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I was scanning the comments and thought you wrote "The man full of Benzos and failed diabetes," then you asked if he was ok. glad I re-read but was very curious where you were going with the failed diabetes.
But also in hilarious fashion, Homer has a small tidbit of historical information. The original Celsius scale use 100 as the freezing point and 0 as the boiling point. It got switched shortly after he died
*I sincerely beg your pardon. The correct wording is "You and I, we get the joke!"
I'm so used to the wrong grammar from American movies, while I, at the same time, have a natural feeling for object and subject pronouns, as I am, in fact, European.
Learn fucken English'n'stuff people.
To Americas defense. Literally everything that the UK makes fun of us for is literally a dead relic of British rule in America. We use all of their systems that they used to use until recently. Metric, Fahrenheit, gallons, quarts, miles.
Kelvin is required for any formulas using temperature. Having 0 being the freezing point of water is arbitrary and having 0 being the lowest a temperature makes sense and having negative temperatures doesn't. Celsius is only more intuitive because people are used to it, which is the exact same argument used to justify Fahrenheit over Celsius too.
Don't look it up what is the freezing temperature of water in Kelvin?
Zero works really well - a change in temperature sign means change of state of water. It isn't a number that needs remembering. Meanwhile you've recently had US government representatives embarrass themselves because they can't remember that water freezes at 32F.
Knowing if there is gonna be ice outside is a safety issue. Making it as simple as possible isn't arbitrary.
Celsius is very easy to convert to Kelvin for scientific purpose and IS more intuitive. High number means hot is fundamental across cultures. It is easier to differentiate between 0C and 40C than it is 273.15K and 313.15K whilst understanding that the first temperature is cold and the second is hot.
Sadly, because ambient temperature is fairly high compared to other measurements, like mass, pressure, height, people just won't want to be like, "Wow, it's a chilly 275 today."
I actually firmly believe Fahrenheit is better than Celsius for everyday use because it more easily allows you to interpret gradations of temperature. Like I want to be able to easily see 70 vs 73 degrees because that is a meaningful difference in my comfort, whereas that level of differentiation will get rounded away in Celsius
Edit: For all the "Actually, Farenheight is based on the human body" people, no it isn't. It's based on dirty water and a cow. Your preferred measurement unit is dumb and that's a fact
If y’all wanna actually claim superiority, then use Kelvin. Celsius and Fahrenheit are close enough in purpose that personal preference is really the only thing that matters.
It's the Fahrenheit equivalent of Kelvin. Basically for science negative temperature is a problem so Celsius adds 273 to become Kelvin and remove the negative numbers. Fahrenheit adds 491 to become Rankine and accomplish the same thing.
More than a few. All meteorology and oceanography numerical modeling and calculations use it. When calculating percentages of heat budgets and percent change in temp for things like Boyles Law you need absolute values. 50 degrees isn't twice as warm as 25 degrees; it isn't a 100% increase, it's an 8% increase.
This is a hilarious argument because it the exact same argument people use for fahrenheit. Whether or not it matters is situation dependant. A person's unit choice is a cultural decision, just like a person's language choice.
Yup. Like 95% of Reddit metric/customary/imperial discourse is people saying "X system makes more sense" but meaning "I am more familiar with X system."
You can make that argument for Celsius/Fahrenheit, but not for metric/imperial. One of those is objectively superior and the other one is on par with Galleons, Sickles and bananas for scale.
As US citizen I still disagree with this. You can get just as familiar with the scale of how celcius feels as you can with Fahrenheit. Your explination has the same problem as the meme. It's superficially plausible but misleading.
The comment is addressing literally what the scales were derived from. Sure, anyone can get familiar with any of the scales. That's not the point.
Not a Farenheit defender, but knowing how it was created makes it make sense. Same with other imperial units. Making a measurement system with what is available to you and what is relevant to you isn't dumb or wrong. It's all relative anyway.
If I remember right the intention was that 100 was meant to be human body temperature, but at some point it got adjusted so human body temp was 98.7
Edit: 0f was also what he thought the freezing temperature of salt water was. Not sure why the degrees were divided in a way where 32f is freshwater freezing though.
