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this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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I'm not sure I agree with the take for farenheit. It's an arbitraty choice, and to me who grew up in a country that uses celsius, I find that far easier to understand and farenheit may as well be random numbers to me.
Whatever your grew up with will always seem more intuitive for most people. But given that I grew up with Fahrenheit, the whole “0 is cold as fuck, 100 is hot as fuck” thing works for me.
Farenheit is asking Americans how hot they feel.
Yeah, pretty much. I figured it was probably implied that I’m in the states. :)
I mean, SI units are objectively the best, and align with metric in most cases, but my brain is conditioned to accept Fahrenheit and miles per hour natively. Celsius and km/h have to go through an interpreter to convert them.
I have to say though, km/h has that “0 to 100” thing going for it that Fahrenheit does. 100 isn’t the fastest you’ll go, but it’s a typical highway speed.
Yeah after I discovered that sort of meaning for fahrenheit, it made a lot more sense to me. So no issues with fahrenheit, but imperial is still crazy to me
"I grew up with a completely different scale, so this scale makes no sense to me!"
Well no fucking shit.
I was trying to be polite as to not trigger Americans which generally happens when you critique Imperial measurements. The post makes no sense to me as it assumes that Farenheit is correct for humans to communicate temperature. The post should read.
Celcius is basically asking water and most humans how hot they feel, Kelvin is basically asking atoms how hot they feel and Farenheit is basically asking me how hot it feels because I didn't learn the others.
I know someone who knows both "natively" and celsius is much more logical to them because 1. kelvin has the same steps as celsius so for any science its much easier 2. freezing is 0 celsius so for weather(the thing you use temperature most commonly for) its really useful. Same with cooking.
"Oh but 100 Fahrenheit means 100/100 on the hot scale, it just makes intuitive sense!"
WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?? Fahrenheit lovers literally don't know how ridiculous they sound
Right? Lol
Americans just assume their experience is the universal one. They can't possibly imagine that F might be gibberish to someone who grew with Celsius or that people who grew up with Celsius can intuitive tell how hot something is in Celsius.
So humans feel cold at 0F and hot at 100F? I dont think thats true. Humans start quickly dying at something around 32F and 180F. Fahrenheit is complete nonsense. It has nothing to do with humans. And considering humans are mostly water Celsius seems a much better fit.
In aggregate this is absolutely true, though not the point anyone is making.
Humans will die of dehydration or heat stroke quite quickly at temperatures well below 180F. In fact that's far hotter than the hottest recorded temp on Earth (~135F/56.7C) (not including human-made environs like a sauna or outliers like an active volcano) so I'm frankly not sure what point your even trying to make here.
The latter statement is manifestly false. Fahrenheit was originally supposed to have 90 degrees as the average humans body temp (no clue why 90 and not 100). Due to inaccuracies in measurements of the time, It was later changed to 96 and then 98.7. Still no clue why not just 100, but the fact remains it was based on human body temps. The zero point was selected using the freezing point of a brine mixture. No real defending that one, it was pretty much arbitrary.
But we aren't just water. In any case, humans are rarely at boiling temperature. My ideal temp scale would have 0 at water's freezing point and 100 at a humans body temp.
They do? 32F is 0C, it very routinely gets below freezing in many inhabited parts of the world, including the US, and people get along just fine with some precautions. Likewise with 100F (not sure what 180F has to do with it). So yeah, 0F and 100F are around the extremes of what humans regularly experience. (though it does, of course, get hotter and colder in some places).
Same.
Not to mention that the 0-100 range thingy really depends on local conditions. I mean, depending on where you live, there are parts of the scale you'll never use.
I've never in my entire life lived in a place where the lowest temp got anything close to 0°F.
My range of values is more -5°C - 45°C, or 23F - 113F.
23F for me is already fucking cold, and 100F is nowhere near fucking hot anymore (thank the entire humanity for climate change).
So whichever scale, for me they're still just a bunch of numbers. But at least Celsius is used in "science, bitch!"
Fahrenheit was not an entirely arbitrary choice: it was defined based on two points of reference that could be measured at the time: the freezing temperature of an ammonium chloride brine is used as 0, and the best estimate for the average human body temperature is set at 96.
Over time, as the freezing point and boiling point of water at sea level atmospheric pressure proves to be more accurate reference points, the Fahrenheit scale was adjusted to provide exact conversion to Celsius.
it's not arbitrary, it's based on the uh, the freezing temperature of uh, ammonium chloride! we're all familiar with how cold that is! and, and, and, uh, the upper end is, uh ... they decided on 96. it's not arbitrary!!!
...96? How is 96 a point of reference when you are making a scale from scratch?
I think it's because 96 is divisible by 3.
96 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8
100 is divisible by 5, so what's your point?
Are you telling me they were able to measure those things, but not the boiling and freezing point of water?
Sure, let me just whip up that ammonium chloride mixture and travel somewhere where I can get it close to freezing so I can know the zero reference of that scale. What, did the just carry that NH₄Cl around for convenience?
Fahrenheit was proposed in 1724, Celsius dates back to 1742, so there wasn't that much time between the two.
