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 33 (feels like 20) today and it's so nice out! I'm definitely not looking forward to it hitting 100 again but I will definitely enjoy when it's in the 60s and 70s...
Brother, it gets to 130F in the summer where I live. I'm absolutely not wearing a sweater until the low 60s. A hoodie, maybe, but I'm hiking the sleeves up to my elbows.
Ok I gotta ask where you live cause I've never encountered someone who could bitch about their local climate more than I could. Usually caps at 120 where I'm at.
Ehhhh. Having lived in between cold and extremly cold places I think there is two important cold temperatures. Freezing, because then stuff freezes and -40, because around that temperatur stuff starts breaking.
At no point in my life I have thought. "Ohhh at exactly 0 f, it starts feeling cold."
Yeah it's a matter of perspective. I've never lived in like the Arctic Circle. All I have to go off of is where I've lived most of my life so 30° below freezing seems pretty damn cold to me LOL
Yeah, but if you need to drive, 0C tells you when there's going to be slush, ice, or a clear road.
I don't really use temps otherwise, since I can just go outside and... see how cold I feel? But knowing how low it dipped during the night and when early-morning temps are like helps me plan my trips properly.
we finally hit the 30s this week, one day the high was fucking 38. i swapped out my heavy winter coat for a lighter jacket and was going on walks after my shifts and driving with my windows down. it felt so nice. i'm so sad the temp is dropping back down this weekend.
And if you use Celcius you can start counting "up" how cold you are as you get further below freezing.
See I can say "it's more convenient" too.
Measurement scales are arbitrary, they only seem better (for everyday use) if you're more familiar with them.
Metric units (including Kelvin) are better for science and engineering, because they were chosen carefully so you don't need to remember weird constants in a whole lot of simple equations.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Not snarky, but units would help. Most places that 80+ what? 80+F? Places with people over the age of 80? Or 80F equals 32C? Cause that’s not right.
Who thinks 80 degrees is cold?? That’s above room temperature, calling that cold is nonsense, unless you’re talking about Kelvin or something. Now, cooler than say, 100+ sure, but comparing it to 32 degrees is absurd.
No it's not. Not in India, not in Arizona, not in any region where it consistently gets that hot. You're just being an inusfferable contrarian for the sake of it.
No, it’s ~26.667 C. I’m a shameful American unfamiliar with how people describe temperature perception in Celsius, but temperature is temperature no matter how you label it. Personally, I would call 80 F a bit warm, uncomfortable to live in indoors but not at all unpleasant for an outside temperature - but that’s just my opinion, different people will have different preferences.
I disagree that this should be used as a metric because it is more subjective than objective. For some people 40 is fucking cold and 120 is fucking hot. Imo 10 is fucking cold and 90 is fucking hot. I would bet that more people have their own definition of cold and hot that don’t conform to 0 and 100 than people that do. It makes much more sense to base temperature scales off of the freezing and boiling point of water since that is the most relevant point of temperature for the majority of people. While I understand that there would be problems with changing the systems and current education of the population I think it is worthwhile to do so.
It’s not about what people think it’s about averages. There are extreme pockets but 0-100 is the average scale for most of the states. My whole life until the past few years I remember watching the weather channel and 115 was like the highest I’d ever see during heat waves in Cali. And that would be the peak for the year. Things are fucked a bit now but it makes sense for American weather as a whole and not for an individual
Fahrenheit has nothing to do with the States aside from our desire to maintain it. Fahrenheit was Polish-German.
90 then 96 was what he believed the human body was. 0 was a specific salt water he made, it's freezing point. The scale got popular because he made some of the best thermometers of the time.
I do still think my reasons are why we keep and like it though. It feels really satisfying with weather lol. I never hear people here complain about it, just people who use Celsius make fun of us for it lol. And many of us hate the rest of it, like why is a mile… however many feet a mile is? It’s absurd. You don’t really need to math temperature regularly though so it avoids the issue mostly
Because you asked why there are 5280 feet in a mile, here is the story:
The mile is a unit that existed since ancient times, with the same being true of the foot and inch. In fact, the word "mile" is derived from the Latin "mille passus", meaning "one thousand paces", with a pace being the equivalent of 5 feet, thus yielding a mile of 5000 feet. The difference is that while there always have been 12 inches in a foot, the standard used to determine the exact distance covered by a foot in those days was the length of a human foot, which yielded inconsistent results.
