5 ms·
Nah, Celsius is useful if you're a human. Fahrenheit is useful if you're an American.
by inetknght 2y ago
Nah, Celsius is useful if you're a human. Fahrenheit is useful if you're an American.
- artursapek 2y ago0 is cold as fuck, 100 is hot as fuck. Perfect human scale. Stay jelly
- beAbU 2y ago-40 - cold as fuck, 40 - hot as fuck. 0 - shit freezes, better drive carefully. I don't understand why this is always breought out when farenheit is criticized, as if the 0F-100F thing is the "killer app" for temperature scales.
- artursapek 2y agoIn what country do people encounter -40 degrees
- zeagle 2y agoParts of Canada for sure. When it’s below -35C my garage stored vehicle’s cold engine light turns after a bit on while driving!
- timschmidt 2y agoWe had a -40F windchill day here in Michigan a few years ago.
- nukem222 2y agoRussia, canada, sweden, norway, finland, us... probably missing a few. Edit: mongolia too, I think. curiously, nothing in the southern hemisphere?
- olddustytrail 2y agoAntarctica
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoAs an American I’m biased, but Fahrenheit matching the 1-100 scale used in so many other things just feels nice. Maps cleanly to 0-1.0 in a float/decimal type in programming which is neat too. Feels less arbitrary even if it actually isn’t. I prefer metric otherwise but for temperature Fahrenheit just “clicks” in ways that Celsius doesn’t.
- taberiand 2y agoFahrenheit doesn't match the 1-100 scale, though - Celsius does. 0 water freezes, 100 water boils.
- artursapek 2y ago[flagged]
- hollerith 2y agoHerr Fahrenheit measured the temperature many times over a period of one year in some town in Germany. He defined 0 degrees as the coldest measurement, 100 the hottest measurement.
- taberiand 2y agoOk but Celsius works wherever you are (adjusting for pressure)
- 0rzech 2y ago> some town in Germany The Polish city of Gdańsk, of the then Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was also born there at the time. [1] > He defined 0 degrees as the coldest measurement, 100 the hottest measurement. Nope. It was neither about the temperatures in Gdańsk, nor about the temperature of his wife, btw. ;) [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gabriel_Fahrenheit [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit
- briHass 2y agoAnytime your scale has to go into negative numbers to represent common scenarios, it's not human friendly. If you're not tying your scale to human-specific temps, why not just use Kelvin? At least that won't go negative.
- cyberax 2y ago20F is also cold as fuck. 90F is also hot as fuck.
- chrismcb 2y agoIf you are used to Celsius, sure. But the point the op was making is Fahrenheit was designed with humans in mind and Celsius with the changes of the state of water. Your average person didn't really care what temperature water boils at, just that it is hot.
- nukem222 2y ago> Fahrenheit was designed with humans in mind If there was a design, it's not clear what the intent was. It seems about twice as precise as it needs to be (i certainly can't perceive 1F°—for all intents and purposes, 70 feels about the same as 69 and 71) and doesn't seem to correlate to any scale that is immediately based off the needs of humans. At least compared to celcius.
- timschmidt 2y agoThis is very interesting, because I absolutely can feel one degree F difference in house temperature. I wonder if using a lower resolution scale dulls the senses like other forms of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
- nukem222 2y agoI live in the US and can't change my thermostat, so I don't think that's it. I'm sure I could feel the difference if i split myself between two rooms with one degree difference. I just don't think this is a useful granularity—I typically move the thermostat by 2-5 degrees at a time.
- throwaway657656 2y agoFarenheit set 100F to be his wife's internal temperature. 0F was the freezing point of brine and humans are mostly brine. F is human centric.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit
- 2y ago
- timschmidt 2y agoWho needs 2x the effective resolution at human temperature scales? Or useful temperatures without significant digits beyond the decimal?
- mass_and_energy 2y agoAgreed, there's a reason most of the world uses it.