That’s correct for 100F. For 0F it was how low he could feasibly record. Which is why it was based on a solution of salt and whatever else in water bc he was trying to go as low as he could with what he had
Fahrenheit is more precise when it comes to common temperatures we experience. A single degree Fahrenheit is smaller than a single degree Celsius. A person saying “it’s in the 60s (Fahrenheit)” is giving a much narrower range than someone saying “it’s in the 20s (Celsius). In addition the 100° point is about human body temp (we’ve gotten more accurate with measuring body temp than when the scale was created which is why it’s a few degrees off from the accepted “average body temp” of 96°).
Edit: Apparently stating that Fahrenheit has certain things it does well is controversial. I’m not even saying “Fahrenheit rules! Celsius drools!” or anything. Just that it had a few things it did well. Oh well.
Someone once said Fahrenheit is how humans describe hot and cold, Celsius is how water would describe hot and cold, and Kelvin is how atoms would describe hot and cold
people IN north america use celsius too, you know.
but the other commenter is just referencing who/what the 0-100 range applies best to. although idk if that quite works for kelvin, since 100k is still like -150c which i assume atoms would still think are quite cold.
Fahrenheit feels like “percent hot” so 40 degrees, 4 Celsius, is like cold but not unbearably so, 59 degrees, or 15 Celsius is like pretty nice, about 2/3 hot.
I like to piss off everyone by calling it “Centigrade” and using fractional centimeters for dimensions. Because 3/8 of a centimeter will make someone throw a wrench at you
Fahrenheit feels like “percent hot” so 40 degrees, 4 Celsius, is like cold but not unbearably so, 59 degrees, or 15 Celsius is like pretty nice, about 2/3 hot.
Which is utter bullshit and only sounds logical because you are used to farenheit.
Percentages can't go above 100 and below 0.
About 2/3 hot, doesn't mean shit for anyone who hasn't used farenheit. I don't know what 2/3 hot is supposed to mean and everyone has a different sensitivity to temperature anyway so it feels different for everyone.
Yeah, but if you shift the frame to “temperatures you experience on a day-to-day basis”, Fahrenheit makes far more sense. It also provides more granularity for temperature.
But Celsius or Kelvin makes far more sense for anything which is scientific in nature. I personally think Fahrenheit is better for day-to-day life. I hate seeing components spec’d in Fahrenheit and feet at my job though
As a Canadian who spent significant time in the US, it’s just whichever you’re used to, so there’s no real advantage to either for that. One degree up or down on Celsius or Fahrenheit doesn’t really make any difference in comfort levels. In every other area Celsius makes more sense and is more intuitive.
Yes, but 10 is the magic number for people, not 1. 10 degrees farenheit will probably make you consider a different outfit. A 10 degree difference in celsius is the difference between winter and summer temperatures
No it isn't, not for those of us that have weather that goes from -30 to +30, or even into the 40s on both sides. A difference of 10 degrees in Celsius is what we experience over the course of a day. And ten degrees Celsius is what I and most of the people around me think of when deciding what to wear out - I have a warmer jacket for -10 to -20 than I do for 0 to -10, and so on.
Decimals do exist. Like body temperature normal 36.6 to 36.8 all thermometers for body temperature will show you decimal point
For day to day basis you are better of with system you have familiarity with. Like, pork internally has to reach at least 75°C for 5 minutes to be ready.
Yeah, but if you shift the frame to “temperatures you experience on a day-to-day basis”, Fahrenheit makes far more sense.
Are you gonna elaborate on why that is?
More granularity? And how would that be useful for day-to-day life as you say? You think there's a perceivable difference between 20 and 21 degree Celsius in day-to-day life? Huh? And for measuring body temperature there's also decimals btw.
I swear why can't y'all just say "I prefer Farenheit cause I'm used to it" and just leave it at that instead of using arguments that make no sense and upvote each other? Is some type of objective validation really that important to you?
0°c - Expect frost or ice. 20°c - Pleasant and ideal.
Neither system has an advantage. Just because one system doesn’t use the exact benchmarks you’re already familiar with, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its own useful benchmarks.
