597

submitted 8 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

422 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] LibsEatPoop@hexbear.net 70 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 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. Thats how I know what clothes to wear!!! 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, that 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.

[-] sorghum@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 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.

[-] Sal@mander.xyz 6 points 8 months ago

As someone who grew up in the tropics and now lives somewhere colder, I went through the first three table entries thinking that this was Celsius and felt understood.

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments (23 replies)

this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024

597 points (76.3% liked)