this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Someone once told me it was 20 degrees Celsius out. I didn’t know if it was snowing, blazing, or if he was moving at 50 furlongs a minute.
This is exactly how I feel when my American colleagues discuss the weather in Fahrenheit.
0: Fuck, it's cold out there!
100: Fuck, it's hot out there!
If you go somewhere outside this range - leave.
Fahrenheit is, surprisingly, somewhat intuitive in the very specific case of weather.
Not that it never goes beyond the extremes of the scale, but very broadly speaking, 0-100 F is your weather range, with 0F being cold as balls and 100F being hot as balls.
The balls scale of weather temperature is significantly less intuitive.
I feel like no matter where you go, most people would agree that 0F is really cold and 100F is really hot.
Again, not that it never goes beyond those, but it's a quick and effective scale.
Celsius
Farenheit
Both
A propos the last one: the only temperature where fahrenheit and celsius are the same temperature at the same number of degrees is at -40°
So in To Build A Fire when it's -70° it doesn't matter what it is, the sad hidden ending is the dog freezes too.
Not being used to F at all, it seems to me that C has at least least some very notable landmarks - 0 frozen, 100 boiling. I have zero landmarks for F
There are people in the US who will fight tooth and nail to defend the imperial system, as if it's superior in some way. It just doesn't make sense to me. It's harder to learn, completely inconsistent, and unlike standard metric, there is no scientific basis for the measurements. They're just random distances that someone made up.
Tell me, what's easier to remember? 0°C or 32°F? 100°C or 212°F? 1000m = 1km or 5280ft = 1mi
It's actually kinda weird that they use dollars and cents and not pounds, shillings, pennies and farthings, because that feels much more compatible with the imperial way of thinking.
You're right actually, when you think about it $1 being 100 cents is basically communism. $1 should be 57.93 cents
I think even using decimals like that seems un-American, because I've always been told that fractions are what makes imperial so easy. Everyone loves calculating fractions after all, so perhaps a cent should be 1/37th of a dollar.
Imperial basically developed by picking a useful measure at each given scale.
For example, a mile was originally 1000 paces, and wasn't standardized at all. The first Roman legion to march down a road would stick mile markers down based on the length of their stride.
A furlong was one agricultural furrow long - the distance you'd plow with your Ox.
A foot was originally someone's literal foot.
It's inconsistent for the same reason a meter doesn't go neatly into a light year. That doesn't make it good, but it's a very human system of units.
At the very least get the history right. Fahrenheit was defined so that a temperature stable brine solutions temperature was zero, because it was easy to create for calibration, and that the freezing and boiling points of water would be 180° apart, because circles and temperature gauges have a natural link.
Redefinition of the scale to make it line up with metric has led to some minor drift in the definition.
The good criticism of fahrenheit is that it's non standard, not that it doesn't have round numbers for two states of one substance.
Easy. 80f is 80% hot. 90f is 90% hot. 110f is 110% hot and so on.
That doesn't make sense at all lmao
Of all the parts of the imperial measurements, temperature is the one I'd keep, at least for weather measures. It's a human centric scale rather than scientific, so 0 is cold, 100 is hot, but both are survivable with the right cloths and an accommodating environment. If you get outside of those it starts to get particularly hazardous in either direction though and even near the ends it's 'take some heavy precautions' territory.
I see what you mean, but the freezing point of water is arguably the most critical temperature when it comes to weather. Celsius is easy in this regard.
+3°C? => Precipitation will almost certainly be liquid.
-3°C? => Precipitation will be mostly solid and any possible rain or drizzle will be supercooled, forming a sheet of ice on whatever it lands on. Look out for slippery roads!
It's also useful that a moderate climate on average won't go much higher than 100 in the summer, or lower than 0 in the winter. So you know if it does then either that day is an outlier, or you don't live in a moderate climate. So it makes that information just a bit more intuitive. Speaking as a Michigander at least, that's what those numbers mean to me.
I hope that holds true, given we just had the twin cities marathon canceled for excessive heat in October, in MN where we still mention the Halloween blizzard of 94 in hushed tones, that scale might need recalibration.
Yeah it's definitely drifted a bit since Fahrenheit was first conceived what with climate change and all. That doesn't mean the scale is wrong, it means the moderate climates are slowly moving elsewhere.
Maybe we just discovered an instant solution to global warming, just readjust the temp scale. Move everything up by a couple dozen degrees and suddenly we're in a new ice age. 🤔