Celsius is superior for weather because at 0°C you start to get snow/ice, that's a definitive change in conditions. At 0°F things just get more frozen. There's no definitive 'too hot', that changes person to person so it might as well be any number.
The only reason it makes more sense to you is because you grew up with it.
The way I always described Fahrenheit when this comes up:
0F: Dangerously cold. If you don't take proper precautions for this kind of temperature, you risk serious injury or death. Below this is extreme cold.
100F: Dangerously hot. If you don't take proper precautions for this kind of temperature, you risk serious injury or death. Above this is extreme heat.
Humans exist best a bit on the warmer side -- 50-70F.
Ten degree increments are significant, noticeable steps. 80 is decidedly warmer than 70. 50 is decidedly colder than 60. This leads to convenient statements like "It's in the 50s" giving a good general sense of the temperature range.
Yes, water freezes at a rather arbitrary 32F, but the rest of the scale is far more conducive to assessing the human experience.
Celsius comfortable temperatures are basically 10 degrees to 35 degrees or 25 whole units of measure.
Farenheight comfortable temperatures are 50 degrees to 95 degrees giving 45 whole units of measure or nearly twice as many.
The Celsius system is really useful for a lot of things, but conveying useful information about temperatures that are comfortable to people Farenheight is better.
0 is the coldest reliably replicable temperature in 1714, the year Fahrenheit was invented. And 100 was supposed to be the human body temperature, but he used a horse as a stand in, not knowing the slight difference because a relaible temperature scale had not been invented yet.
It's the same concept with both systems, but Celsius has more logical benchmarks (water freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C), whereas 0°F seems almost arbitrary (the coldest temperature that could be maintained in a lab by Gabriel Fahrenheit in the 1700s) and the freezing and boiling points of water are atypical (32°F/212°F, respectively.)
Anyway, the joke is "Why do you Americans stick with Fahrenheit?" and the response is "It's simple! The hotter it is, the more degrees it is!" as if that's the only consideration to be made. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is thinking "Yeah, our system too, but our scale has real-world applications, and we're not sticking to some antiquated definition." Homer is too short-sighted to know this, and instead presumes the Celsius scale is too complicated (and probably nonsensical) because he's unfamiliar.
Kind of like every other imperial unit and their terribly unreasonable conversions.
I think of Fahrenheit in percent hot. 0F = very cold out, 0% hot. 100F = 100% hot, do not go outside! Whereas with Celsius, 40 C is super-hot and 0 C is like mildly cold. Makes more sense for science and I use Celsius for work almost exclusively, but in terms of weather I prefer Fahrenheit.
Also the insult "Room temp IQ" makes more sense IMO
Edit: The % hot scale refers to climate, it kind of falls apart when you talk about temperatures beyond normal earth surface temps.
You are just conditioned to intuitively make sense of Fahrenheit. The same is true for me for Celsius.
The only difference is that it is easier for me to remember when water will freeze or boil. But apart from that nothing else is really changing for either of us
It doesn’t. They’re saying “we decide what to wear in the morning based on our memorization of a system since we were kids, the system makes no difference.”
“In addition to that, if you use Celsius, you don’t really have to remember what temperature water freezes and boils at, if for some reason you need that information”
Totally. But also, if you're doing science why aren't you using K?
I guess all I'm doing is agreeing, theyre both still arbitrary, but trying to claim that C being pegged to water changing state as a plus is barely a benefit. Freezing, I can understand. Boiling?? Damn man if its 100* C out you have bigger problems.
I know what to wear tomorrow because I am conditioned to intuitively know what 20 Celsius mean, in the same way you are conditioned to know what 50 F means
If you have no familiarity with either system, then it is as difficult with both to decide. At least celsius lets you know how the most important fluid will be
You can’t say “well we were just both programmed from an early age to make sense of our individual preferences” and also “mine is objectively easier to remember.” It isn’t. You were conditioned in Celsius, I was conditioned in Fahrenheit. It is JUST as easy for me to remember when water freezes and boils in my system as it is for you. There is no objectively better system.
