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by tpush 2775 days ago
> A good comparison is degrees Celsius, which are just as arbitrary/unscientific (the standard metric unit is the Kelvin).

Celsius is literally the same scale as Kelvin, just shifted so that 0c = water freezing.

2 comments

Yes, and water freezing is a totally arbitrary value.

Fahrenheit is scaled such that 0 is about the coldest it gets where I live, and 100 is about the hottest. (Very approximately, but close enough). That strikes me as a lot nicer in practice (since 99% of the time people are talking about temperature, it’s related to weather) than something based on the physical properties of a particular substance.

Also water freezing at 0 and boiling at 100 is only valid for a specific, non-metric, air pressure.

Celsius is a particularly bad metric unit. It doesn't have enough units in the range most commonly encountered by humans, and it goes negative, which is also to be avoided in a good unit.

So you end up needing negatives, and decimals.