Tell me that you are American without telling me you are American
Now, now you get your People pass cancelled.
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?”
You’d never hear any Americans talking about soccer unless their kids were playing in a Rec league
LMAO, this clown is acting like american food is real food.
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.
Can confirm. Moved from the US to Canada and maybe a year of using Celcius revealed to me just how fucking stupid and convoluted Fahrenheit is. My dad spent three weeks out here and started using Celcius on his phone. Now I only use Fahrenheit when dealing with fevers or temping cases of suspiciously overripe produce.
Fellow Americans. Celcius is superior and more intuitive for those who take a moment to adjust to it. It is okay to accept this as fact without developing an inferiority complex. USA not always #1. USA quite often not #1 and that is okay. It is okay for USA to not be #1 without developing an inferiority complex.
Fahrenheit has a fine granularity that is lost in cold climates. It’s why the Bahamas/Belize use it as well.
Well you know that you can use the decimals?
How is - 40.000001°F more fine than - 40.00000000001°C?
23°C is a nice room temperature.
18°C is a bit chilly but still a comfortable temperature.
If you want to go for a finer destinction then we cann say 18.5°C is warmer but I personally can’t feel the difference.
Our bodies are mostly water why not use a system that reflects this?
The universe is mostly empty space with an average temperature of like… 4 Kelvin or some shit. Why not use a system that reflects that? Oh, we do? Right. Celsius is Kelvin + 273.15.
…rankine glowers in your general direction…
Are you made of mostly empty space? Your response does leave me questioning. Please aknowledge that you are made of 64% water and not 4°k nothing.
Plese do not use Kelvin with a degree symbol. There ist no “degree Kelvin”.
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.
But that also doesn’t matter because the granularity is meaningless if you don’t make decisions for differences between 71F and 70F
Not at those exact temperatures, but one degree matters in in grilling meat, making mash for beer, making candy, etc.
Sure, but you should be using Celsius for those things. That’s the main argument here.
You win best username. I’m assuming you’re a Linux nerd as well. <3
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.
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, some people experience colder.
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.
What? People experience 100 f regularly. It’s literally their body temperature.
100F is a fever; if you’re experiencing those regularly you should go see a doctor.
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.
All that not to mention that 50F (10C) is actually cold, not comfortable.
Fahrenheit is only intuitive and “feeling-descriptive” because you’re used to it. From a person born in Celsius country, it’s really not less intuitive. I know I can be comfortable in my birthday suit at around 25C. Less than 20 is chilly, less than 10 - cold, less than 0 - freezing. More than 30 is hot, more than 40 is deadly.
0F is the temperature a freezer needs to be to keep food fresh.
50F is the point that you can’t survive without clothes, your body will not generate enough heat.
100F (38C) will not burn you alive. You can survive for a long time in a sauna at 200F.
100F is perfect hot tub temperature
Freezer normally operates at -4F
You can’t survive without clothes at 55-60F, either.
100F will not burn you in an instant, but the comment went into long-term survival, and good luck surviving at that.
Not sure where you got -4F from.
USDA, United States Department of Agriculture, recommends 0°F or -17.8°C
100°F in the shade isn’t extreme, and you’d be able to survive normally (With more water, everyone can use more water)
100°F is hot tub water
120°F is recommended hot tap water
140°F water will pretty much burn you instantly
The 120 and 140 don’t make that much sense unfortunately.
90-110 is hand washing temp. 100 average.
110 is hot
120 recommend max
130 very hot
140 very very hot
150 burns
If I said to you. Would you stick your hand in 50°C water for 100 dollars would you do it?
What about 60°C?
65°C?
I bet you don’t know what would happen if you stuck your hand in 65°C water without looking it up. There’s a huge jump from 60° to 65°C. 70°C will instantly scald you.
Someone out there is stupid enough to think. Water boils at 100°C, 65 should be perfectly fine. Even though water doesn’t boil until 212°, most people would be cautious of sticking their hand in 100°F+ water.
Yes if you think 40°C+ is hot then you can gather that 65°C would be hotter. But why compare to 40° when you can do 100°.
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 🤷♂️
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
There’s also no such thing as an inch. It’s defined by the meter, there isn’t an official yardstick.
The only reason the UK, Canada and USA used the same inch is because they needed to interchange parts for weapons and machines during WW1. Despite all thinking they used the same measurement system the definition had drifted between them. Metric was defined by enlightenment people with better methods of reproducing the standard. So it was easier to adopt a inch definition based on 25.4mm.
