TWO HUNDRED AND SEVETY THREE KELVIN I’M FREEZING
Fahrenheit is best for ambient temperatures. 0 F is what humans feel is a very cold day, and 100 F is what humans feel is a very hot day.
Celsius is best for literally everything else, but for humans feeling of ambient temperature Fahrenheit is best
only if you grow up with fahrenheit.
100F was defined as the human body temperature (The guy they used had a cold or something so it’s off by a degree and a half.)
That’s useful for perception of heat. When the dry bulb gets above 100F, wind only cools you down by sweat evaporation, and when the wet bulb gets above 100F, even that can’t cool you down, and you will die if you don’t get to a cooler or drier environment.
This is more intuitive than 36.5C.
what Fahrenheit used for his endpoints was 1) the melting point of a brine mixture that he didn’t write down the ratio of, and 2) his wife’s armpit.
those “bulb” things is something i only ever hear of from americans. it’s never used here.
and I fail to see how two numbers are somehow differently intuitive. they are just numbers. also, 36.5 is too low. it’s pretty much 37.0 now, because average body temp has interestingly enough shifted since he took those measurements.
What does Europe use for apparent temperature measurement then? Just humidity and not evaporation?
temperature, wind speed and direction, and humidity are given separately. regular news report style forecasts don’t give humidity at all.
What’s a dry/wet bulb?
Dry bulb is a normal temperature reading with say a thermometer. Wet bulb is that same thermometer but it is wrapped in a wet cloth to simulate evaporation of sweat.
The purpose of wet bulb temperature measurement is to fix the dangerous temperature threshold at body temperature instead of having to adjust for humidity. So if the wet bulb temperature crosses 35C/95F you know that it is dangerous to even be outside because your sweat can’t even evaporate enough to prevent you from overheating just standing in the shade.
Dry bulb is the temperature independent of humidity. Wet bulb is has a wet cloth on the thermometer bulb. This simulates how much sweat cools you in the current humidity and wind.
Measuring humidity instead and cross-referencing to get heat index is more common these days, but IMO it’s worse. 120 in the desert vs 120 heat index due to humidity is the difference between someone using a hair dryer on your face and getting cooked in a steam room, and it doesn’t consider wind and cloud cover.
Wait, doesn’t everybody walk around with a pocket psychrometric chart?
fahrenheit doesn’t exist if you use celsius i guess??
It doesn’t, because celsius users doesn’t think about fahrenheit at all.
yeah, and it seems to me like they’re the wrong ones here, because i can think about things in celsius perfectly fine without my worldview imploding, in fact i can pretty accurately estimate temperature conversions even.
Like it’s great that you guys don’t have to use it, but please think about it a little bit harder before saying something really goofy that can be explained easily. Or just like, shitpost.
Um. No.
If I said a movie was a 7/10, you would understand what that means because it’s a scale. You don’t have to “grow up” using a 0-10 scale to understand it.
Like if I asked you to rate something on a scale of 4-17, you’d understand what I mean. The numbers are different but the concept of a scale remains the same.
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But to understand “x out of a possible y” you have to understand scales, or at least percentages which is the same concept. Then, if you understand percentages, you understand fahrenheit.
Honestly more places should do what the U.S. does and just teach both (and Kelvin). Because ultimately there isn’t one perfect system of measurement for every possible application. Celsius is of course better in lab settings, Fahrenheit is better for cooking and meteorology.
Honestly, I thought I’d deleted that comment before you replied. I’d broken my promise to myself of never commenting in the celsius/fahrenheit threads.
I understand. Tbh, I usually try to stay out of arguments too, but the fahrenheit debate is pretty low-stakes and kinda fun sometimes so I figured I’d jump in.
Really not. Basically, you just need to peg feelings to a number, just like you are doing.
Celsius:
below -20 = deadly even with good gear, you can’t spend long here
-15 = very dangerous / deadly
-10 = starting to get dangerous
-5 = starting to get uncomfortable
0 = very cold
5 = cold
10 = a little cold
15 = cool
20 = nice
25 = warm
30 = hot
35 = starting to get uncomfortable
40 = starting to get dangerous
45 = very dangerous / deadly
50+ = deadly even with good gear, you can’t spend long hereI don’t think you understand what I said.
