
In Defense of Fahrenheit - johnmyleswhite
http://lethalletham.com/posts/fahrenheit.html
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cyberferret
The author argues against Celsius because it 'feels' wrong? Well, I've grown
up with Celsius all my life, and Farenheit just 'feels' wrong to me.

Everything is relative. The author deems 35 deg C as being "grossly hot", but
that is just the average temperature to me where I live. He calls 0 degrees
not even cold, but for me, that is almost unbearably cold.

Having a datum of 0 for freezing makes sense, especially for professions like
flying (I used to be a pilot). Knowing that you are close to a point when
water will turn from liquid to solid can be life saving, and I have no
problems with using negatives to determine HOW solid.

~~~
classichasclass
It's not so much 0 that's the problem with Centigrade for weather purposes,
it's the 100. 100 F is rather warm. 100 C is DEAD.

I don't have a problem with Centigrade for other stuff, but I think Fahrenheit
captures the human ambient environment range better.

Disclaimer: American, where I remember the vain national attempt at
metrication as a young child and still have to convert everything mentally
when visiting my Australian in-laws

~~~
seszett
But surely Americans use temperature for cooking too and not just for weather,
and then 100°C is boiling which is also at least somewhat useful to know.

~~~
ralph84
When cooking I have never needed to know what temperature boiling water is.
The fact that it's boiling is enough. Never mind that water only boils at
100°C at sea level and most Americans don't live at sea level.

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username444
The argument that 0-100 being an intuitive and useful daily use scale is
actually a good one.

However, everything else falls flat.

Nobody actually uses decimals with celcius, because nobody can tell the
difference between 8.2 degrees and 8.7 degrees. It's just 8 and 9.

Zero being freezing is a critical number to know, because that's when you can
get black ice (+/\- wind-chill) and snow.

Knowing that 35 is grossly hot is no more difficult than knowing -32 is
freezing.

Celcius has simple ranges: Below 0: it's freezing, bundle up 0-10: it's cold
outside, wear a jacket 10-20: good for physical activity, sweater and light
jacket required 20-30: it's comfortable outside 30+: stay in the shade

That said, all our appliances (oven, barbecue) use Fahrenheit and I have no
idea what temperature to cook at in celcius.

~~~
Symbiote
> That said, all our appliances (oven, barbecue) use Fahrenheit and I have no
> idea what temperature to cook at in celcius.

It surprised me when we recruited a developer from Canada, and on his second
day at work he asked what temperature he should have set the oven to. I
learned that Canada has appliances labelled in "American".

180°C is the most common oven temperature required, outside 160-200°C is
unusual for normal cooking.

~~~
jld
Ive always thought ovens could do fine with a five setting control.

Warming (180-200F)/90C

Low 300F/150C

Med 350F/180C

High 400F/200C

Broil

~~~
dagw
A High of 400/200 seems quite low. I'd definitely want a Very High of ~230-250
as well.

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Jedd
The author lists the importance of a global temperature scale, then shows a
map of North America overlaid with some dots.

> For many people that's Celsius, but for many others it's Fahrenheit.

That second 'many' is disingenuous. For about 90% of the planet's population
it's Celsius, and for about 10% it's Fahrenheit.

Author also has some pretty arbitrary and bewildering requirements, including
wanting a scale of 0 to 100, yet also avoiding any 3-digit numbers.

Any claims about 'intuition' are misguided -- Celsius makes more sense because
a) most people use it, and b) it maps onto the rest of the SI units.

That I happen to feel comfortable at a somewhat arbitrary 21 (c) is not a
sufficient or satisfactory reason for other people to let go of deprecated
temperature scales.

~~~
acqq
> For about 90% of the planet's population it's Celsius, and for about 10%
> it's Fahrenheit.

I thought only the US and a few very small countries use Fahrenheit, which is
not more than 5% of the world population?

~~~
Freak_NL
A quick glance at the numbers on Wikipedia puts it a bit under 5%, the bulk of
which is inhabitants of the US, but I did leave out the Bahamas for
convenience.

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0n34n7
Celsius is much more useful than stipulated here. For example, it takes 1J
(Joule) to heat 1g (which is also 1ml) of pure water 1 degree Celsius.

The metric system is all weighted and related from temperature to mass to
distance. This is what makes it so useful for Science, and frankly, every day
use.

~~~
kylec
Please provide an example where you need to convert between Joules, grams, and
Celsius in "every day use"

~~~
fanf2
Estimating how long it will take the kettle to boil :-)

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dosshell
> The truth is, outside of a chemistry lab I don't care that much about the
> freezing and boiling points of water

What? Freezing point of water is one of the most important things with
temperature outside. Will it snow or rain? Will the lake freeze or melt? Will
the road be slippery or not. That is like... the most important thing about
temperature and outside.

However, I agree that the boiling temperature of water is not much used
outside in a daily life.

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IgorPartola
Or we could just stop this Freedom Units bullshit and be like normal people.
It feels wrong is not a reason to keep doing the stupid thing.

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KaiserPro
There is a desperate attempt by some news papers in the UK to bring back
Fahrenheit, The problem being only those over 40 really knows what it means to
have a 85f "scorcher"

its only being done as a symbol of "freedom" from the EU loving french.

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Thorrez
>The truth is, outside of a chemistry lab I don't care that much about the
freezing and boiling points of water

Even in a chemistry lab, Celsius isn't that great, it's Kelvin that actually
has an advantage. And Rankine would be about as good.

~~~
Tepix
I care very much about the freezing point of water outside. It means ice on
the roads.

