this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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Yeah, well that’s a cultural thing really. Celcius and fahrenheit scales are both quite arbitrary. The kelvin scale uses absolute zero, which totally makes sense, but the other fixed point is pretty arbitrary when you think of it. The fahrenheit scale makes sense for the human experience of weather, while the celcius scale makes sense for generally life on Earth where water plays an important role. Neither of them are particularly universal, and they both suck in their unique ways.
see also: natural units
(Edit)
Life Pro Tip: If you take the piss out of two units at the same time, you can make everyone equally angry.
Technically they arr arbitrary yes, but sometimes some arbitrary makes more sense than others. Why is fahrenheit 0 at -32°C? Accordinfmg to wikipedia he chose 0°F as the melting point of water and ammonium chloride (what percentage of solution?) and the highest was initially "the average of the hottest temperature of a healthy man". Do you see why this feels more arbitrady then " the melting and boiling point of water at 101.300 Pa"? Not only these points are constant and measurable, but water is such ubiqutous in human life that it feels at least less arbitrary as a reference point.
Historically, it was ok. Now it just doesn't make much sense, sincd we tried (and mostly succeded) to standardize measurements units for centuries (and make them all base 10)
I don’t really use the Fahrenheit scale for anything, but when I bump into it, I prefer to think of those values as: 0°F is a cold winter and 100°F is a hot summer weather. Makes sense for the human experience, which makes it a very practical unit. The original definition was more technical than that, but it was also severely limited by the technology at the time, so it had some flaws.
You also have to look at these units in the proper historical context. Measurements were a complete mess, so having at least something that sort of makes some sense and is somewhat repeatable, is a clear improvement. Both, Fahrenheit and Celcius scales totally addressed those concerns, and that makes them both good enough. Absolute zero and plank temperature weren’t even known back then, so what can you expect.
When it comes to using these units in serious scientific and engineering applications, you run into problems, but the kelvin scale addresses those pretty well. It’s not exactly elegant, but at least it’s functional. Because of historical baggage, we’re pretty much stuck with these units, but it could be worse.
I agree, historically they make sense, but times have evolved and I honestlt believe certain things should belong to the past, just like we abandoned 12 base monetary and measurement systems, except for a single place on earth that just ignores what everyone else does and goes their own way.
In a global world, we should unite things instead of dividing for ideological/political reasons. Still, my own is an ideological reason why the imperial system should disappear, but there are pratical issues it causes, espeically when used internationally in industrial and scientific fields, which is very common.
I think a large portion of it is that governments/institutions/whatever don’t want to pay the large amount of money it would take to replace all signage/software/etc.
The classic “high short term costs for long term benefits” vs. “no (direct monetary) short term costs for ‘future me’ problems”.
I mean the imperial system has it's niche uses too. Fractional measurements are helpful if you're doing multiple of something and you don't want to calculate. What if you have 16 boards and you need to lay them out across 19 feet, what's the width for each board and gap? Well its 19/16 or 1-3/16. And you could say your tolerance is ±1/16. Versus a decimal system, you need to hit 1.1875, with a ±0.0625 tolerance. Yeah no, imperial is better in that case.
Bur imperial does have it's pains, especially once you start working with anything that isn't a multiple of 2. Just wanted to point out it does have some uses.
I think it’s about time we switched to using seconds as the universal time unit. I really hate the messy base 60 conversions we inherited from the Babylonians. Also, month is such a broken unit, and it just makes many calculations unnecessarily complicated.
Makes sense for some specific location. But in general sense 0°F is not cold and 100°F is not hot.
For me 0 F would be civilization ending cold that i have been only seen once.
0 is an extremely cold winter. Like you're going to die very quickly if you're outside without extreme weather gear.
Where I'm at, mid east coast, we only have a few days each winter get below 20, which is already hellishly cold.
Lol
In the Middle East, the winters are brutally cold and the locals suffer. Tourists from colder regions come there to enjoy their winter vacation in December or January, because it’s paradoxically quite warm. They only pack their normal spring clothes because it isn’t really that cold in their opinion. You know, a thin coat, maybe a thin summer beanie. You’ll probably be ok without any mittens. Also, you can wear normal shoes which is nice.
Extreme weather gear is considered just normal winter clothes in some parts of the world.
Human experience in weather is arbitrary and that's just cope, celcius feels as much natural as fahrenheit, the only difference is what you learned as kid
Wat. Yanks keep saying this but... wat
50 is about the average temperature for spring and fall. Summer gets closer to 100 to imply hot and winter it drops down closer to 0.
That's both very dependent on the location and not at all more natural or intuitive to me than Celsius for my area
Yeah well obviously wasn't planned for a global scale and you can thank European mindset 300 years ago for that so it is definitely scaled for arable land in higher latitudes.
It wasn't very technical cause I mean they just weren't back then. Heck ask a baker what a pinch is.
But for trying to come up with a scale to give people a way to talk about the temperature in Poland was the point and it's just stuck for people that are using it same as those using other methods. It wasn't and isn't about you.
This was about "scale makes sense for human experience of weather" in comparison to Celsius though. What I've wondered is how does it make any more sense than Fahrenheit.
Yeah and it's been explained and you avoid it by saying it doesn't work for you.
So the conversation is over.
I didn't avoid it, I was just hoping that there'd be an explanation that would make sense. "Well you know, this season is vaguely around this degree in general in some places and this around this, or maybe not, very natural and intuitive" wasn't very convincing lol. No offense.
It’s only fair to give credit when credit is due. Doesn’t mean I like that unit, but I can see where they’re coming from.
It doesn't make any sense to me, sorry
Culturally speaking, it's pretty cursed to use some units that are specific to a country instead of the global standard for science. Extra cursed if it's for serious engineering (just ask NASA).