Also, that’s a lot of explaining, and lots of feelings associated with arbitrary numbers. Fahrenheit doesn’t need anywhere near that level of explanation. It doesn’t necessitate the pegging of feelings to random numbers.
The sentence “Fahrenheit is a 0-100 scale of how hot it is outside” is all anyone needs to immediately understand and be able to use fahrenheit. I didn’t need to type out a long list of what each temperature value means to me. There is no need for a mneumonic such as “10 is cold, 20s not, 30s warm, and 40s hot”
If you’re doing math in a lab, absolutely use Celsius. I’m not saying it doesn’t have a place. It’s just not the be-all end-all most perfectest temperature measurement system ever.
I think you are projecting your feeling onto others; I don’t have “a mneumonic” in my head. That was for your benefit, since you are not immersed in that scale.
When I see the weather report and it says tomorrow it is going to be 25 degrees with light wind, I know that it will be a pleasant day. The same way I know what the reporter is saying, I have been immersed in the English language since birth, it requires no though to understand the words they are saying.
It requires no thought to understand that 25 degrees and light wind is a nice day. It just is.
I don’t have that intuitive sense for the F scale, I always have to convert it to a sensible number. I know 100 is around 37, which is really hot.
But it requires you to be familiar with an arbitrary -20 - 40 scale. Which makes way less sense than a 0-100 scale.
I don’t need to use the mnemonic either, I grew up in the U.S. so I understand both systems perfectly well. But the mnemonic exists because Celsius uses an inherently less sensible scale. You only understand it internally because you grew up with it. A person who grew up with neither system would find fahrenheit easier to understand from an unbiased position because it’s more logical.
But it requires you to be familiar with an arbitrary -20 - 40 scale. Which makes way less sense than a 0-100 scale.
Your 0-100 scale is just as arbitrary, in fact even more, since it doesn’t even cover the daily temperatures huge parts of the global population lives in.
deg C is no more arbitrary than deg F; any more than French is more arbitrary than English.
It is a strange argument to say “You only understand it internally because you grew up with it.”; well yes, but that is exactly the same with the deg F scale.
A person who grew up with neither system would find fahrenheit easier to understand from an unbiased position because it’s more logical.
In your opinion.
In my opinion it is far more logical to base you temperature scale on repeatable physical measurements, than say what a person feels.
0 C = water freezes
0 F =Several accounts of how he originally defined his scale exist, but the original paper suggests the lower defining point, 0 °F, was established as the freezing temperature of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride (a salt)
100 C = water boils
100 F = best estimate for average human body temperature.The F scale is not built on logic.
if I knew that you are a european and you told me a movie was 5/10, i would assume it was average. if i knew you were American, i would assume it was dogshit.
Americans have a weird relationship with numbers.
also, as mentioned in another post: if 0 is too cold and 100 is too hot, surely 50 would be a pleasant temperature?
Dear god, is Fahrenheit the reason behind meaningless movie ratings? Another reason to hate it…
“Americans” ah, I see. You don’t actually care about effective systems of measurement, you just want to shit on people that are different from you.
Also, as answered in another post: Why would you assume that humans, an endothermic species, prefers exactly 50% thermal energy? Of course we sit around the 70F region, we’re warm-blooded mammals. We don’t want to be half cold, we want to be mostly warm.
No matter how much you complain or argue, it’s never going to be true that Celsius is the one-and-only most perfect system of temperature measurement. The fact is that both systems have their applications, as any intelligent member of the scientific community would tell you.
Get over it.
considering america is the only place that uses it, i can’t really find any other factor to use.
the point of a temperature scale is to quantify temperature as to ease its communication. if one player is using a different scale that’s just complicating things.
also, if its an “intuitive” scale, surely it should take human bias into account?
So you’re saying that 0 and 100 aren’t intuitively obvious? I find that really strange when it’s doing a better job keeping to base 10 than the metric system in this particular use case.
