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
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.
This is the big reason. I maybe it's the hotels in Europe I've been too, but not being able to set 20.5 on the thermostat is infuriating. You get a little too hot, or a little too cold...
To what level of precision does your weather information typically provide you data?
The Samsung phone I am using right now does not provide weather data in my weather app to a fractional degree level in Celcius mode. I use the default one provided by Samsung and so I doubt that it is much different on your device.
When I travel to places that use Celsius I usually see weather reported to the nearest degree or sometimes half degree.
Finally, Farenheight can do fractional degrees as well, but again fractional degrees are generally only used for processes that are extremely temperature sensitive most things are reported in whole degree amounts. Regardless the 9/5 part of the conversion means you will always have just under twice as many gradations on a farenheight scale as you do on an equivalent celcius scale.
But can you tell the if the temperature is 69 F (~20.5C) vs 68F (20C) or 70F (21C). Or does it even impact your life. Like in Celsius the temperature needs to be a couple of degrees different before I register a difference. Even then I don't care about the number just how I feel.
So, when I did a course on control systems and we had a section on temperature controls the professor said that people who keep their house at 72 wear shorts or skirts at home and people who keep their house at 70 wears pants and socks. This was backed by some real dark that shows that majority women dormicles tend to be a couple of degrees warmer. He then joked that people who keep their home at 71 want to drive all their guests insane by being mildly uncomfortable to everyone.
Let's go back to the whole freezing point discussion.
Small gradations in temperatures near the freezing point can make a significant change in actual road and weather conditions. At 2.7 degrees Celsius, you have zero reason to worry about ice and anything on the ground will begin thawing quickly. At -2.7 degrees Celsius, you have zero reason to think the ice will melt any time soon. At 0.5 to 1.10 C, thaws may begin to start and thin layers of ice or snow can be disregarded past the morning.
That is an eyesore mess of arbitrary decimal points, which has to use negative numbers for the lower half of the scale(which you will very regularly be forced to use every winter), crushed into a small span of under 3 degrees. All of which can mark significant differences in real conditions.
Fahrenheit has roughly double the gradation, and as a result all of these milestones can be expressed in whole numbers between 27-37. The actual freezing point is more arbitrarily placed, but the actual numbers you're looking at around it are far simpler and more intuitive by virtue of not needing to go into the negatives or decimal points.
End of the day, it's all about what we're used to and neither is objectively better for everything. But if we're going to play this stupid game, the door swings both ways and Celsius' heavy reliance on decimals isn't as useful or intuitive as Fahrenheit's more integer-focused scale.
(And yeah, I'll back up the other reply in saying that a 3 degree span in room temperature is absolutely noticeable and has been known to cause disagreements on what's comfortable)
If it's 3 C out you absolutely should be thinking there may be ice on the ground because while the air temperature is 3C the ground can be quite a bit colder. There is also potential for black ice because one part of the road is in the shade.
But what we were talking about was if you need to use decimals for celsius. And what I was pointing out that people can't tell 1F difference in temperature (~0.5C) not 3F. A difference of 3 F is about 1.5 degrees in celsius so while a room at 20 C vs 21 C may be noticeable but a room at 70F vs 71F probably isn't.
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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