[IgorPartola]

Or we can stop using freedom units and join the rest of the world. Take a small step to make this happen right now: set your phone and thermostat to show you the temperature in Celsius. I did this and my kids are growing up with an intuitive understanding of what 20 degrees C feels like.

[brownbat]

I want to be careful, this could get holy war-ish...

So I do not want to sell anyone on changing their view. This isn't advocacy. But just want to provide one illustration of why someone may prefer Fahrenheit.

When I travel, hotel rooms generally let me alter the temperature on digital thermostats by one degree. In the US, that's great, that's plenty of precision. In Europe, I lose fidelity and am strictly worse off.

If people like a room set at 71 degrees, they don't like 72 or 70. If they like it at 75, they aren't secretly shooting for 76.

When I'm cooking in an oven or sous vide, I often want to tweak controls very precisely in an attempt to balance the carmelization of sugars or the rendering of fats while leaving proteins or starches intact.

Room temps, weather, and cooking are the ways I mainly interact with these scales. In each of them, the precision of the base unit in F is strictly advantageous to me.

Celsius can absolutely allow greater granularity, if everyone used an extra significant digit as a rule. I blame psychology though, people and systems often just don't bother to think that way.

I wholly support the metric system to unify measurement across different scales. That's neat. But as I rarely need to talk about millidegrees or gigadegrees, it seems less relevant to me in this context.

[stephen_g]

To somebody who lives in one of the few hundred countries that uses Celsius, this just seems like a non-problem... While a lot of air conditioners adjust in single degree steps, plenty exist that go up or down in half degrees. A sous vide would probably adjust with a single decimal point. Digital thermometers basically also always do also. My weather app says it’s 16.1 degrees C outside right now... Easy...

Your comment about psychology is actually just you mistaking familiarity with your temperature system with something more universal. In countries where we use metric/Celsius, we find decimals super easy to think in because we’re used to doing it!

[badamp]

Temperature sensors in thermostats are nowhere near as precise as you seem to believe. And unless you have calibrated your sous vide to a standard I am willing to bet good money its not anywhere within 1 degree precision (having tested this.. you’re lucky to get +/- 3 C). Also nothing in cooking requires the precision down to fractional degrees C. You’re not going to obtain it anyway, even if you think you are.

Everything you’re saying is all in your head.

[twic]

The user interfaces let you input temperatures with more precision. But i would be astounded if the thermostats actually regulated the temperatures with that much accuracy. Have you tried measuring the temperatures actually attained?

[IgorPartola]

What if I want 0.25 degree adjustments? Can we all make and use a scale that lets me do that? This is a non problem for most of the world’s population. And if it is a problem, we can fix it by creating thermostats that work in C and let you have half degree adjustments. That’s your billion dollar idea.

[droithomme]

I don't find the range of temperatures of distilled water at sea level from freezing to boiling particularly useful for thinking about the weather. A more arbitrary scale like F works just as well maybe even better since 100F is too hot. However 0 as the temperature your seedlings will freeze is useful so C has that going for it.

[duckymcduckface]

You got them on meters and liters as well?

[IgorPartola]

Liters don’t come up much and those are going to be a lot harder given that every gas station is in gallons only. Meters no, centimeters yes. They are 6 so they mostly measure small stuff. I use grams for cooking too. Who thought that “1 cup of cheese” was a reasonable measurement?

[kortilla]

>Who thought that “1 cup of cheese” was a reasonable measurement?,

It’s easier to use a 1 cup scoop to grab something quickly than it is to weigh something out.

[rat9988]

Which cup?

[IgorPartola]

In case you are not from the US, an official freedom unit of volume is a cup which equals 8 fluid ounces (not the same as ounces which are a unit of weight; yeah it really is that dumb). Almost all cooking recipes use teaspoons (5ml), tablespoons (15 ml), or fractions of a cup (1 fluid oz, 29 ml or so), including for measuring things like cheese, herbs, pasta, etc. No American recipe website will ever say “use 200 grams of butter), it will tell you how many cups of butter to use.

[walshemj]

And American Fluid Oz are not the same as real Imperial Fluid Oz which is another difference to work with.

[jsmith99]

Or how many sticks of margarine, according to their favourite margarine brand.

[mikeash]

I did this years ago and it hasn’t worked yet.