They aren’t. And fahrenheit is not a 0-100 scale. It is just the scale you picked out of it in order to make some kind of sense out of the non-intuitive system which it is.
No, they’re not. I couldn’t tell what those numbers mean even if you asked, but I can tell what 0°C outside feels, and what 100°C sauna feels. I can also tell that 21°C is a nice ambient temperature for chilling, and 15-20°C is ideal for most outdoor sports.
Yeah sure those are not necessarily nice round numbers, but I’ve used the scale all my life so it’s intuitive to me, same as the Fahrentrash is intuitive to you
No, that’s not how this works.
You understand the concept of a scale. If I asked you to rate something on a scale of 1-10, you know what i mean. It has nothing to do with intuitiveness. If I asked you to rate something on a scale of 7-23, you’d know what I mean, even though the numbers are different than what you’re used to.
So if I said it was 100F outside, you’d know that’s very uncomfortably hot, as hot as a normal person can really tolerate, because you’d recognize it as the high end of the scale.
Everyone can understand fahrenheit, some people just try really hard not to.
You really don’t understand what reference points are. The scale is useless without reference points, and I’m not accustomed to them while I have very clear ones for Celsius.
Sure I can understand that 100F feels very hot, but if I was outside in that temperature I couldn’t tell you an estimate in Fahrenheit how hot it feels
The reference points are 0 and 100! You don’t have to get accustomed to them, they are the same reference points used by the entire base-10 numerical system. It is a percentage.
And yes, you could step out into 100F degree heat and accurately estimate the temperature. Is it the hottest day of summer? Are you beginning to experience symptoms of heat fatigue? Are you saying to yourself “This is one of the hottest days I have ever experienced”, all the same stuff you’d think if you stepped outside into 37.8C weather. Then it’s probably close to the high end of the scale, i.e. 100F.
Okay so you’re making lot of weird assumptions here. I don’t know how hot weather 37°C feels, other than that for me 30+ is absolute hell. I’ve never experienced heatwave that bad for what I remember. Hottest summer days here are just about 30°C, and it’s miserable.
Reference point means that I’m able to easily understand what that temperature is.
I can easily understand 100°C though, sauna is getting too hot and I should open window and chill down with feeding the fire.
For 0-30 I can easily understand how I should dress outside, and 0°C is easy to understand because just above it and I know it’s going to be wet and slippery if there was negatives before it, and below 0 is slippery if there was positives earlier.What is intuitive to you is totally a subjective experience based on your earlier experiences and what you’re used to use to measure temperatures.
0 and 100 aren’t just “very cold” and “very hot”. They are potentially dangerously so, and you need to take extra precautions at temperatures beyond those limits. You don’t necessarily have to understand it beyond that.
It is pretty funny how your supposed completely intuitive human feeling system needs to have all these disclaimers added to it whenever you try to explain it. Perhaps it is only intuitive because you are used to it after all?
If you’d say it is 100F outside, I wouldn’t know what you mean because I have no concept of Fahrenheit. Is 100F actually hot? What is that in Celsius? Do you mean hot as in “better to wear light clothes” or “Do not set a foot outside or you will melt”?
What does it mean “as hot as a normal person can really tolerate”? What about a abnormal person?
It gives nothing of information. Just a rough indication of what it might be. Which isn’t useful at all.
Do you understand the base-10 numerical system? Do you understand percentages? Congratulations, you understand fahrenheit. You can no longer honestly say, on the internet or otherwise, that fahrenheit is meaningless to you. You are now a fahrenheit understander, whether you like it or not.
Also, your second statement answers your first question. When I say “as hot as a normal person can tolerate” i do not mean “wear light clothes”, I mean “as hot as a normal person can tolerate”. Thats why i said “as hot as a normal person can tolerate”. Happy to clear that up you for you.
Abnormalities/outliers are not something on which we should base standards of measurements.
You keep saying this but it still doesn’t make any sense. 50% heat would be average middle of the pack nice? And “as hot as normal person can tolerate” is full of shit because neither you or I have no concept of what “normal person can tolerate”, as the normal depends on your geography. And this is quite a good reason why claiming “Fahrenheit is how human feels” is just idiotic as it relies both on a specific climate and having learned that scale growing up.