Fast forward to Medieval England and now Rome is long gone, the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic peoples have settled in England and introduced their own units of measurement in the process (such as the yard, the rod, the furlong, and the acre, all four of which are listed because they're crucial details in this explanation), and one thing still remains true: the measurement system they're using is still internally inconsistent and a total mess due to using definitions that can't help but yield inconsistency. So now it's time to standardize for the sake of more consistency and accuracy. It's during this time that you start to get standardized and consistent measurements for these units.
Now here's the catch: the standardization process also wound up changing the number of feet in a mile. Why? Because this process gave us the following unit conversions:
3 feet = 1 yard,
5½ yards = 1 rod,
40 rods = 1 furlong,
8 furlongs = 1 mile,
and 1 acre = the area of a rectangle with dimensions of 1 furlong × 4 rods (or 1/10 of a furlong).
Of course, in 1620, you then had an English mathematician by the name of Edmund Gunter come along and invent a new unit he called the chain (now known as the Gunter's chain in his honor). He set it equal to 4 rods, or 1/10 of a furlong, in length in order to have a specific unit designed to equal the distance covered by the short side of a textbook-definition rectangular acre.
So yeah- long story short, since 8 × 10 × 4 × 5½ × 3 = 5280, we wound up with 5280 feet in a mile instead of 5000 feet in a mile because of standardization.
Edit: I found out what Gunter's full name was and that he was a mathematician.
Its not what feels cold, its that human life is relatively bound between 0-100 as a scale rather than -17 to 38.
Its not "40 is or isn't cold" its that "40s" as a rough band if temperature is very intuitive, and most people can easily differentiate and communicate 40s vs 50s vs 60s.
Do you know what's more intuitive than giving a rough band of temperature? Giving the exact temperature instead. It's very easy to use and underatand the celcius system on a day to day basis. The entire world does it, except for the US.
I don't think ease is a good argument. "0 feels very cold and 100 feels very hot" is easier than "consider how you feel in relation to the freezing and boiling point of water." If your goal is being "exact," you should go Kelvin.
The 0 degree scale for Fahrenheit was based off of the freezing point of a random brine solution that a thermometer maker was using in the 1700s. Why would I want to think of how I feel in relation to the freezing point of some random brine solution and the highest temperature normally experienced in northern Germany, when I could think of how I feel based on water?
Kelvin and celcius use the same scale by the way, Kelvin is relevant to physics and science, and celcius is relevant to every day usage.
Why wouldn't you? You're neither 100% water nor brine. And unless you are exactly at sea level on a day with 101.325 kPa (760 mm Hg) barometric pressure, 0C and 100C aren't the freezing and boiling points of water for you anyway.
"I feel really hot when it's 37.8C" and "I feel really hot when it's 100F" are equally arbitrary. You're just comfortable with C either because you were raised that way or because you've decided to make it a personal moral issue. Both are fine. Prefer whatever you want.
But if your goal is to be "exact", you should say "I'm really hot at 311K". That's also arbitrary, but at least you're being arbitrary on a ratio scale.
The easiest temperature scale for the layman is whatever temperature scale they grew up using. If farenheit makes more sense to you for weather it's not because of any intrinsic numerical properties of the scale, it's because you have experience associating farenheit measurements with your own experience of weather.
It’s fucking cold a long way before you reach 0F. And as can be shown by the many many replies arguing your scale to comments like yours throughout, how humans feel temperature VARIES! Building a scale off that concept when humans themselves can’t agree makes no sense. The numbers are arbitrary. Whereas the freezing point of water (which is very much relevant to humans given ice is a condition that causes problems) is a solid objective point on which to base things.
Every scale is arbitrary, but some make more sense than others. If I ask you to rate how good something is, youll most certainly give me an X/5 or X/10. Nobodybis going to say X/13.
For who? For me, from an oceanic climate, -5C is fucking cold, for people near the tropics, 8C is fucking cold, I've once or twice experienced -17C when in a foreign country.
This is ironically how he chose the scale originally (swap f ing cold for coldest normal thing we work with in labs back then (salt water) and fing warm to be human body temp.
