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from the There's-nothing-hotter-than-ITS-90 dept.
At face value, measuring the temperature using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit seems to make sense. After all, the freezing point of water in Celsius is a perfect 0 degrees C — not that inexplicable 32 degrees, as in Fahrenheit. Also, the boiling point of water in Celsius is right at 100 degrees (Okay, 99.98, but what's a couple hundredths of a degree among friends?), instead of the awkward 212 degrees Fahrenheit.
But Fahrenheit may be the best way to measure temperature after all. Why? Because most of us only care about air temperature, not water temperature.
Celsius is great for measuring the temperature of water. However, we're human beings who live on dry ground. As a result, it's best to use a temperature gauge that's suited to the air, as opposed to one that's best used for water. This is one reason why Fahrenheit is superior.
Fahrenheit is also more precise. The ambient temperature on most of the inhabited world ranges from -20 degrees Fahrenheit to 110 degrees Fahrenheit — a 130-degree range. On the Celsius scale, that range is from -28.8 degrees to 43.3 degrees — a 72.1-degree range. This means that you can get a more exact measurement of the air temperature using Fahrenheit because it uses almost twice the scale.
A precise reading of temperature is important to us because just a little variation can result in a perceivable level of discomfort. Most of us are people who are easily affected even by even slight changes in the thermometer, and the Fahrenheit scale is more sensitive to those changes.
It seems the author is saying that nobody uses fractions of degrees in day-to-day life, so Fahrenheit is a better scale because it has smaller increments. I'm not sold on this, because you'll get the same temperature variation within a room whether you set your air-conditioning system to 21°C or 70°F, and people will complain that they prefer the room to be a bit warmer/cooler/whatever.
Does anyone here have another reason for advocating the continued use of the Fahrenheit scale ?
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday July 27 2017, @07:26PM (6 children)
people don't like change, and, if your country didn't fully convert to metric, it won't any time soon.
If you grew up in a Celcius country, you think about temperature in Celcius, if you grew up using Fahrenheit, you will think about temperature in Fahrenheit.
Googling "one man says the U.S. got it right" currently returns this article as the top hit, and no other examples. Weird.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday July 27 2017, @10:55PM (1 child)
I grew up using Fahrenheit. In my 20s we went metric; took less than a week to forget Fahrenheit and think in Celsius (actually, it took me longer to change from calling it centigrade to Celsius).
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday July 28 2017, @03:12PM
It's funny, but to some extent it's what you grow up with. I've been in Europe for decades, and obviously "think" in Celsius. And yet...
Even after all this time, if I'm using English, sometimes something will slip out that references temperatures in Fahrenheit, or distances in miles. These tend to be expressions rather than measurements. For example, saying it's "in the 60s" is just a string of syllables meaning "it's cool out", rather than a temperature measurement. Or saying something is "miles away" just means "far" (and no one says "it's kilometers away").
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @01:04AM (1 child)
It has more to do with the fact that the US is a large enough country that we can get whatever units we want on appliances and other items. Combine that with the fact that the metric system adds absolutely no benefit over the system that's in place here and you get a recipe for never changing. The longer it takes the more infrastructure and things we have that are built with imperial measures.\
Europe went metric country by country, not as a continent. Much of the ugliness is forgotten because most of the infrastructure had to be rebuilt following the world wars.
Most of the rest of the world converted before they developed, after rebuilding or because they weren't large enough to have things produced in the local units. China is a particularly big mess as they still use their traditional measures, as well as both metric and imperial ones depending upon the context.
But, really, unless the Europeans want to pay for us to tear up every road and rebuild ever building and replace all the other things, I suggest they STFU as it's not their money that it's going to cost to make these silly changes.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday July 28 2017, @02:58AM
You sound just like Abe Simpson...
"The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @06:37AM
I'm in Britain, was brought up with the metric system, used SI units for a large part of my working life, but here's the SOP with units I use daily.
Travelling distances: miles (fsck Kilometres...can't grok them at all)
Outside measurement: feet (as in, my front garden is 40 ft x 27ft... )
Inside/Object measurement: mm (which is a bit of a pain when carrying out repairs at home, as my house is old, and most definitely Imperial in all its measurements...)
Area: m² (with occasional use of square footage..)
Temperature: centigrade (fsck Celsius, he got it arse about face..) with increasingly occasional forays into Kelvin territory after decades of not going there.
Liquid Volume (home): pints, gallons (ok, ok, so I like booze...I'm Scottish...), fl oz
Liquid Volume (work): ml, cm³
Solid Volume: m³, Cu ft/ft³/whatever, Chords
Weight (home): oz, lb, st (depending on context.)
Weight (work): g
even though I normally use mm as the base unit in all the CAD/CAM software, I have had drawings submitted in the past year from someone in the UK where the base unit was ft, but hey, we've only been going metric since 1965, that's only two generations ago...
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday July 28 2017, @06:52AM
It's no harder to think in terms of different scales of temperature than currencies, and I've changed currency 6 times in my life without any issues at all (and of course I'm not including holidays in that, those are only for periods best measured in years). There is no inability to change, only unwillingness, and that's usually due to laziness.
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