"Fahrenheit is a bit more convenient for describing the weather" - you might need to show us an example here that is not biased. Because to me, Celsius is a bit more convenient for describing the weather.
On the Fahrenheit scale, the majority of daily temperatures in the vast majority of the US fall between 0 and 100, which is -17 and 37 Celsius, and it’s more granular without introducing a decimal point.
I enjoyed reading this exchange, it's really a matter of perspective.
For someone like me living in a country with the metric system there's no issues with negative values for the temperature. It just mean it's below freezing, which is cold, the more below freezing it is, the colder it is. And inversely the more above freezing it is, the hotter it is. For me 20C feels good, 30C is too hot, 40C is at the point where I can't work anymore, and anything above that doesn't exist around here. 100C is where water is boiling at sea level. Easy.
Another thing that's interesting to me is that going from 300m to 0.3km is automatic, it maps to exactly the same concept to me in my mind, I don't feel like I'm doing any conversion at all and one is not harder to use than the other.
In metric world nobody cares about decimal points in temperature outside. Measuring precision is not that good because of wind, humidity, exposure to sun etc. We just don’t need that granularity, so it is really hard to understand why would you need that. Is there really any difference between 56°F and 57°F that you can feel and want to measure?
And choice of 0/100 for weather is absolutely baseless. You do have below-zero days and in some places it can be over 100. With Celsius you know when it’s going to be ice on the roads and when rain becomes snow.
below zero days are really really crazy cold and above 100 days are really really crazy hot. I don't think the fact that things occasionally exceed the 100 point "normal" range makes it less useful, if anything the out of bounds numbers emphasize the severity of the temperature. it's common where I grew up in the midwest US to hear "wow its going to be BELOW ZERO" as a way to express extreme cold
For me personally “really really cold” starts below -30°C and crazy hot is above +30°C. It’s very subjective and outside of US many areas have climate where Fahrenheit doesn’t make sense at all.
maybe that's why its popular in the US? for most of this country the 0-100 range works quite well to describe the normal range of outdoor temperature. we seem to like 0-100 ranges, for instance speed in MPH works out nicely.. "over 100 MPH!" is a common expression for extreme speed drivers. school grades are often a value out of 100, etc. which makes you wonder why we don't prefer metric lol
0 degrees F is a cold winter day, 100 degrees F is a hot summer day
0 degrees C is a cold winter day, 100 degrees C means you're dead
I think he's suggesting that a 0-100 scale for temperature/"relative warmth outside" is more intuitive than a 0-37 scale. It's easier to to place 73 degrees on a 0-100 relative warmth scale than it is to place 18 degrees on a 0-37 scale (unless of course you grew up calibrated to the 0-37 scale and know that 18degrees means you maybe need a light jacket or whatever).
I think it's funny that one of the main benefits of metric is its base-10-ness where things scale so nicely from 1-10-100-1000 etc. but then for temperature we're supposed to be fine with a 0-37? Fahrenheit is basically the 1-100 version of temperature (when it comes to weather).
It is what you are used to for both of you. you could make your own measurement system and it would work fine once you get used to it - until you need to communicate with someone else who isn't used to it.
A big part of it is certainly what you're used to.
The other part, which I'm sympathetic to, is that for human scale everyday things, Fahrenheit 0 degrees lines up with really darned cold, 100 degrees with really hot outside of an oven, and the degree size is about twice as granular as Celsius.
And while Celsius degree size is indeed widely used in engineering calculations, you're often using Kelvin as the absolute temperature scale. (Which does use Celsius degree increments of course.)
> and the degree size is about twice as granular as Celsius.
And then they'll argue that the inch is more convenient than the centimeter because it's twice as large.
That's backwards. Fractions of an inch are in far more common usage than fractions of a centigrade. Ideal might be both a smaller inch and a smaller centigrade, but between the two a smaller inch is more helpful than a smaller centigrade.
Perhaps, but useless for most purposes. You need to know how think of a coat to wear and you need a mental map from some number to some coat. It doesn't matter what the scale is, just that you have that map.
I agree its having the mental map that matters but my intention was to disagree with the parent comment's claim that Fahrenheit is more appropriate to the "human scale of things".
its a small advantage, but I think zero indicating when things might freeze is a more useful than "0 degrees lines up with really darned cold"
To me, below zero Centigrade lines up with "really darned cold". It's all subjective.
> zero indicating when things might freeze is useful
Of course it is, parent is being silly.
Picking some other non-zero random number for freezing just seems absurd to me. But that's because Centigrade is what I am familiar with.
Say pick freezing = 12, or 47?. If those numbers for freezing seem absurd to you, then consider that the only advantage that "32" has for you is that you're familiar with it. People will find reasons to defend whichever one they grew up with.
> 0 lines up with freezing point is useless for most purposes
Rubbish. Absolute nonsense. It's very useful.
But, each system has points where you can say that it is more convenient . You could defend Fahrenheit all day. I could counter with Celsius usefulness. "below zero" being a synonym for "below freezing" is one of those.
But you miss the context - you will defend whichever one you grew up with. You look for reasons to defend what you know. It is mere familiarity, nothing more.
>But, each system has points where you can say that it is more convenient . You could defend Fahrenheit all day. I could counter with Celsius usefulness. "below zero" being a synonym for "below freezing" is one of those.
Of course it does. That’s my entire point. For the intended purpose of measuring air temperature there are some advantages to Fahrenheit. Celsius is not self evidently superior in that regard. Therefore no one using Fahrenheit is going to change unless forced.
The freezing point of water is useful for some things, but I’ve never paid particular attention to 32F because almost all of the bad things I need to worry about related to freezing water happen much lower than that.
So making 32F the 0 point of the scale has few objective benefits to me.
Not as laughable as "metric is more convenient for human scale things". "Human scale things" includes fractions of an inch and fractions of a mile, which are horrible in customary units, and includes both the foot and yard which are used confusingly interchangeably. Metric is far superior for human scale measurements.
And that's only length. It gets worse outside of length. Like WTF is an ounce?
And using different ounces for metals, fluids, drugs, and, er, everything else - how does that not send people screaming into the arms of the metric system?!
And then there's the hundredweight, where "hundred" actually means "eight"...