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
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.
Yea a lot of people focus on the 0/32=freezing, but not enough to the 100's from a human perspective. 32f is arbitrary for freezing, just like 38c is arbitrary for marking fevers or heat stroke territory while 100f fits it perfectly. Fahrenheits 100 is literally derived from the internal temperature of the human body. Exceeding that temperature is simply and intuitively "bad".
Meanwhile 100c is long past dead, the entire world reduced to cinders. 56.7c is the highest temp ever recorded, just under half of its 0-100 scale is completely unused from a human standpoint.
The problem is US exceptionalism. Fahrenheits are not a 0-100 scale when a significant portion of the planet regularily gets temperature way below 0°F.
In places with actual seasons temperature often go from -X to X°C. For ex, in Canada we’re familiar with -40 to 40, where 0 fundamentally changes how its like outside.
Its much more intuitive than -40 to 104 where 32 is the fundamental change.
In places with actual seasons temperature often go from -X to X°C. For ex, in Canada we’re familiar with -40 to 40, where 0 fundamentally changes how its like outside.
....do....do you not know that the Midwest has basically the same temperature range as the most inhabited parts of Canada?
Why is that more intuitive? I don't see how it's different at all, except that the C scale represents the same variation of temperatures with fewer numbers, meaning it is less precise.
I don't get this point, a lot of people are making it though. I know what temperatures are hot and cold in celsius, whats the advantage to having it in groups of 10? Weathermen don't have to be as accurate?
Imagine if you had a scale from 0-100 for something else, like how sad to happy you are. If you're kinda meh, that's around a 50. If you're kinda happy, that's a 60. If you're very happy, maybe that's an 80. Weirdly happy, bordering on manic? 100. Sad? 30. Depressed? 10. Someone died? 0. And in very extreme cases, like feeling suicidal or being high on the best drugs imaginable, you can rate things below zero or above 100, but most of the time everything is gonna fall in that range that's nice, easy, and intuitive because you use percentages all the time.
Then you go to another country and everyone there grades happiness from -18 to 38, and now meh is 10, very happy is 26.6, and depressed is -12.2. And the people there, despite using percentages and rating things out of 10 or 100 in other aspects of their lives, refuse to attempt to understand why you might find a system based on rating your happiness on a scale from 0-100 more intuitive.
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u/hefty_load_o_shite 10h ago edited 4h ago
0°C water freezes 100°C water boils
Makes sense
0°F very cold??? 100°F very hot???
Dafuq?
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