~~~
Thorrez
My point was about in the chemistry lab, not outside.

~~~
Tepix
I don't work in a chemistry lab. But why is the boiling point of water not
important there?

~~~
Thorrez
It is important, but more important is having absolute 0, which Celsius
doesn't have.

The other problem with Celsius and the boiling point is that the boiling point
changes depending on air pressure, which changes depending on elevation. So
it's not always 100°C.

------
lukeschlather
Celsius is pretty easy to wrap my head around, even though I think in
Fahrenheit. I think my main argument against Fahrenheit is when I'm cooking
and look up food safety information I usually convert to Celsius in my head
because I have a pretty intuitive sense of temperatures as a percentage of the
boiling point of water but Fahrenheit I really don't. I also don't imagine
anyone using Celsius as their "native language" routinely converts to
Fahrenheit in their head just to get a better understanding of what a
temperature means.

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Tepix
In practice a difference of 1 degree celsius is slightly noticeable. But given
that 1 degree Fahrenheit is only 5/9 degree celsius, do you really care if
it‘s 74 or 75F outside?

~~~
kylec
I can definitely feel the difference between when I set my car to 72F vs 73F
(or any pairing of consecutive degrees F)

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hpaavola
For everyday use the unit does not matter at all. We could drop numbers
completely and just say it's freezing, cold, chilly, ok, warm and hot and be
done with it. For cooking we could just use simmer, boil, stew and bake.

But Celsius interacts with other units nicely. So when you actually need some
precision, Celsius works nicely. Kelvin is of course the one to choose when
talking about scientific matters, but Celsius works well enough for everyday
things and when precision is needed.

------
DonHopkins
So why is the metric system based on water, instead of liquid hydrogen? Why
not use the most common essential element, instead of some arbitrary compound?

Metric seems pretty anthropocentrist to me, since humans are 50-60% water,
while the universe is 75% hydrogen.

In the Universal Hydrogen Metric system, 0 °H would be -259.2 °C, and 100 °H
would be −252.87 °C.

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sys_64738
I think there are a lot of similarities between F and C as there are with the
use of military time. In the US we use AM/PM for civilian use but in England
you see them use military time for things like TV show times, and train/bus
times. It all seems very regimental.

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ericd
I think a lot of people here are missing the most important point, which is
that Fahrenheit roughly maps 0-100 to the most common temperature ranges
experienced in daily weather, which is by far the most frequent use of
temperature for most people.

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burfog
Rankine is even better. (like Fahrenheit plus 459.67°)

You get the same step size as Fahrenheit, so you can adjust your house
temperature without a decimal. (some of us care) It is also good enough for
industrial food processing without that decimal, for example in canneries.

You get a correct zero. Fahrenheit and Celsius are just wrong. Think about the
meaning of something like "twice as hot", which is a thing people say. With a
correct zero, there is no need for negatives unless you are doing quantum
physics research. If you aren't convinced, imagine we had a weight scale that
used 0 for a very small adult and 100 for a very large adult.

All the normal temperatures people deal with, including oven temperatures, are
exactly 3 digits. The 3-digit numbers 100 to 999 are like Fahrenheit from
-359.67° to 539.33°.

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jim-jim-jim
I think alternative measurements are cute and I encourage their usage simply
because they make epic reddit science guys so irrationally mad.

The year is Reiwa 1, it's 51° F out, and I weigh 9.92 stone. Deal with it.

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enriquto
LOL. Do people really still use fahrenheit over there?

~~~
dragonshed
More imperial entanglements than you can possibly imagine.

~~~
fanf2
American customary units are not the same as imperial units. The British
imperial reform in the early 1800s altered the volume measures, whereas the US
continued using the Queen Anne wine gallon and the Winchester grain bushel.

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fxj
tldr; Fahrenheit maps the subjective feeling of very cold to very hot to a
scale from 0 to 100.

Celsius on the other hand gives you additional information about the state of
water at this temperature (0C frozen, 100C boiling).

The author didnt talk about the correct physical unit, Kelvin, which tells you
about the possibitiy of the temperature (no Kelvin values below 0).

------
williadc
Fahrenheit seems to be a good scale for weather. It would be a pretty simple
matter to make a human friendly scale based on Celsius - halve the unit.
Freezing is zero degrees, and boiling is 200 degrees. I call this unit
Celinheit:

Here's how that looks when compared with Fahrenheit:

    
    
      0F == -35 Ch
     10F == -24 Ch
     20F == -13 Ch
     32F ==   0 Ch
     40F ==   9 Ch
     50F ==  20 Ch
     60F ==  32 Ch
     70F ==  42 Ch
     80F ==  53 Ch
     90F ==  64 Ch

100F == 76 Ch 110F == 86 Ch

The advantages of this system:

* 40-60 would be considered about ideal.

* Each 10 degree "band" has a feeling, similar to Fahrenheit.

* Converting to metric would be really easy.

Disadvantages:

* [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

~~~
Ndymium
> The advantages of this system: > > * 40-60 would be considered about ideal.

Why would that be an advantage? I consider about 20–25°C ideal. Why is it
worse than some other range?

> * Each 10 degree "band" has a feeling, similar to Fahrenheit.

As a user of the celsius scale, each 10 degree "band" already has a feeling to
me.