The UK and US inch only match because of WW1. The imperial volumes are still different.
By that logic, there’s also no such thing as a meter either. It’s defined as a distance light travels in a time interval proportional to the inverse of a frequency related to the caesium-133 atom. Definitions don’t mean there’s “no such thing” as something, it’s just a matter of if the units are useful in a given context. And meters are more useful in most everyday contexts.
In timekeeping, there are so called stratums to describe how correct a clock is.
Stratum 0 is a physical process, an inherent property of the universe. An atomic clock would be stratum 0.
Stratum 1 is a clock defined based on a stratum 0 clock. For example, GPS clocks are usually stratum 1, so are timeservers at universities with atomic clocks.
Stratum 2 is a clock defined based on a stratum 1 clock, for example, your router’s ntp server if it syncs its time based on gps or a university’s timeserver.
So if we adopt this jargon for units:
Meter is a stratum 1 unit, defined based on the stratum 0 properties of lightspeed and cesium resonance.
Inch is a stratum 2 unit, defined based on the stratum 1 meter.
Fahrenheit isn’t how people feel, it’s how brine solutions feel.
Which is a surprisingly good approximation for how people feel. 0-100 is pretty survivable, with the mid ranges being most comfortable, and things outside of that range starting to pose serious threats.
0-100 is pretty survivable
I can tell you’ve never been outside when it was 0°F
“Human scale”. Snort. What bollocks.
How can you manage to spell Fahrenheit right but Celsius wrong?
USA
I don’t get it…people freeze at 0F and boil at 100F?
No, but those describe pretty well the range within people tend to do okay in. Anything lower or higher and you tend to need more specialized gear and have to seriously limit exposure.
You need specialized gear at less than 0F and more than 100F? So totally fine to wear t-shirt and shorts anywhere in between? Just face facts…F is a completely nonsensical system with no basis in any reality.
At this point, there’s no harm in using Fahrenheit. We can convert it to celcius. But please use a sane date format.
ISO 8601
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.
Make it log, but not start at absolute zero anyway
No, please start at absolute zero, then you get negative infinity.
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.
“human scale” is dismissed as even existing by the Celsius users
Celsius user here.
I find “I’m more used to it, therefore it makes more intuitive sense to me” is a perfectly understandable argument.The problem with the human scale argument is that it makes it sound completely arbitrary.
To a human there is no objective difference between -1F, 0F or +1F. They are all about the same degree of “cold”.i mean a lot of measurements are arbitrary necause their manmade. thats creation of measurements in a nutshell. they exist to give people context to conpare to. time is a manmade construct, unit of length is a manmade construct. unit of weight is a manmade construct.
for instance with 1 kilo, tell me the last time a regular person had platinum-iridium ingot. its completely arbitrary.
tell me the last time a regular person had platinum-iridium ingot
What, you don’t?
But yeah, I agree, units are made up. I mean, why is the boiling point at 100C and not any other number? Someone made it up.
I’m just saying the argument “0F is really cold” is just as true as -10F is really cold or +10F is really cold.
Is there a difference between 19, 20, and 21 Celsius? It’s also pretty subtle. Yes, there’s a bigger difference than fahrenheit, but I’ve never cared regardless of scale down to what degree the temperature is. As a fahrenheit user, it’s always 10s. 0-10, 10-20, etc.
Is there a difference between 19, 20, and 21 Celsius?
First off, nobody claimed that Celsius is based on human perception so humans not being able to differentiate between these is simply irrelevant to the argument.
Second, the bounds of 0 and 100 are based on the freezing temp of water which are specific, non-arbitrary temperatures.I’m not arguing one system over the other, I just think the “human scale” argument has been made up just to have an argument.
Most heated post on Lemmy
hot take, right there.
I think it’s 0K
I’d be Rankine it a bit higher than that.
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.
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
Plus 100 is boiling it’s a perfect scale.
Nah, it doesn’t make any sense, and isn’t deep or insightful at all.
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 😤
main arguments from below
Celsius is adequate because it’s based on water, and all life on earth is also based on water, so it’s not totally out of our wheelhouse. But for humans specifically I think Fahrenheit is the clear answer.