I swear you Americans can get so fucking stupid on this topic, it’s like claiming that Finnish is the most intuitive language because it’s the language of how love (average love, excluding outliers obviously) feels
When it comes to a single number on a scale, whatever you grew up with will be more “obvious”. 100F doesn’t give me any more information than 38C does. The whole “base 10” thing only matters if you are actually doing some math to that number.
100F definitely gives more insight as to the temperature. It’s a 100/100. That’s as hot as a person can really tolerate. If you understand percentages or how to rate things on a scale of 1-10, you understand fahrenheit.
That’s as hot as a person can really tolerate.
There’s large chunks of the world proving that false every day. For the geographically impared, the simple fact that Phoenix has existed for longer than air conditioning, proves that statement false.
And 0F as the low point is equally as useless.
That’s why I used the qualifier “really” and in another comment I mentioned “in average temperate climates” If you were more familiar with statistics you would understand how means and outliers work. Just like someone can score a movie an 11/10 or a -1/10, it is possible for the weather to exceed 100F or drop below 0F. Just not typical.
And while I didn’t say it specifically, 0F is similarly the average lowest temperature a person can tolerate/expect before beginning to experience problems.
Hypothermia can be a problem in temperatures as high as 50F. 0F is a meaningless number, outside of purely subjective “it’s cold” uses.
fun fact about phoenix, going outside on a day that’s about 100f, is not fucking pleasant they literally have air misters to help provide cooling, which barely does anything.
People are just fucking insane and will live in places like alaska where the ground is literally frozen all year round. Phoneix AZ is not “habitable”, it’s bearable. Also a lot of these places, especially in hotter dryer regions, will have covered sidewalks to provide shade, (at least historically) people would and still do wear large hats to block a lot of the sun. Even then a lot of people wouldn’t spend a whole bunch of time outside in that heat.
also, have you seen death valley? It kills people, every fucking year.
Base 10 makes it much easier to remember.
When was the last time you did math related to temperature?
For day to day use, it’s just a single number, no one is doing any conversions, etc, with the number. That was my point. There’s nothing to remember. Do you forget what 72F feels like? Do you have to scale it in your head?
Kelvin is used for math pretty regularly. Rankine was too.
base 10 is literally just 0-9 so yeah, everyone remembers that.
scaling based on the base 10 figure makes conversions easier, so there’s that.
the numbers may be, but if you asked me to tell you what they feel like i would have to convert them to celsius first. where i live temperatures are generally between -30 and +30, and i could tell you in an instant what I would wear for a given temperature in that range. 50F though? no clue. since it’s right between 0 and 100 i guess it would be just right, temperature wise, so t-shirt and long pants?
yeah no shit, but think of it this way, if you were put into a place that was 100f, you would go “damn this bitch hot out here” and if you were put into a place that was 0f you would go “damn this joint cold as fuck fr”
Stop thinking in celsius.
What if it was 99f? Or 1f? Would your scientific “damn this bitch hot out here” change to something else?
no? Because it’s not entirely hinged around the temperature being one specific number???
Do you think the human body is a perfectly accurate thermometer?
why would i stop? there’s only one place in the world that uses another scale, and it’s dangerous for me to even travel there.
because we’re not talking about celsius? We’re talking about fahrenheit?
This is like pulling up to a car meet in a semi truck, and being really confused when nobody thinks your ride is sick.
the parent post was literally about Fahrenheit vs Celsius.
Can you remember that at temperatures near 0F and 100F, you need to take special precautions when going outside? The rest is a matter of getting used to what the numbers mean, but those are very intuitive danger points.
-18 is such an arbitrary place for “special precautions”. at 0, I know to start driving more carefully since the roads ice up. at -15, i know to wear long johns. at +15, i know to start using a thinner jacket. at -30, i know to use a thick hat and wax on my cheeks to prevent the blood vessels from rupturing. at +30, I know to use a large hat and sun cream on my cheeks to prevent them from burning.
