Comment on Everyday, as an American
businessfish@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months agoexactly! whenever anyone says imperial units are “more intuitive” and better reflect “how it feels to humans”, i can only think: obviously, you grew up with it. that’s what you know.
no matter what measurement system you were raised on, it will feel intuitive to you and reflect how you as a human experience the world because you are used to measuring things in those units. having said that, i’d much rather we used metric if for nothing else than the ease of unit conversion.
samus12345@lemmy.world 6 months ago
When it comes to Fahrenheit, there is some merit to the idea - 0 to 30 is a small scale compared to 0 to 100. The opposite is true of kilometers and miles - kilometers is more refined since each unit is a shorter distance.
pumpkinseedoil@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
The fixed points (for 0 and 100) are much more logical though and can be used to accurately recreate the scale anywhere (well… it’ll be slightly off on higher altitude since boiling temperature changes but it’s still not far off).
0°C = water freezes (= it’s snowing)
100°C = water boils
meanwhile:
0°F = the coldest night Mr Fahrenheit experienced, thinking it couldn’t get any colder than that
100°F = Mr Fahrenheit’s own body temperature (he had a slight fever apparently)
How would you recreate that??
samus12345@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The temperature of water boiling is not a useful metric when it comes to the weather, as it’s extremely far outside of where humans can live. Science uses Celcius standard, and that seems to work fine, but I see no reason why we should use it for the weather.
Allero@lemmy.today 6 months ago
The temperature of ice melting, on the other hand, is hugely important for weather. 0 point is placed at a very important spot as far as weather observations go.
Can’t say that of Fahrenheit.
pumpkinseedoil@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I think we can agree that the freezing point is super important when it comes to the weather.
So where would you place the second mark (you have to define two spots) so it “makes sense for the weather” (I don’t see how it makes less sense for the weather than Fahrenheit, at least Celsius tells you if it’ll snow or not while Fahrenheit tells you nothing) while still making sure that it can easily be recreated?
Kaboom@reddthat.com 6 months ago
I am not water.