still "arbitrary" in the sense that they have no relation to anything that humans regularly deal with or have an intuition for. Basing a unit of measurement on the size of the Earth? Why not base it on the size of the Sun, or on the distance between Toronto and Timbuktu, or on the combined height of every member of the U.S congress if they all laid head to toe? Those numbers mean nothing to me, but I have a good intuitive feel for distances like "the general range of human heights", "the size of my foot", or "how far I can walk in an hour". Imperial measurements have their origins in those kind of intuitive, everyday quantities that we humans have a natural feel for; that's the sense in which they're not "arbitrary". That doesn't nmake imperial measurements unconditionally "better", it just makes them more useful and relatable in certain contexts.
dillydogg 3y ago
I once read an article I've wished I could find again online. It begins with something like "I decided to create the perfect scale for measuring the temperature outside for the weather. Of temperatures taken where people live, I will scale the 95th percentile of high temperatures as 100 and the 95th of cold temperatures as 0." The goal of which was, if a temperature is <0 it's really cold, and a temperature >100 is really hot. My memory is that using this method the scale was within 2 degrees of Fahrenheit! Of course, I've never found the story again so who knows the details of their method or if I'm even remembering correctly.

Dalewyn 3y ago

Like you, I also find celsius more useful for knowing how hot some thing is while fahrenheit is more useful for knowing how hot some where is. I also find inches, feet, miles etc. more intuitive than meters for basically everything. "so-and-so meters" or "such-and-such kilometers" doesn't describe anything to me, give it to me in inches/feet/miles so I can visualize the damn thing. Moral I suppose is that metric is great for describing the universe, but the problem is we're dumb apes.

Epa095 3y ago
I suppose the moral is that we relate to whatever measurement we grew up to and are used to. I have no problem visualising meters and kilometers, and I am as dumb an ape as you.

globular-toast 3y ago

> Thanks, America! Erm, they didn't invent it. Most (all?) American units were inherited from British. Farenheit was invented in Europe. I have also warmed to Imperial/American units for certain things. A lot of simple recipes are easier to remember in ounces than in grams. For example, 5 ounces of flour and 4 ounces of butter gives you enough shortcrust pastry for a 9 inch tin. Inches seem about the right size, but centimeters are too small. People's heights tend to fall around 5-6 feet which is nice, or 150-180/1.5-1.8 which is kind of awkward. Basically, imperial measurements seem much more "human" while metric seems based on arbitrary universal constants like the speed of light which have absolutely no bearing on our lives. None of this means that "cups" are a sane way to measure ingredients for cooking, though. There's just so many reasons why it's bad but even just from a laziness point of view it's an extra thing to wash up.

perilunar 3y ago
> while metric seems based on arbitrary universal constants like the speed of light Um, No. Metric is based on the size of the Earth and the density of water. The original definition of the meter was "one ten-millionth of the distance from the pole to the equator", making the circumference of the Earth 40,000 km or 40 Mm. The kilogram was originally defined as the mass of one litre of water. (1 m³ = 1000 kg). It wasn't arbitrary.
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  Well yes but those measurements are still "arbitrary" in the sense that they have no relation to anything that humans regularly deal with or have an intuition for. Basing a unit of measurement on the size of the Earth? Why not base it on the size of the Sun, or on the distance between Toronto and Timbuktu, or on the combined height of every member of the U.S congress if they all laid head to toe? Those numbers mean nothing to me, but I have a good intuitive feel for distances like "the general range of human heights", "the size of my foot", or "how far I can walk in an hour". Imperial measurements have their origins in those kind of intuitive, everyday quantities that we humans have a natural feel for; that's the sense in which they're not "arbitrary". That doesn't nmake imperial measurements unconditionally "better", it just makes them more useful and relatable in certain contexts.

dillydogg 3y ago

I once read an article I've wished I could find again online. It begins with something like "I decided to create the perfect scale for measuring the temperature outside for the weather. Of temperatures taken where people live, I will scale the 95th percentile of high temperatures as 100 and the 95th of cold temperatures as 0." The goal of which was, if a temperature is <0 it's really cold, and a temperature >100 is really hot. My memory is that using this method the scale was within 2 degrees of Fahrenheit! Of course, I've never found the story again so who knows the details of their method or if I'm even remembering correctly.