18 is such an arbitrary place for “special precautions”
cool little trick, you see how -18 is like, pretty close to -20, yeah. You can just round them. It really doesn’t matter
see, that’s what i’m saying. having a scale that starts at “it really doesn’t matter” makes it hard to use for everyday things.
For Celsius, 0 is freezing cold and 100 is boiling hot - that’s intuitive too.
I have literally never felt 0°F in my life and couldn’t tell you how cold it is, just that it’s very cold. I believe everyone has a rough understanding how 0°C and 100°C feel though.
It is intuitive, and that’s fine. Having the same intuition around human comfort zones is also fine. One measurement system can’t really cover everything.
People tend not to want to live in places where it’s routinely under 0F or over 100F. You’ll tolerate it, but you won’t like it. It’s a very natural range of human comfort.
The real reason Fahrenheit will never die!
https://youtu.be/nROK4cjQVXM
(Finnemore’s conversation between Farenheit and Celsius)Use Kelvin then, 314°K is a way bigger number
No °, just K
314 K
Once again… the classic argument of: “Well, I grew up using this system, and I’m used to the system. I have built an internal intuition for how hot and cold the temperature is. I am used to >100 being hot! 40 is not hot!”
Well then. I grew up using celcius and… “IT’S FOURTY FUCKING ONE DEGREES OUTSIDE?” sounds just as hot.
For proof that this thread is just people justifying what they know as better somehow, look no further than Canada.
We do cooking temps in Fahrenheit, weather in Celsius. Human weights in pounds, but never pounds and oz. Food weights in grams, cooking weights in pounds and oz. Liquid volume in millilitres and litres, but cooking in cups, teaspoons and tablespoons. Speed & distance in kilometres, heights in feet and inches.
Try and give this any consistency and people will look at you like you’re fucked. The next town is 100km over, I’m 5ft 10in, a can of soda is 355ml, it’s 21c out and I have the oven roasting something at 400f. Tell me it’s 68f out and I will fight you.
People like what they are used to, and will bend over backwards to justify it. This becomes blatantly obvious when you use a random mix of units like we do, because you realize that all that matters is mental scale.
If Fahrenheit is “how people feel” then why are feet useful measurements of height when 90% of people are between 4ft and 6ft? They aren’t. You just know the scale in your head, so when someone says they’re 7ft tall you say “dang that’s tall”. That’s it.
No one is gonna post this vid?!?
0 Degrees Farenhight = very cold, 100 Defrees Farenhight = very hot
0 Degrees Celcius = very cold, 100 Degrees Celcius = dead
0 Degrees Kelvin = dead, 100 Degrees Kelvin = also dead…
I think the reason people are saying that Fahrenheit “feels” right is because we use a base 10 number system. 1-10 and 0%-100% feel right to us because of this. If you somehow knew nothing about each temperature unit, but you did know base 10, I feel like Fahrenheit would be more intuitive. Obviously if you grew up with Celsius that would feel normal.
Disclaimer: I feel like the US needs to adopt metric already. It’s so much better.
Use the same logic to use km/h then.
0 to 100 is better than 0 to 60.
60mph/97kmh is not that fast, though. 90mph/157kmh is pretty fast.
If you somehow knew nothing about each temperature unit, but you did know base 10, I feel like Fahrenheit would be more intuitive.
Would it though? Because it’s not like people who didn’t grew up with Fahrenheit can just intuitively use and interpret it. Maybe base ten is “more intuitive”, but I’d argue not to any meaningful degree. Both scales have to be explained, experienced, and tied to personal reference points.
But really it is much better for human temperatures.
It’s just intuitive, 0F is 100% cold, and 100F is 100% hot.
When the dry bulb gets above 100F, wind only cools you down by sweat evaporation, and when the wet bulb gets above 100F, even that can’t cool you down, and you will die if you don’t get to a cooler or drier environment.
When I was out in SD recently the temperature was reaching 100F or above frequently and it sucked but it wasn’t that bad. Where I live in Cali and it gets that hot by the beach with humidity well into the 70% range sometimes I literally felt like I was about to die just sitting inside with a fan blowing right at me. Humidity is such a huge factor.
