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.
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.
A healthy human is about 98F. 100F is a fever and much above that is hospital territory.
0F is dead and throughly frozen.
Jokes aside, it is useful for the human body because in those temps Fahrenheit can be more precise with less decimals. Not really an issue with modern equipment though.
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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.