this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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That's what kills me about people who rag on Americans.
We order our dates the way we say them, and we use a temperature system is a great way to describe feeling heat.
I've got no defense for imperial measurements beyond scooping up a cup of flour is easier than dumping it on a scale.
But people spend more energy shitting on the cultural norms of Americans than anyone else (especially Europeans) and then spend a lot of time telling us we have no culture.
You know if you really think about it for even the slightest amount of time this makes absolutely no fucking sense. I can imagine why you state this, but to not spoil the fun I'd love to hear it from you.
The fahrenheit scale was created as a base for human temperature. The guy fucked up his math though because 100°f was supposed to be average body temp.
Celsius is temperature based on water.
Kelvin is based on universal scale.
Fahrenheit is based on the human body.
I don't see how intent is relevant, to someone using Celsius, 40 degrees is hot because they're used to that, that's the only thing that matters. Besides, when it comes to body temperature, Celsius is a lot closer than Fahrenheit. Not to mention "it's freezing outside" in Celsius is actually sub zero, and not a number close to your body temperature as it is in Fahrenheit.
Fahrenheit based his scale on what he thought to be absolute zero (i.e. the coldest temperature he could produce in his lab with the tools of his time) and his body temperature, which he set to 12, because 12 was a convenient number and used in a lot of scales in his pre-metric time. He did realize though that this scale was impractical, and halved his degrees until they deemed sensible to him, resulting in the final degrees to be ⅛ of the first draft. 8 * 12 = 96, hence 96° F was his second fixed point.
Which is just senseless, as we know today, as the temperature of the human body fluctuates over time. If we took the original definition seriously, everybody would have their own Fahrenheit scale that would differ over time.
Fahrenheit is not based on body temperature, it is based on the temperature of a mixture of ice and salt and the body temperature of a certain individual, both in 1714. Who was, by the way, suffering from hypothermia.