Lol, 0F is not 100% cold. That is barely cold unless you live in very warm place like tropic or something
Do you live in northern canada?
Europe
People do live outside of North America. I know that must be news to you, but it is the truth.
Is 50°F 50% cold or 50% hot?
0F is 100% cold, and 100F is 100% hot.
So 50% is perfect temperature, no?
I love it when it’s -10% hot in winter nights or 110% hot around the equator. Makes perfect sense.
Yes, it does a better job of impressing that is all of the hot (or cold), and then 10% more than the difference between 38 and 43
i assure you, we who grew up with celsius absolutely know the dire difference between 38 and 43. 38 is death, 43 is the crimson realms where even souls wither.
all this “which one is better for x” is nonsense, you develop a feel for whichever you grew up with. it’s just that the math is less stupid with metric. that’s all.
Any of the systems is better if you have an intuitive understanding of it. I don’t know what 107 F would feel like, just as you don’t know what 42°C feels like. But it’s not a thing where one is inherently better than the other…
Yes, it does, actually, if you understand how thermal energy works.
Being 41% of the way to boiling water sounds pretty hot to me, too.
“Intuitive” is a meaningless metric for a single scaled number. Whichever system you are used to will be the more “intuitive”.
Also, climate can play into which system feels more useful. Where I live, 100F occurs only rarely (and since air conditioning is almost ubiquitous, not something I’d bother looking out for), while 0C is an outdoor temperature that I do need to be aware of for half the year.
I disagree that either would be just as intuitive. Fahrenheit being 0=cold and 100=hot is intuitive because there are a lot of things we do in the world that exist on a scale of 0 - 100. Percentages, just off the bat. Also, fahrenheit has a higher degree of fidelity in the temperature range that we use.
Celsius’s general temperature scale is like -10 - 40 which is absolutely not intuitive because it doesn’t look like any other scale we use as humans. I agree that we get used to Celsius fast and it’s a fine it’s not like it’s super confusing (and Celsius is so much more useful scientifically).
It has only been 100°F once in the last century. Nobody has any point of reference to make this intuitive. 30°C/85°F is defined as hot around here. 40°C/100°F is defined as national emergency.
The heat index gets over 100°F in much of the southern US every summer
“It has only been 100F once in the last century”
Lmao what?? Go ahead and find me a source for that.
I guarantee you it reaches 100F regularly during summer in many temperate climates, that’s not even including warmer regions.
Do you think your little small town is the only place in the universe?
it reaches 100F regularly during summer in many temperate climates,
Not when it’s near the sea, like most of western Europe. It’s the same shit as “why don’t you have airco?” Because it was never that hot.
Tell that to the gulf coast, or Mexico, or central America, or Africa, or Australia.
Your experiences are not universal. Just because you’ve never seen 100F doesn’t mean no one else has. That’s absurd.
“cold” and “hot” are completely non-descriptive and useless parameters for your supposed “intuitive” system.
Which system did you grow up with? Because I grew up from the start with Celsius und it is 100% intuitive to me. Everytime you americans use your funny temperature numbers I have to stop and use a tool for transforming it or I simply ignore it and go “low means cold and high means hot, how high? Ain’t nobody got time for dat!”
So I disagree with your notion that Fahrenheit is intuitive. The system you grew up with and have multiple experiences as reference points for, is the system you feel is intuitive is also my opinion.
What you grew up with =/= what is intuitive.
That is not what intuitive means. You’re talking about what’s “familiar”.
Familiarity is subjective. Intuitiveness is objective.
If we want to go that road, intuition is according to Wikipedia:
Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge, without recourse to conscious reasoning or needing an explanation.[2][3] Different fields use the word “intuition” in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; gut feelings; inner sensing; inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition; and the ability to understand something instinctively, without any need for conscious reasoning.[4][5] Intuitive knowledge tends to be approximate.[6]
Since every temperature system needs an explanation, namely the reference points, no system is or even can be intuitive per this definition.