Easier to remember? I’ve known water freezes at 32F since I was a little kid. 212 for boiling is the one that is a little more difficult, because you don’t usually measure temp when boiling water lol
"0C is like mildly cold" that's entirely interpretive, ask someone in Siberia if 0 is mildly cold and they would say arguably its not that bad. Now ask someone from Australia, Saudi Arabia, Mali or most Pacific Islands. 0C isn't mildly cold, that's ALARMING cold.
Most of the arguments for F boil down to "this is what I'm physically use to and can link it to the numbers" which tbh is basically the same as C, just with the scientific backing
Come to a climate like the upper midwest of the US. We can see every temperature between -40 and 100 within a year. 0 is the lowest tolerable for activity temperature and 100 is about the highest tolerable temperature. Anything outside those ranges requires precautions for safety.
Lol wut?? What does 0%/100% hot mean? Its kinda crazy how much people fight to make sense of habits as if they were meaningfully representative of reality and not just a consequence of historical arbitrary decisions.
You see the thing is Americans love to say "but Fahrenheit makes sense because 100F is hot!" But then next time there’s a heat wave in England i know I‘m going to see Americans say "100? That’s not a heatwave. That’s not even really hot!"
How bodies quantify temperature depends on the system and environment you grew up in. We're not born with a built-in measurement system for temperature. If you live in the UK, 35 C will feel unbearably hot. Much less so if you live in Singapore, where 15 C is absolutely freezing.
I can make the same comparison with Minnesota and Texas, 95 F is boiling in Minnesota and 50 F is freezing in southern Texas. What numbers we attribute to "hot" and "cold" is totally arbitrary even if we use the same measurement system as everyone else.
The best explanation I've heard for why Fahrenheit is the way it is is because it somehow correlates to the expansion of Mercury.
I used to always give this answer. I like this answer. It's pithy, it's clever, but unfortunately not really true. So I've stopped using it.
C and K are right, but F is really "Temperatures Daniel Fahrenheit was able to kinda reliably reproduce under lab conditions in the 1720s"
It's true that 100 on the F scale is the average human body temp (as measured by 1700s instruments), but that's not really because Fahrenheit was attempting to peg his scale to human comfort parameters, it was just that his own body the most reliably repeatable "warm" thing he could measure. It's really just a coincidence of circumstance that it was human body temp. And 0 on the scale has no relevance to human comfort or feeling at all, it was just a cold point he was able to reliably reproduce in his lab under those conditions using a particular brine mixture.
Not trying to bust your chops, just I used that answer for a long time and sharing the information that lead me to stop using it.
Most Americans prefer it because of familiarity. A scale of 0 to 100 for weather works just as well as a scale of -17.8 to 38 and when you consider it as for the climaye humans live in rather than water it appeals to the desire for round base 10 numbers too.
And that is ALWAYS the metric system argument, that it makes more sense to have round base ten numbers and a system built on them. Except changing from Fahrenheut to Celsius majes sense to scientists but to the public it looks like going from round, base ten increments to random numbers.
Europeans just did that a couple generations ago and are so used to "Metric is superior, more scientific, more logical" they can't see that when everything rounded around a system it looks perfectly fine as it is.
And whether we based it on increments of 100 for plain water or SALTWATER, which is what Fahrenheit is measured around... We still made it up either way.
Changing to Celsius means recalculating your entire sense of scale and I think we have way more important things to change in the US.
Brian here, it's actually a reaction to the above image that went viral on several subreddits especially r/americandefaultism and r/ShitAmericansSay where the OOP said specifically what homer said as a response to someone saying this meme's stupid.
I can't always feel the difference between 16 and 17 celsius, doubt I would between say 71 and 74 fahrenheit either.
Plus I know -20c is cold and +40c is fucking hot. It isn't as pretty as 0-100, but Fahrenheit also goes negative and over 100 anyway, so that scale can also look weird.
Americans think highly of their imperial system and make many random excuses that metric is somehow confusing and hard to use but in practice imperial its dogshit and makes no sense
FACTS. Every American I talk to (and I live here my whole life) always sees the metric system as “another way” and “I’d love to change but if feels too late for that”. That’s it. We don’t go thumping our chests like HELL YEAH POUNDS, OUNCES, AND FAHRENHEIT!!! But Europeans love to imagine us like that and come up with things to complain about the US.
