This is why Celsius is the only SI unit that isn’t just wholly better than its imperial counterpart. Both F and C are fairly arbitrary, but in my view F has the slight edge by giving numbers 0-100 in most weather conditions across earth.
Kelvin is the SI unit.
Anyway also for the weather Celsius is clearer: Below 0 = snow, above 0 = rain. And Celsius at least has fixed points that can be recreated - if all thermometers and data on scales were lost we could easily recreate °C, but not °F.
Ah well I should have said metric measurement then. It is part of the metric system, yes?
If you can’t remember the number 32 then I guess. Personally I think it’s pretty bizarre to have negative temperatures all the time but whatever floats your boat.
Regarding losing all thermometers and data… if you lost the definition of Celsius there would be no way to recreate it. This seems maybe more likely then your scenario.
No seriously what is significant about 0F? I live in a place that sees a lot of negative F too.
It’s so arbitrary. If it was 0 at freezing water and 100 at human body temp I’d understand it but no, it’s literally nothing significant in people’s lives. It has no tangible anchor.
0°F is the coldest night Mister Fahrenheit has ever witnessed, thinking it couldn’t become any colder than this.
100°F is Mister Fahrenheit’s slightly feverish body temperature.
???
PS: Pretty much all other countries also had their own measurement systems and simply switched to metric because it made sense. I’m glad we did, and that pretty much all others did too.
PPS: I’d also be up for revamping time measurement, why can’t we have 10h a day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute? 100.000 seconds in total per day, currently we have 86.400 so a second would only become slightly shorter.
The French tried to implement that in the First Republic, together with 12 months à 30 days per year, 3 weeks à 10 days per month and 5 (6) extra days at the end of the year to make it work (from Christmas to New Year, how thematic!)
It failed because the French were fearing they’d have to work more (if they’d also only have 2 days off per 10d instead of per 7d). One of the biggest tragedies in French history. Without the week reform the time reform might’ve succeeded.
Changing the length of a second would be so insanely difficult that it’s probably isn’t worth attempting. Pretty mush every other standard unit has the second in there somewhere at some point, so changing that would mean spending decades of changing math on so many things. That story about the Mars probe that slammed into the planet because someone screwed up the units? That would be happening everywhere all the time.
In the end you’re always going to have weirdness with time because the orbit of the Earth around the sun isn’t going to be divided evenly by the rotation of the Earth. Whatever you do is going to come out janky, so why spend all the time and effort to change from our current jankiness to a different janky system? We’d have to put a lot of time and effort into solving the new problems caused by the new jankiness. Then someone else will probably propose some new janky system to replace that system, and it’s a never ending frustration because we’ll never have a perfect system because ultimately orbital mechanics don’t divide into even numbers.
0 as the freezing point of water isn’t arbitrary though, and neither is boiling.
They’re both very useful reference points since water is universally available and you can easily tell when it freezes and boils, it makes it comparatively trivial and accessible to create your own thermometer which is likely to at least generally agree with someone else’s.
this is the one aspect where i kind of prefer imperial measurements for distance, basing measurements on the human body means everyone has easy access to a reference that is likely to be not too tremendously wrong.
Obviously not super relevant these days, but back in the day it was a pretty neat feature. Like fuck, it wasn’t that long ago that the meter and the kilogram were still defined by a SINGLE specific object kept in a climate controlled vault.
I’ve always hated this justification of Fahrenheit. For it to be a good argument, 50 °F would need to be the ideal comfortable temperature. But instead 50 is really fucking cold. 100 just isn’t as hot as 0 is cold.
PSI
0 100
┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫
Dead Potentially survivable
Vs
Atm
0 100
┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫
Dead Dead
Vs
kPa
0 100
┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫
Dead Totally Fine
See that Celsius graph is precisely the nonsense I’m trying to point out. 0 ℃ isn’t “fairly cold outside”. It’s literally the definition of freezing cold. 0 ℉ is “dead” if you’re not wearing quite heavy clothing. 0 ℃ is “really cold outside” and still understating things.