Never said either one can’t be intuitive, just that the scale of farenheit has a precedence outside of it being an arbitrary temperature measurement by being a scale that goes from about 0 - 100.
If you had never used either scale and some one asked: “which is more intuitive, a temperature scale where -10 is really cold and 40 is really hot or one where 0 is really cold and 100 is really hot?” I know which one I would pick because I’ve done things before like calculate percentages and work in a base 10 system so it makes sense for the scale to be between two orders of magnitude.
But that is what we others are saying: there is no “more intuitive” system, just one you know better and can quicker evaluate how it would feel! So you agree with us.
Everything you said can be said about Celsius scale as well.
There is also a precedence for Celsius more than just an arbitrary number between 0 & 100.
A scale for liquid water, you know, the stuff that is the reason why we call our little spaceship "the blue marble"and why we even have this discussion, because it is the basis of all life on earth, is also not a bad choice for a number between 0-100.
And you made me curious: in what context did you have to calculate percentages of temperature that were not in Kelvin? Because as soon as percentages and temperatures are close to each other in one sentence the only example I can think of are things like reaction kinetic calculations and those are neither in Celsius nor in Fahrenheit.
You should examine your definition of intuitive. Yes, technically nothing is intuitive it’s just based on what you know because intuition is also based on what you’re used to.
By your logic, if you compare a machine that powers on by pressing a big glowing red button labeled “ON” and one that turns on by you performing the haka in front of a camera while reciting a Shakespeare sonnet backwards you might say that there is no “more intuitive” way to turn on a machine, just one you know better and can perform quicker!
You aren’t reading what you’re replying to because I said in a previous post that it’s easy to get used to Celsius and fahrenheit and there’s no difference to either and I also already said that Celsius is better for science because it’s based on water.
Everything you said can be said about Celsius scale as well.
At this point you’re just lying or further proving that you didn’t even read the post you tried to respond patronizingly to. I said that the Fahrenheit scale is intuitive because it’s a 0-100 scale which is similar to other scales we use all the time and works well for our base 10 counting system being a scale essentially between two powers of 10. Neither of that can be said for Celsius and that’s so obvious I think you just didn’t read it before replying.
And hell, on top of all this, I think we should all switch to using Celsius! Because as I mentioned it’s easy to grasp both scales and using Celsius makes understanding a lot of science easier which I think is the only real argument in this arbitrary choice between the two! But I’m out here explaining the use of Fahrenheit because people here can’t grasp my explanation for why people might use it and are acting like they’ve got the defeater to a post they didn’t even read!
But fahrenheit is not a 0-100 scale. You have just arbitrarily picked out 0-100 because that makes your brain more easily understand the non-intuitive system which is fahrenheit.
That’s not either scale being intuitive or unintuitive, that’s your familiarity with one over the other.
I got curious so I did some research on the definitions and why everything is this way. It looks like they originally picked the coldest thing they had (brine, possibly inspired by the coldest weather), the freezing point of water, human body temperature, and the boiling point of water. It was supposed to be brine at 0, water freezing at 30, the human body at 90, and water boiling at 240. Fahrenheit then recalibrated his scale slightly to make his math (and thermometer design and production) easier, and also because he noticed water actually boiled at 212 by his newly modified scale.
Looking at it like that work the context of what they had at the time and what they were trying to do, it makes a lot of sense.
How is 0F 100% cold though, most places will never get that cold, so it surely makes more sense to have 0F at freezing point of water and 100F at 38C?
Freezing point of pure water - but saltwater/brine freezes as a different temperature.
pure water at mean atmosphere pressure at sea level if we’re getting technical, but frankly human body temperature varies from 35.5C (95.9F) to 37.5C (99.5F) anyway, and that’s before considering when people are ill, so if we go down that route it falls apart quickly enough that the definition of 100 given above is clearly just as arbitrary
I’m okay with “mean atmosphere pressure” bc that’s what is most likely to occur, whereas pure water seems far less likely to be found in a coastal village. The oddness of the measuring abilities of the devices made at the time is a more damning argument, but less for them back then and more for us now. Still, roughly negative ten to 40 for Celsius vs. roughly zero to one hundred for Fahrenheit, the latter does seem to use more “natural” numbers, even if nothing else about non-metric systems makes any sense.
