[Kim_Bruning]

An eyeballed yard is roughly the same as an eyeballed meter. An eyeballed foot is 1/3 of that. You can stick 4 inches in 10 cm roughly.

And I just poke my nose out the window and look outside to see what the temperature is

  Freezing.... ~30°F.... ~0°C

  Need coat... ~50°F... ~10°C

  T-shirt..... ~70°F... ~20°C

  Melting..... ~90°F... ~30°C

Rules of thumb can be learned either direction!

ps HN tables are not really a thing, are they?

pps Suspiciously many experiments are conducted at 293K

[cucumber3732842]

What you're ignoring is that a hundred plus or minus is a good range for average humans to grapple with and Fahrenheit splits the temperature swings in a given region across an approximately 100deg range.

So using Fahrenheit results in a pretty decent "as high as it can be without being clumsy" measurement system that covers just about all earthly temperatures.

If we only cared about increments of five or so degrees you could go higher resolution and it'd be fine because rounding would occur like we do with vehicle speeds. Or we could go lower resolution and just make the degrees bigger, which is basically what celsius is.

[Kim_Bruning]

Eh, all the degrees (Celsius, Fahrenheit, Réaumur, etc) are all about equally bad. Nicest thing that can be said about Celsius is that it's decimal, connected to water (0=freezing, 100=boiling) so it plays well with the rest of metric.

Kelvin is actually the most practical of the lot, FSVO [1]. It's not a 'degree', because it's anchored at absolute zero. It's just a bit unwieldy for our day-to-day, with room temperature at 293K. But I can imagine if people were to grow up with it, it wouldn't be too bad even then.

[1] eg. "Why can an aircon still heat the house at ten degrees below zero?"- "Well akshually, you still have 263K of heat energy to pump, not an actual problem"

[samus]

Right, we are just arguing which is the most practical range. It's like choosing a calendar: we could define one using entirely metric time units, but nobody would want to use it as long as human civilization is anchored on Planet Earth.

[samus]

The difference between a yard and a meter adds up quickly. Already a 25 yard swimming pool yields significantly different times to cross it than a 25 meter one.