0 ℃ isn’t “fairly cold outside”. It’s literally the definition of freezing cold.
…for water. At 1 atmosphere of pressure. Not taking into account salinity.
0 ℉ is “dead” if you’re not wearing quite heavy clothing.
Lots of temperatures on both ends of the spectrum are “dead” without proper attire, regardless of what unit of measurement is used.
0 ℃ is “really cold outside” and still understating things.
I think there’s a bit of a reference frame issue here.
Zero C is normal winter temperature for a lot of people. For some, it’s downright balmy. If it’s sunny, I won’t need more than a fleece and jeans. Working outside, I’ll probably ditch the sleeves after a while.
Going off of your instance, I’m guessing you’re in Australia. Since I don’t know where, I grabbed a large southern city (Melbourne), and looked up the record holder for coldest temperature (Charlotte Pass). All temps in Celsius:
Melbourne:
Charlotte Pass:
For comparison, here’s a city near me (New York), and a random town I picked from a map in northern Minnesota (known for being cold in the winter).
New York:
Roseau:
That… is a stark difference. Where you live makes a huge impact on what feels “normal.” 0 C is no big deal here. It’s just “cold.” Minnesota in January? “What a nice day!” That’s not nonsense, it’s different perspectives.
Is Fahrenheit arbitrary and outdated? Yes. Is Celsius arbitrary? Also yes. There’s nothing special about the freezing and boiling points of water at 1atm. But that’s the (basis behind the) current scientific standard. Is it ridiculous that the US still uses Fahrenheit? Yes. Why? I don’t run the place, I just live here.
Does any of this matter in the day to day of normal people? No. Will people keep arguing about it? Absolutely.
Chilly outside / late autumn / early spring days (~10°C) are 50°F
Cool outside / warm winter days (~0°C) are 32°F
Cold outside / usual winter days (-10°C) are ~15°F
Winter nights (bit below -20°C) are ~ -10°F
Fahrenheit users keep saying how strange it is to have negative temperatures when using °C, but it’s just the same in Fahrenheit except the whole scale makes less sense since it’s using fully arbitrary, not recreatable points for 0 and 100.
I mean, I deliberately avoided using terms like “hot summer days” and “usual winter day” because that’s far more dependent on where you are. Where I am it’s:
Really hot summer days (35 ℃)
Usual summer days (30 ℃)
Room temperature (24 ℃)
Spring / autumn days (25 ℃)
Chilly outside (18 ℃)
Cold outside / usual winter days (15 ℃)
Winter nights (10 ℃)
So I used words that are about the experience of a person in those temperatures in comfortable light clothing, rather than times of year. And obviously there’s some subjectivity there, with some people being more comfortable in cold temperatures than others. But still, we’re talking about the comfortable mid point varying from mid 20s to high 10s. There’s no reasonable world in which 50 ℉ (10 ℃) is the midpoint.
how is fahrenheit 1-100 for humans? 100 i can sorta see, most people have a body temp around ~37°C (though still, there’s about 1°C of variance…), but 0°F is very very cold and not exactly a temperature that many people encounter on a daily basis.
i certainly cannot think of anything more relevant to humans than the freezing and boiling points of water, most people encounter them often and it’s very easy to see when water starts freezing or boiling.
If you see ice outside you know the temp is below 0°C, when the water in your pot is boiling you know it’s at 100°C, it’s super fucking easy.
But the reference points for fahrenheit cannot intuitively be measured, 0°F has no obvious indicator, and 100°F can at best be vaguely inferred based on the air temps we can do work in, and even then you can really only reliably infer something like 30°C because that’s generally when humans start feeling like it’s too warm to do significant amounts of labour.
This is why Celsius is the only SI unit that isn’t just wholly better than its imperial counterpart. Both F and C are fairly arbitrary, but in my view F has the slight edge by giving numbers 0-100 in most weather conditions across earth.