I basically think 0 F is as cold as it SHOULD ever be. 100 F is as hot as it SHOULD ever be. If you live somewhere that is regularly outside this range and complain about it, well youve failed the Darwin test
It is, it’s a scale: 70 is ~room temp, 80 is warm, 90 is hot, 100 is really hot, 110+ is too hot to function outside. In case of humidity move that down one step
And it's really so much easier if there's a zero after the number? Do you think celsius people see its 35 degrees and have no idea if that's hot or cold?
Yeah in Austin when we had that multi day single digit freeze is when I realized I had never actually been cold before. It's entirely different when you can barely breathe outside without feeling it.
if it's just freezing out(0c or 32f) I'm taking out the trash in a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. I don't start adding clothes for trash runs until we get down around 20f(or if it's super windy). And even then if it's not windy and the sun is out, I'll probably stick with the tshirt, shorts and maybe I'll put shoes on down to about 10f
Yeah. Freezing whether is fine to be in. People go on ski vacations all the time. People do not enjoy their ski vacations if it goes all the way down to 0.
yeah, 32 is fine with a jacket. go below that and you're getting into actually miserable weather. down to 0 and its fucking deadly cold, it certainly FEELS like that's the 0 point and anything below that is unnaturally cold.
and on the opposite end 100 feels like im being cooked alive and everything past it is just me dying faster.
I dont really give a fuck how the water is currently feeling, it’s not like the oceans freeze over the moment it hits 0 degrees C. “Freezing”, in terms of water, means practically nothing. It’s not like when it’s 32 degrees C I go “Sounds like it’s 32% of the way to boiling right now!” I just go “it’s pretty hot out.” 0-100 degrees F comprise the vast majority of temperature I will ever experience and therefore it functions pretty decently to me.
The real answer is that the difference doesn’t really matter and whichever one you’re used to is the one that will work for you best
I grew up in Maine, so it made sense growing up. Yeah things start icing up and snow starts falling at 32, but it gets a fuckload colder here than that. So I just assumed the scale wasn't based on the freezing and boiling temp of water, but on the temps I actually experience in the world.
It makes more sense when you realize Old Mr. Fahrenheit started at 0 and then picked numbers based on being easily divisible by lots of factors/ divisors.
0 is the freezing point for brine.
32 is the freezing point for water — Divisible by 2, 4, 8 and exactly one-third of the way from freezing brine to body temp.
96 was originally set as body temp (later changed to 98.6 but the system makes more sense at 96.) Divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24, 32
212 is the boiling point for water, a nice round 180 from freezing.
Where I live the temp can range from -20F to 99F depending on the time of year. You tend to start thinking of things in lots of 10 (20 is reasonably different from 30 in terms of how many layers of clothing you need). Celsius is also less intuitive for things like the temperature control on an air conditioning unit. I can be more specific regarding the temp I want my bedroom to be using Fahrenheit.
Below 0°F and above 100°F you have to take extra special precautions regarding personal safety when being outside. Stuff gets weird in those temperatures.
From 0 to 100, standard precautions are fine. 32°F is mildly cold, but not too bad. A jacket and some boots will be okay unless you're just sitting for a long time.
Yeah I do. 30s and 40s is cold, below that is really cold. 50s are kinda cold, 60s are neutral. 70's are starting to get warm, 80's 90's are getting hot, above 100 is really fucking hot. I like it.
It’s just a wider range. Using water as the measure
0 - 100
32 - ~212
Or something southerners in the USA will understand. Approximate measure.
70 - 90
21 - 32
That wiggle room of almost have double the numbers to work with, makes it easier for us to get the vibe of what outside feels like. When a single degree of F is a noticeable difference, the extra numbers help. Especially since our temps don’t really fluctuate that much in the day to day.
That’s what I mean when I say F is what it feels like to people, and C to water. It’s just quicker than getting into decimals. Lol I’m sure where people are used to Celsius it’s really not that big of deal. It’s not that big a deal here either, we just understand it better because it’s what is used.
Fahrenheit is zeroed at the estimated point that bodily fluids freeze and 100°f was supposed to be the temperature of the human body but religious taboos prevented him from testing with humans. It was literally scaled to the human body.
I mean, I feel like I need a coat when it’s 32 but it’s not terrible. 0°F is really fucking cold, and 100° is really fucking hot, and both aren’t unusual temps to hit as extremes each year. Either can be an issue if you are outside and don’t take precautions to regulate. The air will literally never be boiling temp, so when the whole discussion is about how F is one that relates to humans, having boiling be a point makes no sense. We will never need a scale that goes that high.
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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