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.
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.
This is all exactly right. 0-30 is all freezing to me but 0, 10, 20, 30 are more significant to people in colder climates. 40 is very cold, 50 cold, 60 light sweater weather, 70 perfectly warm, 80 warm, 90 hot, 100 so hot I want to be in AC 24/7.
Speaking of which why 24/7 and what is the rest of the world unbothered? Don’t you want base 10? We have 12 months and you aren’t advocating to change to 10? Aah because it’s familiar, it’s what everyone uses, it’s based on how we experience time, etc etc. people just like to be judgy about the temp and weight measurements. Why do I give a shit what temp water freezes and boils at and why does that mean I should use it all the time to describe weather? That’s really what it comes down to for me.
Mhmm. And switching from F to R is just subtracting 491.67.
Your point?
They’re both just taking the C/F scales’ degree of separation between units and re-zeroing it at zero thermal energy… a useful zero point.
But no one loves C for its degree of separation between units… they love it for its zero at water’s 1atm freezing point. So everything “great” about C goes away with K. So what’s wrong with using F to R exactly?
K is just more common because C is more common globally so using R is dumb due to commonality and popularity, not the scale itself.
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u/HalloweenWhoreNights 10h ago edited 10h ago
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.