Kelvin is the SI unit. Anyway also for the weather Celsius is clearer: Below 0 = snow, above 0 = rain. And Celsius at least has fixed points that can be recreated - if all thermometers and data on scales were lost we could easily recreate °C, but not °F.
Ah well I should have said metric measurement then. It is part of the metric system, yes?
If you can’t remember the number 32 then I guess. Personally I think it’s pretty bizarre to have negative temperatures all the time but whatever floats your boat.
Regarding losing all thermometers and data… if you lost the definition of Celsius there would be no way to recreate it. This seems maybe more likely then your scenario.
No seriously what is significant about 0F? I live in a place that sees a lot of negative F too.
It’s so arbitrary. If it was 0 at freezing water and 100 at human body temp I’d understand it but no, it’s literally nothing significant in people’s lives. It has no tangible anchor.
It’s purely emotion keeping it around.
0°F is the coldest night Mister Fahrenheit has ever witnessed, thinking it couldn’t become any colder than this.
100°F is Mister Fahrenheit’s slightly feverish body temperature.
???
PS: Pretty much all other countries also had their own measurement systems and simply switched to metric because it made sense. I’m glad we did, and that pretty much all others did too.
PPS: I’d also be up for revamping time measurement, why can’t we have 10h a day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute? 100.000 seconds in total per day, currently we have 86.400 so a second would only become slightly shorter.
The French tried to implement that in the First Republic, together with 12 months à 30 days per year, 3 weeks à 10 days per month and 5 (6) extra days at the end of the year to make it work (from Christmas to New Year, how thematic!)
It failed because the French were fearing they’d have to work more (if they’d also only have 2 days off per 10d instead of per 7d). One of the biggest tragedies in French history. Without the week reform the time reform might’ve succeeded.
Changing the length of a second would be so insanely difficult that it’s probably isn’t worth attempting. Pretty mush every other standard unit has the second in there somewhere at some point, so changing that would mean spending decades of changing math on so many things. That story about the Mars probe that slammed into the planet because someone screwed up the units? That would be happening everywhere all the time.
In the end you’re always going to have weirdness with time because the orbit of the Earth around the sun isn’t going to be divided evenly by the rotation of the Earth. Whatever you do is going to come out janky, so why spend all the time and effort to change from our current jankiness to a different janky system? We’d have to put a lot of time and effort into solving the new problems caused by the new jankiness. Then someone else will probably propose some new janky system to replace that system, and it’s a never ending frustration because we’ll never have a perfect system because ultimately orbital mechanics don’t divide into even numbers.
Nothing. It’s equally arbitrary as setting 0 to be the freezing point of water.
But it covers the weather for the vast majority of people, the vast majority of time, better than Celsius does. That’s what I mean.
If you want to remove sentimentality from your temperature then use Kelvin but Celsius is just as arbitrary and sentimental as Fahrenheit is.
0 as the freezing point of water isn’t arbitrary though, and neither is boiling.
They’re both very useful reference points since water is universally available and you can easily tell when it freezes and boils, it makes it comparatively trivial and accessible to create your own thermometer which is likely to at least generally agree with someone else’s.
this is the one aspect where i kind of prefer imperial measurements for distance, basing measurements on the human body means everyone has easy access to a reference that is likely to be not too tremendously wrong.
Obviously not super relevant these days, but back in the day it was a pretty neat feature. Like fuck, it wasn’t that long ago that the meter and the kilogram were still defined by a SINGLE specific object kept in a climate controlled vault.
Yep Celsius is 1-100 for water and Fahrenheit is 1-100 for humans
I’ve always hated this justification of Fahrenheit. For it to be a good argument, 50 °F would need to be the ideal comfortable temperature. But instead 50 is really fucking cold. 100 just isn’t as hot as 0 is cold.
I think it depends on the person which is the problem, for me 50 isn’t that cold but 100 is completely unbearable
Yeah, 50 F is chilly.
