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| ▲ | kccqzy 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| That’s a biased view that leads to a scale only convenient for people living in higher latitudes. Now talk to someone living near the equator like Singapore, and 0F is unimaginably cold (even 40F is basically unheard of), and 100F is very hot but not extraordinarily so. Then you talk to someone living close to the arctic and the converse is true. All this talk about 0F to 100F being frequently encountered probably reveals your local climate conditions more than it helps define a useful global standard for all humans. We should accept that humans live in very diverse conditions and such a scale won’t be useful for all. |
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| ▲ | cyral 24 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Now I'm imagining some kind of timezone-like temperature unit that varies around the world, and a "100 things programmers should know about ___" post about all the intricacies and special cases. |
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| ▲ | al_borland an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This has always been my primary argument in favor of Fahrenheit. It makes sense for humans, which is all a majority of the population really cares about. In addition, it's more granular. Sometimes turning the thermostat up or down by 1C could be too much, where 1F is just right. In science and math, I can see where having round numbers for commonly used temperatures would be useful, but if 0C and 100C are the only places that happens, it's not that hard to memorize 2 numbers. |
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| ▲ | Timpanzee 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | You only think it makes sense for humans because it makes sense for you, where you live the same way you feel changing a thermostat by 1F is perfect but 1C is too much: that’s true for you, not universally. Fahrenheit functionally requires you to be biased in order for it to seem like a good system. | | |
| ▲ | al_borland a minute ago | parent [-] | | It provides greater granularity in the range of human comfort, without descending into decimals. How is that not more useful for day-to-day human usage? 0F is cold, 100F is hot. I experience both of these temperatures outside where I live every year. -20C to -40C seems much more arbitrary as a way to measure the zone humans mostly live in. I would wager that the outdoor and room temperature are an overwhelming majority of human use for temperature. It seems like it would make sense to optimize for how temperature is more commonly used at a population level. I would say those who see Celsius as a good system are also biased, because they grew up with it and it’s what they’re used to. |
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| ▲ | vagrantJin 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Celcius is pretty intuitive actually. It takes atmospheric pressure into account, Water is pretty abundant on the surface of the planet, and life kinda depends on it. It's a remarkable substance and quite stable. I dont think theres another substance where we can see all three phases with kitchen appliances and still consume it. Equally good for bathing and drinking. I need steam to clean clothes and cook my food. Using water as a benchmark for how we measure temperature is remarkably useful. | | |
| ▲ | al_borland 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | With all of those examples, the actual temperature doesn’t really matter. For drinking and bathing, people go by feel. In the kitchen, the freezer makes water freeze, and the stovetop will make it boil into steam, but exact temperatures aren’t really relevant here either. The same goes for ironing clothes, the iron just does it. When I think about where explicit temperatures are needed in the home, the oven and thermostat are the two things that come to mind. Water is pretty irrelevant for both of those. For cooking or frying someone may monitor meat or oil temps, but those aren’t water. A hot tub might have an actual temp on it, but those tend to be around 100F, not 100C, as they are meant for humans, not boiling. Water is an amazing liquid, but I still struggle to see how measuring all our temperatures based on it makes sense. |
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| ▲ | wongarsu 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Celsius maps nicely to the temperatures observed in a typical Finnish sauna. 100C is among the highest typical sauna temperatures (very relaxing in dry air), and afterwards you cool off with water around 0C Also, having 100C as water temp for black tee and 80 for green tee is nice to remember |
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| ▲ | Paracompact 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| OF will still kill you faster than 100F, and most folks aren't comfortable at 50F. It inspires the following idea: A nonlinear scale where ~72F is 0, and +X represents the same level of heat discomfort as -X represents cold discomfort. |
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| ▲ | clickety_clack an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I actually came around to Fahrenheit for the exact same reason. 0°F and 100°F are kind of the top and bottom of the temperature range I’m going to be experiencing and anything outside that is waaay too hot or cold. In Celsius a large portion of people have to flip to negative numbers regularly during the normal year, and everything between 45°C and 100°C is completely unused. |
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| ▲ | mmooss 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > 0°F and 100°F are kind of the top and bottom of the temperature range I’m going to be experiencing and anything outside that is waaay too hot or cold. Food, saunas, the weather, a fever, and much more are often over 100F. |
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| ▲ | ajmurmann 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This makes sense if weather is the main focus. For things like cooking Celsius is great though. |
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| ▲ | 0cf8612b2e1e an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I am failing to understand why there would be a distinction. They all seem arbitrary set points you learn. 450F vs 230C does not feel like anything gets easier there. Maybe in some highly technical baking there are some nice deltas that appear? | |
| ▲ | clickety_clack an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Aren’t you just remembering specific numbers though? Unless you’re trying to boil water unseen so that you can only see a thermometer, the specific 100°C mark isn't that useful. |
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| ▲ | Timpanzee 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Except 0F being “really cold” and 100F being “really hot” is a personal bias of yours based on where you’ve lived. It’s not true for everyone or everywhere. And even if it were true, it still wouldn’t work. 100F in a dry environment is nice while, in a humid environment, 100F is awful. Same for 0F, a dry and static 0F is fine while a wet and windy 0F is killer. |
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| ▲ | TylerE 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Also for things like hvac temps Celsius is rather too coarse where as 1F is right around the perceivable difference. |
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| ▲ | SketchySeaBeast an hour ago | parent [-] | | There's nothing stopping the use of decimal points for Celsius. Though there's also nothing stopping decimal points in Fahrenheit, the rare instance where an imperial sub-unit doesn't make things go fucky. |
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