Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sarchertech 151 days ago
When defining a scale from scratch only for the purpose of defining how the temperature feels it a human, you don’t think human body temperature would factor in?

> What are you even talking about? -17 is a complete irrelevance to me, it does not happen,

It lines up with 0F, which in most of the US is about as cold as it gets. You could be more specific and lick the weight 95% percentile coldest yearly low and get -19 or -16 or something. The specific number is irrelevant. The point is that a scale where the daily values generally fall between 0 and 100 is something that most people would admit is a point in that scale’s favor.

That doesn’t mean that Fahrenheit is better than Celsius. It does mean that there are objective advantages to it for some purposes.

If you can’t sit down and analyze Fahrenheit, Celsius, and Kelvin and make a list of pros and cons for each, you’re just being stubborn.

1 comments

> It lines up with 0F, which in most of the US is about as cold as it gets.

"most of the US" . And yet you think that a group of aliens looking at planet Earth would anchor on that region. This makes no sense. It is what I meant by "parochial".

> The specific number is irrelevant.

Lets set the zero point to an irrelevant number, it's be great!

> does mean that there are objective advantages to it for some purposes.

Sure, I agree. In some places.

> If you can’t sit down and analyze

I can. But if you don't know better than to avoid focussing on that, you're missing the mere familiarity that was emphasised repeatedly.

"most of the US" . And yet you think that a group of aliens looking at planet Earth would anchor on that region. This makes no sense. It is what I meant by "parochial".

Then imagine a group of Aliens is building a scale for the United States of America, which in context is the only relevant country since this entire discussion is about the US switching to Celsius. It doesn’t actually have to be aliens. Just a neutral party with no bias towards an existing scale.

> I can. But if you don't know better than to avoid focussing on that, you're missing the mere familiarity that was emphasised repeatedly.

Familiarity is obviously the reason that the US is a metric holdout. No one has ever argued otherwise.

The only point I am making in this entire forsaken thread is that for the very specific purpose of air temperature in the United States, F has a nice advantage to C in that the numbers normally line up 0 to 100 and that all other things being equal humans find scales from 0-100 pleasant.

Multiple People in this thread who have no familiarity with Fahrenheit have agreed with this.

Because it is slightly nicer scale in this specific place for this specific purpose, no one is going to voluntarily switch the way that some people voluntarily switch to grams when baking or mm when working with small objects.