Americans always regurgite the “Fahrenheit is how people feel” nonsense, but it is just that: nonsense. Americans are familiar with fahrenheit so they think that it is more inituitive than other systems, but unsurprisingly people who are used to celsius have no problems using it to measure “how people feel” and will think it is a very inituitive system.
temperature
Submitted 9 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
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Comments
uienia@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Can confirm. Moved from the US to Canada and a year of using Celcius revealed to me just how fucking stupid and convoluted Fahrenheit is.
CluckN@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Fahrenheit has a fine granularity that is lost in cold climates. It’s why the Bahamas/Belize use it as well.
ivanafterall@kbin.social 9 months ago
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Both are equally arbitrary. You just have to know a handful of temperatures that you use in your day to day life either way.
ichbinjasokreativ@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Celsius being based on water makes it the most intuitive of the three imo.
Ookami38@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
It is really easy to map onto human feel though. 0-100 pretty accurately maps onto our minimum and maximum realistically survivable temps, long-term, and the middle temperatures of those are the most comfortable. It’s far more round, when it comes to describing human preference and survivability, than Celsius is.
faintbeep@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I bet a lot more people know what 0°C feels like than 0°F. One is freezing point, one is a completely arbitrary temperature which only gets called “the lowest you’ll experience” as a post hoc rationalisation of Fahrenheit. Most people will never experience anything that cold.
I even bet more people know what 100°C feels like than 100°F. One is accidentally getting scalded by boiling water, the other is a completely arbitrary temperature which is quite hot but not even the hottest you’ll experience in America.
hex@programming.dev 9 months ago
I wanna say that with this logic 50 should be right around the most comfortable temp… But for most people it’s closer to 70.
I’ll try to explain how easily mappable Celsius is to people as well.
-40 to +40… -40 being extremely cold, and +40 being extremely hot. 21c is the equivalent of 70f.
It’s all the same stuff. Just matters what you’re used to.
Allero@lemmy.today 9 months ago
No it doesn’t, unfortunately What makes 0F (-18C) special? How do you estimate survivability at such temperature? If I’d be out on the street naked, I would die there in a matter of minutes. At the same time, there is plenty of places where winter temperatures go -40F (-40C) and even below, yet people very much survive and live there.
Similar with 100F (38C). There are places with higher temps in the summer, up to 120F (49C) in some places, yet people survive. Still, if you’re not equipped with anything, 100F (38C) will burn you alive.
Ultraviolet@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Good luck surviving in 0°F long term.
ShakeThatYam@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I like that Fahrenheit has a narrower range for degrees. 1C is 1.8 degrees F. So, F allows you to have more precision without the use of decimals. Like, 71F feels noticeably different to me than 64F, but that is only a 3.8 degree difference in C.
Ilflish@lemm.ee 9 months ago
But that also doesn’t matter because the granularity is meaningless if you don’t make decisions for differences between 71F and 70F
matti@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
3 degrees celcius is easily noticeable too so that’s a bit of a moot point. If anything, 1 degree celcius is much harder to discern and therefore having an even more granular scale is unnecessary.
Lizardking27@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I mean, you’re 100% wrong. Fahrenheit isn’t “how people feel” arbitrarily, it’s almost literally a 0-100 scale of how hot it is outside. You need no prior knowledge to interpret a Fahrenheit measurement. Which really reflects poorly on everyone who says “Fahrenheit doesn’t make any sense” because if they were capable of any thought at all they would figure it out in 2 seconds, like everyone else. I’m a lab rat that uses Celsius all day every day, I’m just not a pretentious stuck up tool about alternate measurements just because I refuse to understand them.
inverted_deflector@startrek.website 9 months ago
Celsius is more intuitive for like science or lab work but for day to day use either one is really arbitrary based on what you’re used to.
EnderofGames@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Nah, it doesn’t make any sense, and isn’t deep or insightful at all.
imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Let me explain. Anything below 0F is really cold for a human, and anything above 100F is really hot. The Fahrenheit scale was built around human biology.
0C isn’t even that cold, and 100C is literally instant death. Thus, Celsius is less applicable to the human experience and more applicable to the physical properties of water. The typical range of human scale temperatures is like -10 to 40 degrees on the Celsius scale? Makes no sense.
Kelvin is the most scientifically objective scale, but also the least intuitive for humans, because absolute zero is completely outside our frame of reference.
