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this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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On “we as people can perceive imperial temperatures a lot better than metric,” I’d agree to disagree here - Celsius is pretty straight-forward. Temperate is temperature, it’s just about what numbers you’re assigning to which temperatures.
0°C is when water freezes, and 100°C is when water boils. A 10°C day is cold, a 20°C day is mild, a 30°C day is hot, and a 40°C day is when you melt.
Whatever you grew up with is probably what is going to be easiest for you to comprehend, but Celsius is no more difficult or less perceptible, just a different value range.
For Fahrenheit It's the more graduations between degrees in a range that's easy to tell comfortability.
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.
You don’t need the extra gradations. Trust me.
And if you don’t trust me, do what I did!
(I will preface this by saying “the best unit is the one understood by the audience.” So there is obviously no reason to do this if it doesn’t interest you. But I enjoyed it!)
I’m American, raised on Fahrenheit. I long used the argument that Fahrenheit was really good for humans, because it has lots of specificity and it describes a range that represents weather for temperate climates.
But I decided back in 2019 to learn Celsius. This was precipitated (hah! weather pun) by a trip to the UK and memorizing a few points so I’d be able to understand the weather if someone told me. Specifically I memorized 10°C=50°F, 20°C = 68°F, 30°C=86°F. Halfway between those also, 15°C=59°C, 25°C=77°F. Then if someone told me the temperature in Celsius I could find my nearest memorized point and move 2°F per °C (a close enough approximation). So 22°C, start at 68°F and add 4 to reach 72°F. (The actual value is 71.6°F, so this is clearly accurate enough for weather.)
After I got back from the UK I decided to just keep using Celsius as an experiment. After all, I had been saying for years that Celsius was better for science and Fahrenheit was better for weather, why not test the hypothesis?
Well, it’s been almost 5 years and I’m still using Celsius for weather.
It turns out there are two major things making Celsius better for the weather. 1, having too much specificity actually hurts the scale. A degree Fahrenheit doesn’t have enough meaning, so it’s harder to have a sense for how much change you get. Once I started to get a feel for Celsius (which did take a few weeks/months) it was remarkable how quickly I attained a sense for what those degrees communicated.
But the much more important one is point 2: freezing is 0.
I didn’t think this would matter as much as it did, but oh boy is it fantastic. Temperatures below freezing in Fahrenheit never really meant much to me. They were just cold. But since in Celsius they are just negatives, I can actually understand them much more easily.
That is to say, 23°F doesn’t really mean anything to me, but -5°C means “as far below freezing as 5°C(41°F) is above freezing.”
(Anyway, your chart of temperature ranges to words maps just fine in Celsius if you use 5s. <-15, -15 to -10, -10 to -5, -5 to 0, 0 to 5, etc.)
This might be the first time I've been told that more specificity in a measurement is bad, lol. I use both imperial and metric everyday. Cooking in the kitchen was my entry point as being an American. Calculating percentages for recipes is always easier on metric. Short distances when working on projects is easy enough too. The more graduations in millimeter wrenches over fractional inches was the main reason I wanted to switch in the first place. Which brings me to the problem I've always had with temperature. I'd rather have the extra graduations for weather, but am fine with Celsius everywhere else especially in applications that I measure temps close to water boiling for instance in filament temps for 3d printing or CPU GPU temp monitoring.
Hey, to each their own. Like I said, the best unit is the one understood.
Personally I don’t care about 68°F vs 69°F, so °C works fine for me. And I suspect there are people similar to you who grew up with Celsius and use half degrees. But I’m not gonna tell you you’re “wrong” because you aren’t. I’m about half a degree frustrated that you got downvoted for this!
No worries. Downvoting an unpopular opinion is one of the Internet's greatest traditions. Don't let google gaslight you into thinking that removing the display of downvotes on YouTube is a good thing either.
Oh no, very much fuck Google for that one.
Not trying to be mean, but why not use fractions if you need to be more precise? If you need to express "halfway between 20°C and 21°C" you could just say 20.5°C.
I can, but there's a phrase in talking about weather with Fahrenheit. When someone says the temp is going to be in the 70s all day, that accounts for the entire fluctuation from cooler mornings to hot afternoon. It's the grouping of temps in a range by 10 degrees and that the graduations are set just enough apart that on normal days the temps usually stay within 10 degrees during the day and drops by another 10 degrees overnight. This makes the phrase "it's going to be in the 70s all day" easy to understand especially when using my chart. You can usually bank on pleasant weather during the day and a need for long sleeves or a light jacket at night.
Fahrenheit ironically is the most base 10 like measurement for a non-SI measurement, at least when it comes to grouping temps by tens in relation to weather. Everywhere else I really do prefer Celsius.