[inetknght]

Nah, Celsius is useful if you're a human. Fahrenheit is useful if you're an American.

[chrismcb]

If you are used to Celsius, sure. But the point the op was making is Fahrenheit was designed with humans in mind and Celsius with the changes of the state of water. Your average person didn't really care what temperature water boils at, just that it is hot.

[cyberax]

No, Fahrenheit was not designed with "humans in mind".

Neither 0F nor 100F are anything special for humans. It's "very cold" long before 0F and "very hot" long before 100F. 50F is nothing special either.

Room temperature is 72F.

[nukem222]

> Fahrenheit was designed with humans in mind

If there was a design, it's not clear what the intent was. It seems about twice as precise as it needs to be (i certainly can't perceive 1F°—for all intents and purposes, 70 feels about the same as 69 and 71) and doesn't seem to correlate to any scale that is immediately based off the needs of humans. At least compared to celcius.

[throwaway657656]

Farenheit set 100F to be his wife's internal temperature. 0F was the freezing point of brine and humans are mostly brine. F is human centric.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit

[technothrasher]

He says in his original paper that the top point of his reference scale is 96, not 100 for the point where "Alcohol expands up to this point when it is held in the mouth or under the armpit of a living man in good health". He originally based his scale on 12, and then got more precise by increasing each division by two several times, ending up with 96.

[tremon]

So basically, Fahrenheit chose 100°F to be the temperate when he gets hard and 0°F to be the temperature when his wife gets hard?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

0F .. 100F is about the range of temperatures a human living on earth could reasonably expect to experience without deliberate adventuring. It's not a precise range - plenty of people live in Doha (way above 100F) and in Alberta (way below 0F) - but it's a pretty reasonable approximation.

[djtango]

I'm not convinced the people of Doha or Alberta would consider their day to day lives adventures

[PaulDavisThe1st]

My comment ends with a note that "it's a reasonable approximation".

The percentage of global population where the 0F..100F range is not a reasonable approximation of the temperature range they will experience is small. It's not perfect - no such range could, when humans live almost everywhere on the planet. But it's not bad ...

[timschmidt]

This is very interesting, because I absolutely can feel one degree F difference in house temperature.

I wonder if using a lower resolution scale dulls the senses like other forms of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

[nukem222]

I live in the US and can't change my thermostat, so I don't think that's it.

I'm sure I could feel the difference if i split myself between two rooms with one degree difference. I just don't think this is a useful granularity—I typically move the thermostat by 2-5 degrees at a time.

[artursapek]

0 is cold as fuck, 100 is hot as fuck. Perfect human scale. Stay jelly

[cyberax]

20F is also cold as fuck. 90F is also hot as fuck.

[beAbU]

-40 - cold as fuck, 40 - hot as fuck. 0 - shit freezes, better drive carefully.

I don't understand why this is always breought out when farenheit is criticized, as if the 0F-100F thing is the "killer app" for temperature scales.

[cosmic_cheese]

As an American I’m biased, but Fahrenheit matching the 1-100 scale used in so many other things just feels nice. Maps cleanly to 0-1.0 in a float/decimal type in programming which is neat too. Feels less arbitrary even if it actually isn’t.

I prefer metric otherwise but for temperature Fahrenheit just “clicks” in ways that Celsius doesn’t.

[taberiand]

Fahrenheit doesn't match the 1-100 scale, though - Celsius does. 0 water freezes, 100 water boils.

[hollerith]

Herr Fahrenheit measured the temperature many times over a period of one year in some town in Germany. He defined 0 degrees as the coldest measurement, 100 the hottest measurement.

[taberiand]

Ok but Celsius works wherever you are (adjusting for pressure)

[0rzech]

> some town in Germany

The Polish city of Gdańsk, of the then Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was also born there at the time. [1]

> He defined 0 degrees as the coldest measurement, 100 the hottest measurement.

Nope. It was neither about the temperatures in Gdańsk, nor about the temperature of his wife, btw. ;) [2]

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gabriel_Fahrenheit
  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit

[briHass]

Anytime your scale has to go into negative numbers to represent common scenarios, it's not human friendly.

If you're not tying your scale to human-specific temps, why not just use Kelvin? At least that won't go negative.

[artursapek]

In what country do people encounter -40 degrees

[nukem222]

Russia, canada, sweden, norway, finland, us... probably missing a few. Edit: mongolia too, I think.

curiously, nothing in the southern hemisphere?

[olddustytrail]

Antarctica

[zeagle]

Parts of Canada for sure. When it’s below -35C my garage stored vehicle’s cold engine light turns after a bit on while driving!

[timschmidt]

We had a -40F windchill day here in Michigan a few years ago.

[labster]

-40°C feels pretty much the same as -40°F

[werdnapk]

Because it is the same.

[timschmidt]

Who needs 2x the effective resolution at human temperature scales? Or useful temperatures without significant digits beyond the decimal?

[mass_and_energy]

Agreed, there's a reason most of the world uses it.