[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.