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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 27 2017, @09:50PM (19 children)
You're only saying that because you're familiar with the Fahrenheit scale. Celsius captures the current air temperature in comfortable numbers of people (what does that even mean?) quite nicely. If you tell me that it's 24 degrees, I know that it's comfortably warm; summertime would mean that a light breeze wouldn't be unwelcome, but if it's below -30 outside then 24 is very welcome. Tell me that it's 105 and I'd have no clue whether that means I'd be most comfortable wearing a tank-top, a T-shirt or a sweater.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @12:53AM (4 children)
Not really, Fahrenheit was originally designed with human body temperature on one end and frozen water ice on the other. Meaning that you've got one end of the scale positioned in a place that's easier for humans to judge. Literally any time we're judging temperature without an instrument we're comparing it to our body temperature.
With Celsius, body temperature falls awkwardly in the middle of the end points they chose. So, you get the completely un-intuitive 37C as the reference point for those measurements. To make matters worse, those end points were arbitrarily defined in a way that makes no sense if we ever travel to other planets as they're only meaningful on the Earth or a planet with earth-like properties. Fahrenheit though is a human-centric measurement, so it's useful anywhere that humans go, but at a cost of being probably worthless when dealing with aliens if we ever meet any.
The SI system is earth-centric and as a result tends to be great for science. The imperial system is human-centric and tends to be useful wherever humans are using the measures for themselves or judging without tools.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @04:16AM (1 child)
So your arbitrary planet has humans, but no water? One end of your scale is still water based anyway so just as meaningless.
You know F goes above 100? It's not an end.
You're just used to F because it was indoctrinated into you. It's no more or less easy to judge against without tools than anything else you were brought up with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @04:29PM
First off, by definition, anywhere we go is going to have humans.
Secondly, Celsius isn't based on the temperature for freezing and boiling water. It's based upon the temperature of freezing and boiling water under specific conditions. A planet that doesn't have the same atmosphere and size isn't going to have the same freezing and boiling points. Even on Earth, if you're up on a tall mountain the difference between 100C and the temperature that things are actually boiling at can be off by several degrees.
It's shocking to me how dead certain you guys are that the SI units are better for daily living and yet are so completely ignorant of how that system works let alone how the imperial measures work. Personally, I know how both systems work and I base my opinion on the fact that the SI units just don't work very well in real life without making a huge number of bastardizations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @09:33AM (1 child)
Riddle me this: Which is the system that clearly most people on earth can handle just fine in their every day life?
That "human-centric" bullshit is just that, bullshit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @04:31PM
Well, I'm convinced, a bunch of former colonies adopted the system used by their former colonizers, so clearly it's the better system.
Well, not really. The pro-SI arguments are so stupid, that the people making them ought to be wearing some sort of helmet so they don't hurt themselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Friday July 28 2017, @01:01AM (11 children)
This is exactly correct.
Hands up all the non-Americans arguing against Celsius.
Thought so.
Lets do the metric system next.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mykl on Friday July 28 2017, @03:40AM (6 children)
No, the next item on the agenda should be why the US date format is mm/dd/yy rather than dd/mm/yy. This is a massive pain in the ass.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @04:22AM (2 children)
Those both suck. It should be YYYY/MM/DD, so that dates are always sorted in the correct order.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @07:17AM
And "correct" in this sense means "not ambiguous".
(Score: 3, Informative) by unauthorized on Friday July 28 2017, @08:51AM
Incorrect. Dates are human-readable representation of time, indented only for our monkey brains to grasp. dd/mm/yyyy is better for presenting data where many datapoints span the same year or predominantly recent events, where as yyyy/mm/dd is better at presenting data where the year is expected to change a lot (eg only a few datapoints per year, or frequently looking up old records).
Sorting on the other hand is a job for computers who represent dates as naturally sortable timestamps.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @09:19AM
Well, it's topped by the standard time format used by date which puts the time and the time zone in between the day and the year: Fri Jul 28 11:17:35 CEST 2017
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @04:34PM (1 child)
dd/mm/yyyy is the dumbest ordering possible in countries that read from left to right. The only time that it makes sense is if you're writing in a language that goes from right to left.
How many times are you interested in all of the things that happened on the 3rd of every month of a year? I can't recall ever having wanted to know that. I do, however, regularly want to know what happened during a particularly month. Hence, mm/dd/yyyy. Arguably, yyyy/mm/dd is even better as we're usually not interested in what happened during any May, we're interested in one particular May, so moving the year ahead of the month would make a ton of sense.