One point that many may overlook is that most of us here are relatively smart and educated. There are a good number of people on this planet who just aren’t very good with numbers. Obviously a genius could easily adapt their mind to Kelvin or whatever.
You have to use negative numbers more frequently with Celsius > Celsius has a less intuitive frame of reference
Each Celsius degree is nearly two Fahrenheit degrees > Celsius is less granular
The reason I argue the more granular Fahrenheit is more intuitive is because a one degree change should intuitively be quite minor. But since you only have like 40 or 50 degrees to describe the entire gamut of human experiences with Celsius, it blends together a bit too much. I know that people will say to use decimals, but its the same flaw as negative numbers. It’s simply unintuitive and cumbersome.
B) 66F is room temperature. Halfway between freezing (32F) and 100F.
the intuition is learned and not natural.
All scales have to be learned, obviously. It’s far easier to create intuitive anchorpoints in a 0-100 system than a -18 to 38 system. Thus, Fahrenheit is more intuitive for the average person.
I should note that if you are a scientist, the argument completely changes. If you are doing experiments and making calcualtions across a much wider range of temperatures, Celsius and Kelvin are much more intuitive. But we are talking about the average human experience, and for that situation, I maintain Fahrenheit supremacy
Final edit: Well, I got what I asked for. I think I ended up making some pretty irrefutable points with these two last ones though. Once again, math saves the day. If somebody wants to continue the discussion make another thread and tag me because this is a bit much for science memes.
further arguments
It’s not about the specific numbers, but the range that they cover. It’s about the relation of the scale to our lived experience. Hypothetically, if you wanted to design a temperature scale around our species, you would assign the range of 0-100 to the range that would be the most frequently utilized, because those are the shortest numbers. It’s not an absolute range, but the middle of a bell curve which covers 95% of practical scenarios that people encounter. It doesn’t make any sense to start that range at some arbitrary value like 1000 or -18.
When the temperature starts to go above the human body temperature, most humans cannot survive in those environments. Thus, they would have little reason to describe such a temperature. Celsius wastes many double digit numbers between 40-100 that are rarely used. Instead, it forces you to use more negative numbers.
This winter, many days were in the 10s and 20s where I live. Using Celsius would have been marginally more inconvenient in those scenarios, which happen every winter. This is yet another benefit of Fahrenheit, it has a set of base 10 divisions that can be easily communicated, allowing for a convenient level of uncertainty when describing a temperature.
the end is nigh
Generally -40 to 40 are the extremes of livable areas.
Sure, water is a really good system and it works well.
And for F that range is -40 to 104. See how you get 64 extra degrees of precision and nearly all of them are double digit numbers? No downside.
Furthermore F can use its base 10 system to describe useful ranges of temperature such as the 20s, 60s, etc. So you have 144 degrees instead of just 80, and you also have the option to utilize a more broad 16 degree scale that’s also built in.
You might say that Celsius technically also has an 8 degree scale(10s, 30s), but I would argue that the range of 10 degrees Celsius is too broad to be useful in the same way. In order to scale such that 0C is water freezing and 100C boiling, it was necessary for the units to become larger and thus the 10C shorthand is much less descriptive than the 10F shorthand, at least for most human purposes.
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.
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.
Thoughts?
spoiler
Generally -40 to 40 are the extremes of livable areas.
Sure, water is a really good system and it works well.
And for F that range is -40 to 104. See how you get 64 extra degrees of precision and nearly all of them are double digit numbers? No downside.
Furthermore F can use its base 10 system to describe useful ranges of temperature such as the 20s, 60s, etc. So you have 144 degrees instead of just 80, and you also have the option to utilize a more broad 16 degree scale that’s also built in.
You might say that Celsius technically also has an 8 degree scale(10s, 30s), but I would argue that the range of 10 degrees Celsius is too broad to be useful in the same way. In order to scale such that 0C is water freezing and 100C boiling, it was necessary for the units to become larger and thus the 10C shorthand is much less descriptive than the 10F shorthand, at least for most human purposes.
See how you get 64 extra degrees of precision and nearly all of them are double digit numbers? No downside.
Except you don’t, because all instrumentation uses celsius, as that is the sensible system. Also to human perception a difference of 1 degree C is already negligible, thinking adding an extra digit has any benefits is lunacy.
Any response to the rest of my points?
Also to human perception a difference of 1 degree C is already negligible, thinking adding an extra digit has any benefits is lunacy.
Source?