So it’s easily demonstrable that Fahrenheit is how people feel, Celsius is how water feels, and Kelvin is how molecules feel.
Be forewarned that I am willing to die on this hill, and any challenges to my position will result in increasingly large walls of text until you have conceded the point.
EnderofGames@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
The Fahrenheit scale was built around human biology. Nope, it was built around the highest and lowest extremes some dude could create in his room. Not based on human biology in the slightest. Don’t repeat this false information.
0C isn’t even that cold, and 100C is literally instant death. Yeah, but counter argument, who gives a shit? The “meme” doesn’t say anything remotely close to “from 0 to 100”. I don’t know why you are under the impression that these scales become inaccurate if you leave the 0-100 range. I live in a region that frequents -40C to +40C over a year- that’s centered on zero, so it’s already better for “how humans feel” than being centered on 32 and pretending there is some cosmic/celestial/god ordained reason for it.
Kelvin is the most scientifically objective scale, but also the least intuitive for humans… Still no one giving a shit- the “meme” doesn’t remotely even suggest anything related to this.
Be forewarned that I am willing to die on this hill I don’t know why you sign this off with “I’m an obnoxious twat”, but I’m perfectly happy with using the block function if the threat is real.
KISSmyOS@feddit.de 9 months ago
100C is literally instant death.
Laughs in Finnish (while sipping beer in a 100C Sauna)
efstajas@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The typical range of human scale temperatures is like -10 to 40 degrees on the Celsius scale? Makes no sense.
But it makes so much sense though. Because it’s anchored around the freezing and boiling points of water, which is a universal experience we can all relate to. 0°C outside? It’s freezing.
Fahrenheit as “the human scale” is what makes no fucking sense. You end up with the same exact problem where your specific range of “human scale temperatures” does not line up with 0-100°F at all. But it’s also not anchored to water’s behavior. So it just ends up being arbitrary.
FiskFisk33@startrek.website 9 months ago
Anything below 0F is really cold for a human
Anything below 10F is really cold for a human too, and so is anything below -10F what’s your point?
100C is literally instant death.
While commonly between 80 and 100, finnish sauna temperatures up to 110°c are not unheard of.
Very hot, but definitely not even close to instant death.
Laticauda@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
I grew up with celcius and to me it feels more applicable to the human experience. It literally only depends on which one you’re more used to, idk why people feel the need to come up with these weird unnecessary “explanations”.
rainynight65@feddit.de 9 months ago
Whenever I think that I have seen it all in one of these °F vs °C threads, someone comes along and proves me wrong.
No, the F scale was not built around human biology, that is pure conjecture from people who can’t let go of their antiquated system of measures.
But you go die on that hill, I won’t stop you.
zaphod@feddit.de 9 months ago
Anything below 0F is really cold for a human, and anything above 100F is really hot.
Therefore the perfect temperature would be 50°F, which is 10°C, in my opinion a little too cold to be perfect, I’d prefer something in the 15-20°C range.
Gabu@lemmy.world 9 months ago
'murican being 'murican. That’s why nobody likes you people.
MisterHavoc@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I would not mind if you were to expand
brb@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
-10C or 10C: Pretty comfortable -20C or 20C: Starting to feel bit cold or hot -30C or 30C: Uncomfortably cold or hot -40C or 40C: Almost painfully cold or hot
How exactly is -40F to 104F better than that for human purposes?
taiyang@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I like watching people dying in this hill, more power to you. I don’t necessarily agree, but telling people it’s negative anything just to say it’s pretty cold is indeed less intuitive to me (and kids don’t even know negatives until a bit older).
Only thing is, 100 doesn’t need to be anyone’s scale, with C I think of it more like a scale from 10 to 40, especially since I live in California, and F is more a scale from 50 to 110. It’d probably help if F really was based on human temps, with 100 being the average temp whenever you measure, instead of 96 to 98.
(An aside, neither are ratio scales. 0 in both cases are arbitrary and a temp of 100 isn’t twice as hot as 50. Only Kelvin is like that, which makes it my favorite even if it’s never intuitive, haha)
uienia@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That is a large amount of text to say “I am used to fahrenheit therefore it makes sense to me, and now I will proceed to claim it is the only system that shows how humans feel”.
jballs@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Looks like you made the mistake of posting this when the European downvote gang was awake.
