[al_borland]

With all of those examples, the actual temperature doesn’t really matter.

For drinking and bathing, people go by feel. In the kitchen, the freezer makes water freeze, and the stovetop will make it boil into steam, but exact temperatures aren’t really relevant here either. The same goes for ironing clothes, the iron just does it.

When I think about where explicit temperatures are needed in the home, the oven and thermostat are the two things that come to mind. Water is pretty irrelevant for both of those. For cooking or frying someone may monitor meat or oil temps, but those aren’t water. A hot tub might have an actual temp on it, but those tend to be around 100F, not 100C, as they are meant for humans, not boiling.

Water is an amazing liquid, but I still struggle to see how measuring all our temperatures based on it makes sense.

[kelnos]

> For drinking and bathing, people go by feel.

Yes, and people who grew up with Celsius feel in Celsius, and people who grew up with Fahrenheit (like myself) feel in Fahrenheit.

Stop trying to make some sort of determination of what's logical or reasonable here. Neither one is more or less logical than the other for day-to-day layperson use; anyone can "feel best" in any scale if they were taught it at a young age and used solely that scale for the formative years of their lives. Hell, I bet you could make a kid feel in Kelvin if that's all they were exposed to for their childhood. Or in some made-up scale that takes your 0F-100F and compresses it inside 22-35.

[al_borland]

When I said drinking and bathing go by feel, I meant that they aren’t measuring the temperature, so the units are irrelevant.

When drawing a bath, I don’t get out a thermometer, I just stick my hand in the water and feel if it’s comfortable. C, F, or K… who cares? It doesn’t come into play.

[QuantumNomad_]

> When I think about where explicit temperatures are needed in the home, the oven and thermostat are the two things that come to mind.

But in that case in what way is for example baking a frozen pizza from the store at 400 to 425 degrees F more relatable/convenient/natural than 200 to 220 degrees C?

[al_borland]

It's not. When it comes to an oven, F and C are equally arbitrary, so it really doesn't matter. Optimize for what people use most, and let the other random uses fall as they may.

[kelnos]

You have it backward. There's no absolute truth on what's optimal for what people use most. What's optimal is just what you were reinforcement-trained to feel when you were growing up as a child. That's it.

My wife says "30C" and knows exactly how that feels, while I struggle to find a reference point. I say "86F" and know exactly how that feels. Even though she prefers C, she can feel F slightly better than I feel C, as she moved to the US when she was in her teens. (Whereas I've spent my entire life in the US, outside of business and holiday travel.)