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this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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So humans feel cold at 0F and hot at 100F? I dont think thats true. Humans start quickly dying at something around 32F and 180F. Fahrenheit is complete nonsense. It has nothing to do with humans. And considering humans are mostly water Celsius seems a much better fit.
In aggregate this is absolutely true, though not the point anyone is making.
Humans will die of dehydration or heat stroke quite quickly at temperatures well below 180F. In fact that's far hotter than the hottest recorded temp on Earth (~135F/56.7C) (not including human-made environs like a sauna or outliers like an active volcano) so I'm frankly not sure what point your even trying to make here.
The latter statement is manifestly false. Fahrenheit was originally supposed to have 90 degrees as the average humans body temp (no clue why 90 and not 100). Due to inaccuracies in measurements of the time, It was later changed to 96 and then 98.7. Still no clue why not just 100, but the fact remains it was based on human body temps. The zero point was selected using the freezing point of a brine mixture. No real defending that one, it was pretty much arbitrary.
But we aren't just water. In any case, humans are rarely at boiling temperature. My ideal temp scale would have 0 at water's freezing point and 100 at a humans body temp.
Why base it on human body temperature at all though? That's only useful when you're trying to see if you have a fever, and even then that's a number that varies wildly between people.
Air temperature is what we most often measure and talk about, and it needs to be far below body temperature to be comfortable.
They do? 32F is 0C, it very routinely gets below freezing in many inhabited parts of the world, including the US, and people get along just fine with some precautions. Likewise with 100F (not sure what 180F has to do with it). So yeah, 0F and 100F are around the extremes of what humans regularly experience. (though it does, of course, get hotter and colder in some places).
Well if you're going to bring precautions into it, we may as well say the upper and lower bounds should include things like 'feels hot even with air conditioning on' or 'survivable with a heated jacket and boots'.
Sure, that's a great scale if the goal of it is "What should I wear for the climate" and could be fully functional to that purpose with hundreds of degrees of the scale.
What we base scales on are entirely arbitrary and meant to be there for a purpose. If that purpose is clothing than it's succeeding at it's job.
The Fahrenheit scale is just based on a person saying that's what they felt like was absolutely cold and what was hot based on personal feelings and marking thermometers which ones on the market often didn't even match each other. It was for the people as an emotional barometer to the temp. Celsius is definitely a scientist one which picked a standard but why water? They could have picked so many elements or compounds but had to specify what ocean's water because they aren't all equal. It's all arbitrary. Dance in the nonsense.