But, starting it with the day is for tossers, wankers and bollocks jugglers. It makes absolutely no sense other than as a masturbatory nod to the backwards minds in Europe.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday July 31 2017, @04:25AM
By your own argument then, dd/mm/yyyy is superior. The emphasis for the date is in the first part, not the middle.
For example, if you want to know about things that happened in March 2017:
Compare to your version:
In your version, you have to hunt for the most relevant part of the date in the middle of the date, rather than the end. Stoopid.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday July 28 2017, @08:16AM (3 children)
First, most of the time, the difference between one degree Fahrenheit is not detectable to a human. One degree centigrade is slightly less than the amount that you'll notice. 25 degrees is definitely warmer than 22 degrees, but 22-23 or 24-25 is not something that you'd notice. At around 20±5 degrees, the difference in perceived temperature due to differences in humidity is more than one degree. This means that, for air temperature in informal use, centigrade gives more precision than is required.
The second is that humans live in places with temperature ranges from about -40 (in either system) up to a bit under 60ºC (140ºF). This means that Fahrenheit needs 3 significant figures to capture that range. If you use 3 significant figures for centigrade, then you're measuring tenths of a degree, which gives you about five times the precision. People may not be comfortable with fractions, but people use decimals all the time in countries that use metric units.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @03:10PM
Speak for yourself. I'm a healthy male, age 57 who walks 1-2 miles daily in the south Texas afternoon heat, you know, for my health.
When the home thermostat is set at 73 (F), I have trouble sleeping because it's too warm.
When it's set to 71, I need a blanket, but then I get too warm and take it off, then I get cold and put it back on...
When I set it to 70 or below (within reason) I sleep just fine under a light blanket.
But the best is when set to 72 and I can comfortably sleep under a sheet, no blankets required.
I would very much like to have a thermostat with a 0.5 degree F increment.
My vote would be to use Celcius, BUT, renamed to be spell-able by the average 3rd grader (C-scale?) and, here's the important part, then tripled so that freezing (water) is at 0 deg. and boiling is at 300. This puts my target sleep zone at a nice round 67 (or 66.6... for you evil purists), and too hot to go outside will be at an alarming triple digit 100. (I have no trouble walking 2 miles in the 105 deg F. Texas heat, but then, I'm healthier than most people, my age or otherwise.)
The tripled Celsius scale has all the advantages of both systems.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Friday July 28 2017, @07:21PM (1 child)
Not all degrees are equal, even when using the same scale. 70 degrees with low humidity (say ~45%, considered close to ideal in most HVAC documentation I have read) is much more comfortable than 70 degrees with 75%+ humidity. At the latter level of saturation, individual degrees Fahrenheit do make a difference.
My question is, do thermostats differ by percents of a degree in Celcius? If not, you definitely have an issue of practical precision, which seems to be the point of TFA: what good is a system you use improperly, or cannot use to best effect? I can get single-degree precision in Fahrenheit on my programmable unit right now, and it matters to me.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @08:58PM
Thermostats in Celsius usually allow you to set the temperature by half-degrees (so, 21º goes to 21.5º then 22º, etc). So basically the same precision as in F for all intents and purposes.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by KritonK on Friday July 28 2017, @09:40AM
Indeed. I'm more familiar with Celsius, and I'm as comfortable with this scale as you describe. Having lived in the US for a few years, as well, I am also familiar with the Farenheit scale: if the temperature is in the sixties, it is cool; if it is in the seventies, it is comfortable; if it is in the eighties, it is hot. One might argue that the Farenheit scale is too precise, as knowing that the temperature is within a ten degree range is often sufficient. Similarly, if one needs more precision with the Celsius scale, one can always use decimals, but for ordinary use they are unnecessary. I've seen outdoor temperature displays giving the temperature with a 0.5 degree (Celsius) precision, and have never seen the point in that.
(Score: 2) by rondon on Friday July 28 2017, @12:20PM
You didn't actually address anything in my argument. I believe people don't appreciate working in negative numbers, and that they like having the ends of the scale be approximately 0 and 100. You just said I believe that because I'm American. Well, I'm American and I vastly prefer the metric system for the exact same reason that I prefer Fahrenheit - 1, 10, 100 - easy units for people with 10 fingers to work in.