MisterHavoc@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Try having fun every once in a while
EnderofGames@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
If your version of “fun” is repeatedly showing everyone the stupid thing you posted last time you were stoned out of your mind and telling them it’s a great mnemonic or mantra, then I’mma have to ask for us to not be friends.
Anticorp@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Well, aren’t you a fun one?
damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 9 months ago
What’s the flaw??
eldain@feddit.nl 9 months ago
Kelvin is for scientists.
Celsius is for people.
Fahrenheit is a translation layer between Celsius and Americans. All their weather stations have been Celsius for ages, it’s a societal decision to use an arbitrary unit instead. The “69F censoring” which turned out to be a rounding artefact illustrated that nicely. Their government could change that, power to them that they decide not to 🤷♂️
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
fahrenheit is literally defined by celsius at this point, afaik celsius is literally the official standard of the united states but everyone just… keeps using fahrenheit anyways
invisiblegorilla@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Fuck Fahrenheit.
Rodeo@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
All my homies hate fahrenheit.
LibsEatPoop@hexbear.net 9 months ago
Honestly? I’ve only lived in countries with Celsius and Celsius is how I feel. I know exactly how hot or cold a day is gonna be if I look up the temperature. But Fahrenheit confuses the shit out of me. Every time I visit the US, I always convert the temp back to Celsius when someone tells me the temp.
I know Fahrenheit has more degrees and that can give you more datapoints. But cmon. The temp only goes up to, like, 50 C anyways lol. How many degrees do you need 🤣. Can you really differentiate between 61 and 62 F? Now, 60 to 65 F might be believable, but that’s like 15 to 18 C so, they much difference is shown even in Celsius.
I’m not saying Celsius is better, or that Americans should convert to it. Actually, if I was God-Emperor, I’d force us all to use Kelvin, given it begins with Absolute Zero and I’m a sucker for shit like that.
But variety is the spice of life. For Americans, Fahrenheit is how they feel. For most of the rest of us, it’s Celsius.
trk@aussie.zone 9 months ago
I know Fahrenheit has more degrees and that can give you more datapoints.
How do decimal places work?
Fuck_u_spez_@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I’m not saying Celsius is better, or that Americans should convert to it.
I am. But first, metric mass, volume, and distance.
Signed, An American
trebuchet@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
It’s more about the number range in ordinary use than the granularity.
Ordinary daily temperatures in F run from about 0-100. Numbers outside of this range are extreme weather.
sorghum@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
This came up a week ago. I made a chart:
Temps easily relatable conditions <0 throw boiling water up in the air to make it snow 0-10 dangerous freezing cold 10-20 bitter freezing cold 20-30 freezing cold 30-40 coat cold 50-60 jacket cool 60-70 cool 70-80 pleasant 80-90 warm 90-100 hot 100-110 too damn hot for my fat ass/fry an egg outside One of the conclusions on why I like Fahrenheit over Celsius for weather is it’s ironically the most base 10 like for a non-SI scale. A phrase like “it’s going to be in the 70s today” has so much information in it. Usually with no weather changes like a front coming in, you’ll know that during the day it’ll be pleasant. At night the temperature range will drop by around 10 degrees and you’ll know you’ll likely need a light jacket or at least long sleeves to stay comfortable.
If metric wanted to adopt a scale with more graduations that could be easily grouped to 10s, that’d be great. I don’t know why 0-100 was arbitrarily chosen to be the scale for water instead of 0-1000.
For temp measurements outside of weather I really do prefer Celsius though.
aiden@lemm.ee 9 months ago
As an American, I wish I could learn Celsius
taiyang@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Reading these comments, my spiteful genie wish is to invent and proliferate a log base 10 scale, something like earthquake magnitudes or decibels. Y’all hate F or C? Welcome T, where 1 equals 1 Kelvin, 2 equals 10 Kelvin, 3 equals 100 Kelvin, 4 equals 1000 Kelvin, and so on.
It’s easy! Humans live somewhere around 3, as does boiling and freezing, while the sun is between a 4 and a 5 at the surface and the core is closer to an 8.
Hagdos@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Make it log, but not start at absolute zero anyway
marcos@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Take a look at the mean molecular kinetic energy.
As a bonus, it’s measured in Joules. Or eV if you want a sensible unity, but I don’t think you’ll want it.
getaway@lemmynsfw.com 9 months ago
If fahrenheit was how people felt, then room temperature would be 0 because that’s the ideal temperature. Negative fahrenheit would be too cold, positive to warm.