PSI 0 100 ┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫ Dead Potentially survivable Vs Atm 0 100 ┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫ Dead Dead Vs kPa 0 100 ┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫ Dead Totally FineSee that Celsius graph is precisely the nonsense I’m trying to point out. 0 ℃ isn’t “fairly cold outside”. It’s literally the definition of freezing cold. 0 ℉ is “dead” if you’re not wearing quite heavy clothing. 0 ℃ is “really cold outside” and still understating things.
…for water. At 1 atmosphere of pressure. Not taking into account salinity.
Lots of temperatures on both ends of the spectrum are “dead” without proper attire, regardless of what unit of measurement is used.
I think there’s a bit of a reference frame issue here.
Zero C is normal winter temperature for a lot of people. For some, it’s downright balmy. If it’s sunny, I won’t need more than a fleece and jeans. Working outside, I’ll probably ditch the sleeves after a while.
Going off of your instance, I’m guessing you’re in Australia. Since I don’t know where, I grabbed a large southern city (Melbourne), and looked up the record holder for coldest temperature (Charlotte Pass). All temps in Celsius:
Melbourne:
Charlotte Pass:
For comparison, here’s a city near me (New York), and a random town I picked from a map in northern Minnesota (known for being cold in the winter).
New York:
Roseau:
That… is a stark difference. Where you live makes a huge impact on what feels “normal.” 0 C is no big deal here. It’s just “cold.” Minnesota in January? “What a nice day!” That’s not nonsense, it’s different perspectives.
Is Fahrenheit arbitrary and outdated? Yes. Is Celsius arbitrary? Also yes. There’s nothing special about the freezing and boiling points of water at 1atm. But that’s the (basis behind the) current scientific standard. Is it ridiculous that the US still uses Fahrenheit? Yes. Why? I don’t run the place, I just live here.
Does any of this matter in the day to day of normal people? No. Will people keep arguing about it? Absolutely.
Fully agree with you. How does that make sense:
Really hot summer days (30°C) are 86°F
Usual summer days (25°C) are 77°F
Room temperature is ~70°F
Spring / autumn days (20°C) are 68°F
Chilly outside / late autumn / early spring days (~10°C) are 50°F
Cool outside / warm winter days (~0°C) are 32°F
Cold outside / usual winter days (-10°C) are ~15°F
Winter nights (bit below -20°C) are ~ -10°F
Fahrenheit users keep saying how strange it is to have negative temperatures when using °C, but it’s just the same in Fahrenheit except the whole scale makes less sense since it’s using fully arbitrary, not recreatable points for 0 and 100.
I mean, I deliberately avoided using terms like “hot summer days” and “usual winter day” because that’s far more dependent on where you are. Where I am it’s:
So I used words that are about the experience of a person in those temperatures in comfortable light clothing, rather than times of year. And obviously there’s some subjectivity there, with some people being more comfortable in cold temperatures than others. But still, we’re talking about the comfortable mid point varying from mid 20s to high 10s. There’s no reasonable world in which 50 ℉ (10 ℃) is the midpoint.
Yes, it doesn’t matter which example you take, Fahrenheit never makes sense imo.
Only if you grow up with it lol. Fahrenheit makes no sense to me
how is fahrenheit 1-100 for humans? 100 i can sorta see, most people have a body temp around ~37°C (though still, there’s about 1°C of variance…), but 0°F is very very cold and not exactly a temperature that many people encounter on a daily basis.
i certainly cannot think of anything more relevant to humans than the freezing and boiling points of water, most people encounter them often and it’s very easy to see when water starts freezing or boiling.
If you see ice outside you know the temp is below 0°C, when the water in your pot is boiling you know it’s at 100°C, it’s super fucking easy.
But the reference points for fahrenheit cannot intuitively be measured, 0°F has no obvious indicator, and 100°F can at best be vaguely inferred based on the air temps we can do work in, and even then you can really only reliably infer something like 30°C because that’s generally when humans start feeling like it’s too warm to do significant amounts of labour.