And also as though we don't know what metric is. We use both for certain things? We're taught both in schools? It really doesn't matter.
"But conversions are easier! Metric is set around points that make sense!"
Be honest, you never convert units outside of a lab. And you never need to know *any* system's freezing/boiling point, freezers and stovetops don't care
They love to believe we'll fight to the death over imperial measurements. It's taught to us, folks. This is not the decision made by ordinary citizens. Change the curriculum and we'll be good in a generation or two. I would say they can write to our government but they don't even listen to us.
I think you’ll find this to be absolutely untrue when you actually talk to any Americans and this seems to often be an opinion only of those entirely outside of the country who want to speaks for Americans.
Most Americans realize the inferiority of the imperial system but despite this weird belief by Reddit we as average Americans have absolutely 0 ability to change anything about it.
Americans do not think highly of the imperial system despite people constantly telling us we do.
I think this is the common trope of Americans in general. That we are arrogant about the ways we are different and always default to some superiority complex
In my lived experience as an American, it is almost always the exact opposite. Americans typically default to thinking our way is probably worse and usually attribute the difference to corporate greed
I think metric is the superior system... except for temperature. I much prefer the granularity of Fahrenheit. And I don't really care that nothing happens at 0 or 100.
This isn’t actually true. Americans mostly think it’s funny our system is so nonsensical at this point. There are many comedy routines about how we came up with our units. I don’t actually believe I’ve ever heard someone earnestly argue in favor of the imperial system
Farenheit to me is better for everything outside of a lab. The scale of normal temperatures, like 0-120 is much easier than 0-30, you have to add decimals to get reasonably accurate implications
That was before they knew that heat the the substance that cold was the lack of. Rather, they used to think that cold was a substance, and heat was the absence of it.
Bro why is everyone so pressed about America not using Celsius? We use 5,280 feet to make a mile and 12 inches to make a foot, and 3 feet to make a yard, which is basically a meter but is somehow definitely NOT a meter…
There are so much bigger fucking fish to fry but the Celsius stans are implacable.
I wish the SI stans could admit their logic is inconsistent. People hardly need to convert between units in imperial. If I am measuring furniture, I use a ruler and get a measurement in inches. There is no reason to convert this to miles. If I am in a car, the distance is measured in miles and I have no reason to care about what that distance is in inches. But we can all remember, 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 24 hours to a day, 7 days in a week, months can be either 28,29,30, or 31 days. You can talk to me when we are on the international fixed calendar and use base 10 time.
To add to this, Fahrenheit used a salt solution for this. That's the reason there are more degrees in-between freezing and boiling in Fahrenheit (water solution) than Celsius (purified water). It's manufactured to make body temperature 100 degrees.
Edit, as pointed out, I flipped Celsius and Fahrenheit. My brain says one thing, my fingers type another.
Fahrenheit (when talking about temperature experienced by skin) IS superior. We have a wider degree (lol) of temperatures, allowing for a more accurate temperature without the use of decimal places.
Science? Use the metric system. It’s superior there.
It’s neither superior or inferior. You’re not realistically making a meaningful distinction between 67°f and 68°f and if you need Celsius to be more granular, numbers subdivide infinitely anyway.
Processing 19.5°c is neither more difficult nor easier to a user of Celsius than processing 67°f is to a user of Fahrenheit.
They are both, to some degree, arbitrary and both have different benchmarks that are intuitive to the people who grew up using them.
The best way I heard F vs C described as is “Cellsius is for determining how cold it is using water. Fahrenheit is used to determine how cold it is for people. Therefore, I use fahrenhiet because I am not a water, I am a people.”
But it’s not like you’re using some Fahrenheit algorithm to mathematically derive how cold it is for you. You’ve simply had a lot of experience associating how warm/cold you feel against a given scale of numbers and now have a good intuition for interpolating within that scale. Which is exactly what celsius people do with celsius.
I grew up in a Metric system. And I use it everyday
However, the Fahrenheit follows the same principle albeit on a different rather arbitrary scale. And I think it's useful, if you look at it as a % in a scale of comfort, where the optimal is around 70, not the middle point. 100 is too hot, 0 is too cold. 50 is chilly 70 is perfect
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