ShakeThatYam@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That isn’t consistent with K and C though. -K doesn’t exist. And water doesn’t become more frozen at -C (well I guess it technically becomes different kinds of frozen).
Zero in that sense represents the absolute limit that one could exist in a particular state, which for F would be comfort? I guess the issue with humans is that 0 would be very subjective. But I think for almost all humans, the limit would be closer to 40F than 0F.
dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I would like to use this system you propose. 0 is room temperature, plus/minus 100 is death by freezing or heatstroke… But we probably have to do some work to make units fit in a linear way. Are you filing the patent or am I?
ferralcat@monyet.cc 9 months ago
100 is hot out and 0 is cold. That’s not crazy. 35 being hot out is pretty arbitrary for day to day use. But if your job is boiling water every day, it’s probably not the best.
Shurimal@kbin.social 9 months ago
With Celsius it's all nice and round numbers unlike the mess called fahrenheit:
0°C—black ice, snow, be careful on the road and you probably want to wear gloves and a hat
0...10°C—a bit chilly, but you can leave your hat home
10...20°C—pleasant, but not quite tee-and-shorts yet
20...30°C—nice summer weather
30...40°C—holy crap it's hot!
40...50°C—are you fucking kidding me?
50+°C—my proteins are starting to denature...
100°C—good sauna
110°C—finns think it's a good sauna
120+°C—finns think it's getting a bit too hot in the sauna. Italians tend to vaporize in sauna (speaking from experience)
...
0...-10°C—a pleasant winter weather
-10...-20°C—getting a bit frosty
-20...-30°C—finns think it's a pleasant winter weather
-40°C—vodka freezes. Russians and finns agree it's getting a bit frosty
-50°C—getting a little hard to start your Uazik in the morning in Siberia due to engine oil solidifying
-60°C—researchers in Antarctica all agree it's getting a bit frosty and someone should close the windowAdam1@lemmy.world 9 months ago
-60c - Canadians consider putting on a hoodie
T4V0@lemmy.world 9 months ago
To be honest, a 10°C range is way too much variation for me to consider it as the same ‘category’ (at least in the 0°C ~ 40°C range).
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Celsius can be used in place of all three, the others cannot.
The freezing point of water is also a great place to zero the scale.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
i love this idea that water is completely irrelevant to humans, as if it’s not like 60% of our mass and vital to living
yeah no let’s base the temperature scale around what some english dude felt was comfortable
ayaya@lemdro.id 9 months ago
The freezing point of water is also a great place to zero the scale
I disagree. Realistically the scale shouldn’t be able to be negative at all. It doesn’t really make any sense for something have a negative temperature.
Imagine if other scales worked that way. An object can’t be negative centimeters long. Light can’t be negative lumens. You can’t score negative % on a test. If you are measuring something you can’t have less than nothing.
namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 9 months ago
I could be wrong on this, but I think Kelvin is basically required for thermodynamic measurements. Entropy measurements, for example, depend on ratios between temperatures relative to absolute zero. You could still manage using centigrade of course, but you would have to offset all of your temperature measurements by 273.15
Probably a lot of other physical applications that also depend on having an absolute zero reference, but that’s the only one I can think of for now.
mac@infosec.pub 9 months ago
Plus 100 is boiling’ it’s a perfect scale.
Squirrel@thelemmy.club 9 months ago
Most people are inherently biased towards their chosen system. A “water scale” doesn’t make sense to fahrenheit users, and a “human scale” is dismissed as even existing by the Celsius users. But hey, if you want to fight, have at it. It’s annoying and pointless, but that’s what the internet is for.
hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
Did it never occur to you that Celsius is basically Kelvin with the zero point moved to human reference?
Human reference because >50% of our body is water. We are essentially water bags.
unreasonabro@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yeah, the reason you can’t stop thinking about it is because it makes no sense but you insist it does so your brain can’t stop processing it, trying to figure it out, but every answer you come up with is crap and you know it. It’s called cognitive dissonance, you’re really not supposed to lean into it.
BetaBlake@lemmy.world 9 months ago
But it doesn’t really make sense, it’s just some nonsense that sounds clever
Filthmontane@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Fahrenheit isn’t how people feel, it’s how brine solutions feel.
amio@kbin.social 9 months ago
How very American.
I suppose it is how people feel, just, y'know, about 4% of people.
