If that was true outsiders should be able to use Fahrenheit without much explanation. I’ve never got a clue what the °F values mean, I always have to use a converter. It’s really not as intuitive as people who grew up with it seem to believe.
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Lizardking27@lemmy.world 3 months agoAlso it’s a 0-100 scale of how hot it is outside, and it requires no prior understanding to use it as such.
Mrs_deWinter@feddit.org 3 months ago
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
If that was true outsiders should be able to use Fahrenheit without much explanation. I’ve never got a clue what the °F values mean, I always have to use a converter. It’s really not as intuitive as people who grew up with it seem to believe.
because it’s all relative, and you need to actually know how the temperatures relate to the things you’re experiencing? I’m going to hazard a guess and say you’re comfortable with using celsius? Oops cognitive bias. You would have to test this on someone who doesn’t understand temperature yet. It just so happens that here in the US, it pretty conveniently lines up with those figures for us.
Mrs_deWinter@feddit.org 3 months ago
If your example cannot be proven on any existing person I’d argue it’s hardly relevant to our reality.
°F most definitely isn’t intuitive enough for people who aren’t accustomed to it to use. If it is more intuitive at all, it’s not to any meaningful degree.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
If your example cannot be proven on any existing person I’d argue it’s hardly relevant to our reality.
possibly? Arguably you could still make the case that the existing range of 0-100f is more pleasant, and arguably nicer to use. But you would have to either find someone uniquely adapted to both systems, or you would have to do a lot of independent study on how humans interact with numbers and ranges of numbers. In order to find a specific answer it’s going to be quite hard.
intuition is bullshit anyway, it’s highly predicated on previous experience and an existing knowledge base, so i feel like that’s kind of arguing “well a race car driver drives good, so why don’t normal drivers drive good” kind of territory.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 3 months ago
Exactly. Fahrenheit is just metric weather.
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
The freezing point of water is very important to weather, and requires prior knowledge of the arbitrary number 32.
doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
Is it? Only pure water will actually freeze at 0c. Rain, puddles, lakes, etc aren’t all that pure… And we’re talking about ambient air temps here. The air can be below freezing and it can still rain. And you can get snow/hail above freezing…
Knowing the freezing point is just one factor. Knowing it’s generally around 30F is pretty much always close enough (not that remembering 32 is actually very difficult)
Lizardking27@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Okay so fahrenheit has a well-defined high and low, but an arbitrary freezing point of one certain chemical. All other chemical freezing points are arbitrary.
Celsius has an arbitrary high and low, but a well-defined freezing point of that same chemical. All other freezing points are arbitrary.
If your motivation is to minimize the amount of arbitrary values you have to memorize, fahrenheit is the clear winner.
criticon@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
The 0 in Fahrenheit was based on nothing and the 100F was supposed to be human temperature but it is off by some degrees
The water is not an arbitrary temperature, the weather is water dependant, at 0C the water will freeze and you get snow/ice instead of rain
actually@lemmy.world 3 months ago
0°F is when the ocean freezes
100° F was human body temperature, later revised somewhat with better measurements and a decrease of parasites . The average person in those days in London had a slightly higher body temperature than today
AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world 3 months ago
The zero C is freezing and 100 C is boiling, so not really arbitrary.
But it’s pretty hard to define a scale that has intuitive, round numbers for everything we might care about.
Lizardking27@lemmy.world 3 months ago
You’re correct. In a lab setting, 0C and 100C are not arbitrary.
In the weather forecast, they are.
Which ties into your final point, it’s hard to define a scale that is best for everything, which is exactly what I’ve been saying this whole time. Fahrenheit is better for some things, Celsius for others.
The only reason people in this thread are saying otherwise is because for some reason they’ve tied up some significant part of their self-worth into their belief that “lmao DAE fahrenheit bad amirite??1?”, and they mistakenly believe that those of us that understand nuance are trying to belittle or disparage them in some way. I assure you, we are not.
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
It’s not like the weather depends on the boiling point of formaldehyde…
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
yeah, and let me know how accurate our weather models and prediction systems are. Can you calculate accurately how much the temperature in a specific part of the atmosphere will drop to a large updraft?
What’s that? This is literally an entire career field of study and development? Oh that’s weird.
Also the only real time this is relevant, is when things that have this weird property called thermal mass get below freezing, it’s snowing in 30f weather? That’s not sticking, the ground is too warm. or the sun will literally just melt it even if it is cold enough. Water? You mean that weird thing called like, a lake or river? Those get below freezing, without actively freezing, lakes won’t even drop that much in terms of temperature, aside from the surface level. The surface may freeze, but even that is pretty variable.
Also yes, it’s the arbitrary number of 32, so is literally every number though. We have 2 numbers to remember, you also have 2 numbers to remember, god forbid you have like, a password, or a passcode, or like, a numbers based lock somewhere. Humans have never been known to be good at memorizing short strings of data.
like idk how to tell you this, but, it’s not that big of a deal?