Comment on Everyday, as an American
Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
A few years ago I started using Celsius in my everyday life. It’s been pretty easy, just remember that C scales twice as fast as F, and 32F=0C and you’re set for conversations. It helps to be quick with math, but finding it difficult may make it easier to convince other people to use it instead of F near you. To acclimate yourself you’ll want to change the settings on your phone to use C by default.
I haven’t switched over to m in everyday ise, because all the roadsigns are in Mph and doing that conversion while driving is bad juju.
I’m thinking of rewriting all my recepies in grams and liters If I can figure out how to get our stupidly-over-designed-yet-entirely-jank oven to use C, that’d be good too. If we had one with a bimetalic strip and a knob I’d be able to just print one with the new temperature scale.
shylosx@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Honestly, temperature (in terms of weather preparedness, not cooking) makes WAY more sense with Fahrenheit. Largely the only temperatures you care about are 0 to 100 and generally you feel a good difference in temp every 10 degrees F.
Almost everything else I prefer metric. But that’s one where Celsius is just terrible.
smeenz@lemmy.nz 6 months ago
The only reason you feel that way is because you’re used to it.
shylosx@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That’s a poor argument, though, when the justification for utilizing volume, mass, and distance is because it is very “base 10”-y and is easily divisible and understood.
Celsius absolutely is shit for that.
smeenz@lemmy.nz 6 months ago
Replying again because you’ve edited your comment and added another paragraph.
Your edit adds that Celsius is “absolutely fucked” regarding temperature for human comfort… which is an utterly bizarre argument to make because it only makes sense to people who are used to Fahrenheit and have an intuitive sense of what 72F means to them.
I’m not entirely sure that you’re not just trolling now.
smeenz@lemmy.nz 6 months ago
So… in your opinion, Celsius is shit because you’re not used to it ?
NoMoreCocaine@lemmynsfw.com 6 months ago
So, uh, no? In fact within the “human spectrum” you generally care at least somewhat about every tick of the number. So it’s actually more useful for people.
Because I doubt you can feel the difference between 71f and 72f. But it’s possible to notice the difference between 21 and 22, although you’re pretty picky if you do.
imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Tread lightly my friend. I already won the Fahrenheit vs. Celsius debate few months ago, but Europeans are insanely defensive about the metric system and won’t accept the truth.
sh.itjust.works/comment/9757434
I’ll transcribe my best arguments because that thread was an absolute shitshow and it’s hard to find my comment even with the direct link.
Fahrenheit Supremacy Gang
Celsius is adequate because it’s based on water, and all life on earth is also based on water, so it’s not totally out of our wheelhouse. But for humans specifically I think Fahrenheit is the clear answer. One point that many may overlook is that most of us here are relatively smart and educated. There are a good number of people on this planet who just aren’t very good with numbers. Obviously a genius could easily adapt their mind to Kelvin or whatever. You have to use negative numbers more frequently with Celsius > Celsius has a less intuitive frame of reference Each Celsius degree is nearly two Fahrenheit degrees > Celsius is less granular The reason I argue the more granular Fahrenheit is more intuitive is because a one degree change should intuitively be quite minor. But since you only have like 40 or 50 degrees to describe the entire gamut of human experiences with Celsius, it blends together a bit too much. I know that people will say to use decimals, but its the same flaw as negative numbers. It’s simply unintuitive and cumbersome. B) 66F is room temperature. Halfway between freezing (32F) and 100F. >the intuition is learned and not natural. All scales have to be learned, obviously. It’s far easier to create intuitive anchorpoints in a 0-100 system than a -18 to 38 system. Thus, Fahrenheit is more intuitive for the average person. I should note that if you are a scientist, the argument completely changes. If you are doing experiments and making calcualtions across a much wider range of temperatures, Celsius and Kelvin are much more intuitive. But we are talking about the average human experience, and for that situation, I maintain Fahrenheit supremacy — It’s not about the specific numbers, but the range that they cover. It’s about the relation of the scale to our lived experience. Hypothetically, if you wanted to design a temperature scale around our species, you would assign the range of 0-100 to the range that would be the most frequently utilized, because those are the shortest numbers. It’s not an absolute range, but the middle of a bell curve which covers 95% of practical scenarios that people encounter. It doesn’t make any sense to start that range at some arbitrary value like 1000 or -18. When the temperature starts to go above the human body temperature, most humans cannot survive in those environments. Thus, they would have little reason to describe such a temperature. Celsius wastes many double digit numbers between 40-100 that are rarely used. Instead, it forces you to use more negative numbers. This winter, many days were in the 10s and 20s where I live. Using Celsius would have been marginally more inconvenient in those scenarios, which happen every winter. This is yet another benefit of Fahrenheit, it has a set of base 10 divisions that can be easily communicated, allowing for a convenient level of uncertainty when describing a temperature. — >Generally -40 to 40 are the extremes of livable areas. Sure, water is a really good system and it works well. And for F that range is -40 to 104. See how you get 64 extra degrees of precision and nearly all of them are double digit numbers? No downside. Furthermore F can use its base 10 system to describe useful ranges of temperature such as the 20s, 60s, etc. So you have 144 degrees instead of just 80, and you also have the option to utilize a more broad 16 degree scale that’s also built in. You might say that Celsius technically also has an 8 degree scale(10s, 30s), but I would argue that the range of 10 degrees Celsius is too broad to be useful in the same way. In order to scale such that 0C is water freezing and 100C boiling, it was necessary for the units to become larger and thus the 10C shorthand is much less descriptive than the 10F shorthand, at least for most human purposes.
shylosx@lemmy.world 6 months ago
What’s funny is the person who brought up arguments FOR Fahrenheit over Celsius that I hadn’t considered is actually a Brit.
bigschnitz@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You certainly didn’t win any arguments with those claims.
0-100f is not anywhere close to the scale people see in the weather anywhere most people live. Taking where I’ve ever lived as an example:
Neither scale is relative to cooking (which isequally arbitrary for both), though metric is easier for things like brewing 80°C tea since you need 4/5th a cup boiling water and 1/5 a cup and no thermometer.
The “feel” of the weather is hugely impacted by humidity which is why every forecast has a “feels like” measure and why 90°f in Dubai is lovely but 90°f in Houston is miserable. The increments of 10f doesn’t make sense at all, though seems to be a common perception among people who prefer fahrenheit
The comment about farnehiegjt being more granular would be true in an alternative universe where decimals don’t exist, but not in this one.
Americans literally like farenheit more because it’s familiar, any other rationalisation is nonsense. Both measures make perfect sense after you’ve taken the time to learn them and use them daily (I know this firsthand).
imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
What doesn’t make sense about it? You can tell another person it’s in the 30s outside, and you have efficiently communicated more information than is possible when using Celsius. You’d have to say it’s between 4 and negative 1, which is just lame. And this remains true across every temperature, because of a variety of factors which I explained above.
In every climate which you mentioned above, it’s easier to communicate how hot or cold it is outside using Fahrenheit. This is because all of the numbers being used are non-negative integers (aka natural numbers). Even the triple digit ones are one-ten or one-twenty.
I wonder why mathematicians named them that? Possibly because they come naturally? Unlike negative one point seven.
ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 6 months ago
no.
shylosx@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Brilliant response.
ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 6 months ago
🤷♂️ it was as much as it deserved.