Assuming you mean (3 ft / 2) - 12 1/16 inches, it's about 6 inches, which is probably the accuracy you need. But it's exactly 5 15/16 inches, which is also easy to do in your head. Carpenters do it all the time, and even a doctor can.

> biased towards the West and Northern hemisphere

The widest range of temperatures found in any country is the USA. In the continental US alone the temperatures easily exceed -50°C and 50°C in both directions (much colder if you include Alaska). The USA also has the largest temperature change ever recorded in a 24 hour period, at 57°C.

Merits of specific measurement systems aside, the USA is arguably the most representative single country on Earth when it comes to temperature and "how people feel". It has among the hottest, coldest, and most extreme temperature ranges ever recorded.

Celsius in a lab (or in cooking) is perfectly fine.

But as a way to describe daily weather (and thermostats) it's woefully inadequate.

The sum total of "comfortable" temperatures in celsius has to be squeezed between maybe 17 to 24 - why? you never ever use anything above 40 except when talking about people that died from a heatwave.

It's based on the freezing and boiling point of water _at sea level_ which almost none of us ever encounter (whether it's sea level, or the boiling point of water).

Fahrenheit is a much more intuitive scale (again... to describe daily weather or human temperature) - 0 - 100 better models the temperatures we experience daily, and you can intuitively separate into 10s, the way you "feel"

For example...

100s - honey, please, let's move to a cooler place.

90s - uncomfortably hot

80s - hot in the sun, not too bad at night

70s - you'd probably want a light sweater at night

60s - light sweater all the time

50s - medium sweater

40s - sweater, maybe a coat

30s - coat

20s - sweater and coat

10s - why am i living in this region?

0s - honey, please, let's move to a warmer place.

The point is that there's enough resolution to describe the actual human experience with temperature.

For everything else, celsius is perfectly adequate, totally agree.

> Its unit is the same of Kelvin, just shifted by 273

You mean shifted by 273.15 because Kelvin doesn't have tidy fixed points at the freezing and boiling point of water, unlike Celsius and Fahrenheit.

Celsius and Fahrenheit are both utilitarian systems. Kelvin is the scientific system. Arguments about the relative utility of C° and F° are subjective and neither is particularly optimal for science.

"Just shifted by 273"

To be clear, I don't have strong feelings. Obviously in a lot of science/engineering fields we use Celsius degrees a lot. But we also us Kelvin absolute scale a lot which would be ridiculous for day-to-day usage.

I am used to Fahrenheit but it is also a finer scale and a nice round number for boiling is largely irrelevant for the vast majority of purposes. Yes, knowing the freezing point of water can be important but memorizing one simple number probably isn't a huge stretch especially that the reality differs based on a number of factors. Arguably, knowing that 0 degrees F means fricking cold is sort of a higher latitudes bias but I'm not sure the degree to which Celsius simplifies.

Celsius isn't granular enough. Many digital thermostats will even add decimal places if you switch to Celsius mode that aren't present in Fahrenheit.

Secondly, the highest temperature ever recorded outdoors was 56.7˚C. So no matter where you are, from that to 99 is wasted.

I dunno I’m in a room and guessed that the temperature was 72°F and sure enough it’s 72° in here.

I put more details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49635310

I do concede the overwhelming majority of people that argue that one is better than the other (both ways) are basically just arguing "the thing I grew up with is better" - because when you probe further, there isn't really any supporting argument, just "I understand this system better because I grew up with it" but it's equally vacuous coming from people who grew up with Celsius.

I came to the US when I was 12, so I grew up with Celsius but didn't pay attention to the weather as a young child. But still, I've lived in both systems.

The only connection off the top of my head is that mL of water increases by 1˚C if heated with 1 calorie. Which is annoying because 1 Calorie is 1000 calories.

Because in Celsius, 0 lets you know the water outside will likely be frozen and 100 lets you know the water in your pot is likely boiling. This is utterly useless information.

It is nowhere near as useful day to day as knowing 0°F means a very specific saltwater brine mixture will likely be frozen, and 90°F is kind of as hot as your insides. Or 96. Or 98.6 as the third revision decided.

I find that increments of 1C are too small to be useful in daily life but increments of 5C are quite big. As a result, you can't really round degrees Celsius to a multiple of 5 whereas full precision integer temperatures are too precise. So for example 15C and 17C feel like different temperatures, but each 1C step from 15C to 16C to 17C is not really useful.

In contrast, it's very reasonable to round temperature to increments of 5 degrees Fahrenheit. So for example 58F and 60F are basically the same temperature as far as my perception is concerned.

1990s LCD HVAC thermostats that didn’t go down to half degrees had better precision when set to °F vs °C.

There's also this famous comparison chart meme: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/t0lnjt/fahr...

...making the point that Fahrenheit's 0-100 range is better suited to normal day to day measurements than 0-100 Celsius. The numbers that feel easiest to communicate with are scaled nicely relative to the range of temperatures you most often want to communicate about.