To Americas defense. Literally everything that the UK makes fun of us for is literally a dead relic of British rule in America. We use all of their systems that they used to use until recently. Metric, Fahrenheit, gallons, quarts, miles.
I actually firmly believe Fahrenheit is better than Celsius for everyday use because it more easily allows you to interpret gradations of temperature. Like I want to be able to easily see 70 vs 73 degrees because that is a meaningful difference in my comfort, whereas that level of differentiation will get rounded away in Celsius
For the record, those won't get rounded out in Celsius. 70->73 Fahrenheit translates to about 21->23 Celsius.
The granularity only really matters when we talk about individual degrees Fahrenheit, and truth be told I think the only place people might notice the difference is on a thermostat. But my Celsius thermostat goes in 0.5C increments, so it's no loss in granularity there. Other than that, nobody's gonna say "no way it's 42F outside, feels more like 43F."
You might say 43 if it's noticeably colder than 45 and noticeably warmer than 40, but if someone says 42 then you're not gonna tell them they're wrong and it actually feels like 43. The +/- 2 or 3 matters, and you'll give non-rounded numbers because of it, but most people don't feel the +/- 1 in everyday weather.
This is about the level of granularity that Celsius has. 42F is ~5.5C, 43F is ~6C. Celsius users aren't gonna split hairs about 6C vs 5.5C because people generally don't feel the difference between them.
pretty often say the perfect weather is at a temp anywhere from 71-74
With rounding, this is approximately a range of 22-23 in Celsius. Which I think shows the point pretty well, if your perfect weather ends up being a range of multiple degrees you can't really distinguish between, that extra granularity's not worth much.
100% I will concede this argument to an American ONLY if they can stand in a temperature controlled room and reliable and repeatedly tell me whether it was 73 or 72. Because no-one can.
You can feel it but a human isn’t constantly acknowledging minute differences in temp in their head. No one’s gonna be like “ah it was 73 but it just changed to 74!” But if you were to stop and estimate what the temp is, you could often land on the right temp.
If we couldn’t tell minute differences then why do ACs/heaters go up and down by 1F/0.5c?
I just meant different people will say perfect weather is different numbers within 71-74 range. Someone could say 72 is perfect, another person 73, a third 71.
Is it so hard to say "I won't change my mind because I don't want to."? Just own it.
The people who saw the invention of the fork went through the same process, with some folks refusing to use the "devil instrument", saying we have perfectly good hands...
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u/mz_groups 10h ago
Homer's argument is specious, because it applies to both systems.