IvanOverdrive@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Converting from Fahrenheit to Celsius is quite easy. All you need to do is:
import math import random import time def obtain_temperature_scale(): temperature_scales = ["Fahrenheit", "Celsius", "Kelvin", "Rankine", "Réaumur", "Newton", "Delisle", "Rømer"] return random.choice(temperature_scales) def create_cryptic_prompts(): cryptic_prompts = [ "Unveil the hidden truth within the scorching embers.", "Decode the whispers of the arctic winds.", "Unravel the enigma of thermal equilibrium.", "Unlock the secrets of the thermometric realm." ] return random.choice(cryptic_prompts) def await_user_input(prompt): print(prompt) return float(input("Enter the temperature value: ")) def dramatic_pause(): print("Calculating...") time.sleep(random.uniform(1.5, 3.5)) def convert_to_celsius(fahrenheit): return (fahrenheit - 32) * (5/9) def main(): temperature_scale = obtain_temperature_scale() if temperature_scale == "Fahrenheit": cryptic_prompt = create_cryptic_prompts() fahrenheit_temp = await_user_input(cryptic_prompt) dramatic_pause() celsius_temp = convert_to_celsius(fahrenheit_temp) print(f"The temperature in Celsius is: {celsius_temp:.2f}°C") else: print("This program only accepts Fahrenheit temperatures.") if __name__ == "__main__": main()
RIP_Cheems@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The thing about Fahrenheit is kinda wrong. 0 is when salt water freezes, and 100 was supposedly measured by a woman’s body temperature when she was sick.
xor@infosec.pub 9 months ago
water is a molecule
Tango@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
Most heated post on Lemmy
rbos@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
“Human scale”. Snort. What bollocks.
SkippingRelax@lemmy.world 9 months ago
How can you manage to spell Fahrenheit right but Celsius wrong?
exocrinous@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Nah. Only 50F to 115f is usable. What kind of weird ass datapoints are those? I mean 10C to 45C are just as random, but at least it aligns with something practical. At least I understand that 200C is twice what it takes to boil water. I have no idea how hot 400F is supposed to be.
Gabu@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Except it makes literally no sense whatsoever…
systemglitch@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Who uses Fahrenheit in a first world country?
FUBAR@lemm.ee 9 months ago
At this point, there’s no harm in using Fahrenheit. We can convert it to celcius. But please use a sane date format.
Zuzak@hexbear.net 9 months ago
Fahrenheit is the temperature brine feels.
C126@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I don’t get it…people freeze at 0F and boil at 100F?
gofsckyourself@lemmy.world 9 months ago
These comments are toxic as fuck.
Lemmygradwontallowme@hexbear.net 9 months ago
Wait, what’s the culture war deal with this marde?
For me, fahrenheit is fine (just remember 100 c to 212 f, --> with 5/9 or 9/5 +/-32 calculation)
but I prefer for simplicity, celcius, if not kelvin…
, it do be like this, 1 world, 2 systems
It’s like always the same map around here, ykwim…
Tankiedesantski@hexbear.net 9 months ago
Celcius doesn’t care about your feelings kubrick-stare
stoy@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
Tell me that you are American without telling me you are American
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
Ok.
“Hey. Come over and get some BBQ and food that doesn’t look like sad beans. We can talk about how boring a soccer game is when one team leads and they just play keep away for 40 minutes. Man, this corn on the cob is so good. Sure glad my teeth are straight so I can eat it super easy. Anyone else enjoy having a complete global dominance on movies, tv, and pop culture? How about the internet?”
Gabu@lemmy.world 9 months ago
LMAO, this clown is acting like american food is real food.
Nakoichi@hexbear.net 9 months ago
The nation’s “national passtime” is baseball lmao I don’t think we have a leg to stand on there bud.
ARk@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Found the American
WittyProfileName2@hexbear.net 9 months ago
Careful not to burn yourself at that BBQ 'cos you’ll have to go into debt to afford a sticking plaster. That is if any gathering of Americans larger than two doesn’t just immediately devolve into a mass shooting again. Maybe you’ll see a weather balloon and have to hide indoors from the Chinese.
ThirdWorldOrder@lemm.ee 9 months ago
You’d never hear any Americans talking about soccer unless their kids were playing in a Rec league
Flyberius@hexbear.net 9 months ago
I’m sitting here in China laughing my arse off at how inferior you are.
gmtom@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Americans showing the world again and again that they are completely incapable of comedy.
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Now, now you get your People pass cancelled.