Simple experiment. Hold a pan at 50ºC for a minute, then hold a different pan for a minute at 51ºC. Once you’re done, tell me which burn hurt more, okay? :)
Hey buddy this is a bit much for a discussion about temperature scales, no? I’m quite shocked by this response tbh, if I knew people were this sensitive about Celsius I would have been more diplomatic in my original comment.
You’ll never know what it’s like to enjoy a sunny summer day, not a cloud in the sky, with a high of 82. Unlucky.
I would not mind if you were to expand
My argument is actually pretty simple, but people could always challenge these assertions, in which case it would get more complicated.
A) Fahrenheit has an appropriate level of granularity for humans
B) Fahrenheit has an intuitive frame of reference for humans
Celsius and Kelvin do not. Celsius is adequate because it’s based on water, and all life on earth is also based on water, so it’s not totally out of our wheelhouse. But for humans specifically I think Fahrenheit is the clear answer.
One point that many may overlook is that most of us here are relatively smart and educated. There are a good number of people on this planet who just aren’t very good with numbers. Obviously a genius could easily adapt their mind to Kelvin or whatever.
But Fahrenheit is the temperature scale of the proletariat, the working man, the average Joe. And I’m here for it.
Multiple problems with you assertions.
A) Fahrenheit has an appropriate level of granularity for humans
You know that Celsius uses decimals for everything, so really not much difference. Furthermore the granularity of Fahrenheit doesn‘t have any advantages. You won‘t be able to feel wether its 70°F or 71°F outside, nor if you’ve got a fever of 101°F or 102°F. You need to look at a thermometer. And please don‘t reply saying that decimals are complicated. The majority of the planet, except certain Countries seem to manage just fine. Would be quite laughable if one certain country thinks it‘s too complicated.
B) Fahrenheit has an intuitive frame of reference for humans
Not really sure what you are referencing. I think it just stems from you growing up with Fahrenheit, so not feeling comfortable with anything else.
But Fahrenheit is the temperature scale of the proletariat, the working man, the average Joe. And I’m here for it.
I mean the “proletariat” of the majority of the world uses Celsius.
Not really sure what you are referencing. I think it just stems from you growing up with Fahrenheit, so not feeling comfortable with anything else.
Read some of my other comments. 0-100 is more intuitive than -18-38, no? None of you have even been willing to admit that simple fact yet.
Furthermore the granularity of Fahrenheit doesn‘t have any advantages. You won‘t be able to feel wether its 70°F or 71°F outside, nor if you’ve got a fever of 101°F or 102°F. You need to look at a thermometer. And please don‘t reply saying that decimals are complicated. The majority of the planet, except certain Countries seem to manage just fine. Would be quite laughable if one certain country thinks it‘s too complicated.
Agree to disagree.
Read some of my other comments. 0-100 is more intuitive than -18-38, no? None of you have even been willing to admit that simple fact yet.
Well because it stands on a false promise. Neither 0°F = the freezing temperature of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride nor 100°F has any „real“ meaning. The other limit established was his best estimate of the average human body temperature, originally set at 90 °F, then 96 °F . How is that intuitive.
If you are refering to negative degrees, quite useful for telling how the weather is going to be. And to prevent the „negative numbers are hard“-Argument. It seems to work for the majority of people.
For the human bodytemperature argument often throw around: they are inconsiquential numbers in both systems.
100C is literally instant death.
Laughs in Finnish (while sipping beer in a 100C Sauna)
Yes, a totally safe thing to do 🙄
The starting temperature is 110 degrees Celsius. Half a litre of water will be poured on the stove every 30 seconds.
Well, that’s just dumb. That’s a steam boiler, not a sauna.
What’s the flaw??
“Fahrenheit is how people feel” only makes sense if said people have never used another scale. You know how 100F “feels” because that’s what you use. If you used Celsius you’d know how that scale feels instead, and be used to using the more useful scale generally.
See also: people who think they don’t have an accent.
You know what? I just enjoy being able to set a thermostat to a comfortable level by just using whole numbers instead of resorting do decimal places.
If half a degree Celsius makes the difference between being comfortable or uncomfortable for you, then you have bigger problems than being able to use whole numbers.
Spoken like a pleb that has no control over their life. No thermostat control.
The irony of someone not wanting to use decimal points for their temperature setting isn’t lost on me, when that same person has to resort to fractions to measure anything thinner than a door.