Boiling point of water varies based on atmospheric pressure, water boils at a lower temperature high up in the mountains, for example, which could be why the estimated human body temperature is set as a standard, because it is consistent to reproduce as long as there are people around.
The freezing point of water is not affected by atmospheric pressure, however, it is affected by dissolved material in the water. Using a saturate solution of a salt would establish that consistency as well as lower the freezing point to create a bigger temperature range.
It makes sense that you find the system you grew up with to be more intuitive, but I grew up with fahrenheit, and I think you've misunderstood the assertion a little bit.
The older observation that this meme is riffing off of is that 100°C is the point at which water stops being sloshy and starts being steamy, whereas 100°F is the (much fuzzier) point at which humans stop moving around and start decomposing.
The Kelvin addition muddies things because 100K isn't really significant.
I grew up in Canada, but in a temperate climate area on the border with the US. Winter? Use Celsius. Summer? Use Fahrenheit. For me Celsius makes a lot more sense right around 0C. After about 15C my brain switches over and starts using Fahrenheit. I like the Fahrenheit scale from 60-100F for gauging the summer months. The Celsius scale isn't granular enough. It feels like there's a big difference between 18C and 22C versus the comparable 64F-72F. But I also was taught early a quick and dirty conversion. C to F, double and add 30. F to C subtract 30 and divide by 2.
I don't know if this'll help, but I find it interesting. Fahrenheit was designed to make creating thermometers easier. You pop your new thermometer into some ice water, call that 32, pop it in your mouth, call that 96 (human body temperature is actually 98.6, but these weren't the most precise instruments), and then you can just keep dividing the space between them in half until you get 64 degrees.
Obviously Celsius is more scientific and practical in modern times, but I think Fahrenheit is fascinating, if nothing else.
I don't understand your logic. I could just as easily change your text to say
That's some weird logic there. Why 32 and 96? From what I remember, 100 was supposed to be human body temperature (but he had it wrong), and 0 was the coldest temperature he could achieve with brine.
I group up with F, I find it far easier to understand. Celsius is slightly less random, but someone still arbitrarily decided it should be 0 to 100 for the liquid state of pure H2O at sea level. It could have been based on any other number of ranges.
I'm biased living in a °C country, but water seems like a better choice than anything else, since water is a common element that we can easily observe its phase changes and those phase changes effect how we have to interact with it on a daily basis.
Although if I was to improve it I think I'd base it on the temperature range that salmonella can grow, as that seems like it might be useful to be able to remember more easily 😂 🧑🍳
Where I live the weather varies between -5 to 95. That's pretty close to a 0-100 scale which is universally understood. It's almost like metric for the human experience.
Which countries/cultures even use Farenheit?
The United States. We basically pretend that Celsius doesn't exist in all applications of temperature. Weather, cooking... it's all in Fahrenheit.
Fahrenheit measured human body temperature (which he thought was a constant) and called that 96 degrees. We now know normal body temperature is about 98.6 degrees F, but back then, his instruments weren't as accurate. The number 96 was chosen for its divisibility. It has many divisors (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 24, 32, 48, 96), making it easier to mark subdivisions on the thermometer.
It's a scale partly defined by human body temperature, which is, I think, the point.
There are many stories on how Fahrenheit came up with the scale, the body temperature one is just one of many. It's no more true than the one where he took the Romero scale as baseline and multiplied it by 4 to get rid of the factorial.
At least personally I think the 0 to 100 scale with the average global temperature being somewhere in the mid 50s I think makes sense. Sure there's some people in warmer places and some on colder places that will say 0 and 100 farenheit aren't that bad but for people in a more temperate environment it works as a good scale. But yeah I do agree at the end of the day it is whatever you grew up with and it doesn't really matter that much. It's just that for temperature there isn't as concrete of a reason to switch to metric compared to lengths and weights.
But you are still using imperial.
I didn't choose the imperial life, thems were the rules when I got here
Of course it's all pretty much arbitrary. But I think the point was more "celius puts the scale of heat levels of water heat from 0 - 100, farenheit puts the human feelings scale of heat from 0 - 100"
Yeah it’s less human based than Celsius since humans survive equally on the sides of 0 (-40 to 40)
Ssshhh. Just give it to us. We Americans don't have much else left
A useful way to think about it (and I think what the OOP is saying) is to think about it as a scale from 0-100. Where 0 is like the coldest humans can deal with and 100 is the hottest humans can deal with. Obviously this isn't strictly true (it gets to like 115 in death valley) but as an imperfect generalization it's pretty useful.
100 F is roughly a human's body temp. (Actually 98.7 avg, but close anyway)
0 F is goddam cold. (This one's pretty arbitrary ngl)
That probably isn't very helpful.
Fwiw, Celsius isn't much better if you didn't grow up with it. 0 C is pretty cold, 100 C can give you severe scalds. The actual range the people will encounter in weather in their day-to-day lives is all over the place regardless.
Perhaps we are destined to stay divided
I'm UK based and ~0°c to ~30°c (32-86f) covers 90% of the year for celcius. It's still pretty unhelpful but I don't think that feels any harder than using Farenheit in day to day use, I agree that it's largely all arbitrary, but that's as good of a reason to just use that one that's scientifically useful too.