Not to mention negative numbers.
Celsius peopke are cold blooded.
Forty-one sounds insanely hot as an outside temperature if that’s the standard you’re used to. And that’s the thing that the Fahrentards refuse to wrap their head around.
What annoys me about that phrasing, is that “how water feels” is quite relevant to how humans feel.
The obvious example is that if it’s below 0°C, it starts freezing, which causes slippery sidewalks, snow, dry air, all that stuff.
But just in general having a feeling how much water will evaporate and later precipitate at certain temperatures, and even stuff like how hot beverages and cooking temperatures are, it’s all still relevant for humans…Humans are mostly water. If water boils, then humans will mostly boil too.
The obvious example is that if it’s below 0°C, it starts freezing, which causes slippery sidewalks, snow, dry air, all that stuff. But just in general having a feeling how much water will evaporate and later precipitate at certain temperatures, and even stuff like how hot beverages and cooking temperatures are, it’s all still relevant for humans…
that’s an interesting idea, BUT, the boiling point for water also exists under f as well, it’s just 212 f, which if you want to round for convenience, is 200f. 100f is just about half the boiling point of water.
I guess you celsius folks might be more water pilled than the average US citizen, but it’s not like it’s impossible.
100F is just about half
Your scale in water terms starts at 32. 100 is nowhere near halfway between 32 and 212
the celsius scale literally covers 55% of the range of the fahrenheit scale. I’d say “about half” is perfectly reasonable.
granted, it skews since you’re starting on the low end. The figure is more like 122f right in the middle, which is, not great, but i wasn’t going to calculate the half boiling point as i’ve literally never seen it be relevant anywhere lol.
Celcius degrees are quite a bit larger than Fahrenheit degrees. 0 to 100C is much larger than 0 to 100F so I don’t get what you mean by Celcius covering about half of Fahrenheit. In any case neither scale runs out of numbers high or low
my main point was that accuracy matters a lot less with fahrenheit, because it’s so much broader. a range of about 10 degrees fahrenheit is the average subjectively experienced “change” in temperature, at least on the higher end, where there’s more difference between the individual numbers. On the cold side there’s a lot less variance as it meets at about -40 in both systems.
In any case neither scale runs out of numbers high or low
this is very true though, hard to run out of numbers when you can just make more up, although there is an ultimate limit in either direction, due to what temperature actually measures. That’s a physics thing though.
The words you are looking for are that Fahrenheit is more precise. But it’s not as there are an infinity of numbers between any two integers.
My thermometer at work which I use for health and safety stuff reports temperature to two decimal places. Had we wanted more precision we could have gone with twenty decimal places. In too big or too small metric units we use multipliers - metres are too small for long distances so we use kilometres (thousands of metres), metres are too big for construction so we use millimetres (thousandths of metres)
Where Celcius degrees are too big, people (scientists, since whole degrees or a single decimal is enough for everyone else) use milikelvins
In Celcius water boils at exactly 100°C, and you don’t have to round, and 50°C is exactly half the boiling point of water.
Yes, Celsius users are waterpilled: the whole system is based on the temperature at which water freezes and evaporates at 1 atm pressure.
(You’re just fucking with us right? Like Celsius is has a coarser base unit, and the range applicable to human temperatures are not such pretty numbers, but you can’t be seriously thinking Fahrenheit makes more sense for when we talk about water?)
In Celcius water boils at exactly 100°C, and you don’t have to round, and 50°C is exactly half the boiling point of water.
unless you’re doing literal chemistry, the specific boiling point of the water doesn’t matter, especially for any subjective referential experiences you might have, such as, going outside.
(You’re just fucking with us right? Like Celsius is has a coarser base unit, and the range applicable to human temperatures are not such pretty numbers, but you can’t be seriously thinking Fahrenheit makes more sense for when we talk about water?)
i’m not saying it’s better, i’m just saying you’re having a failure of imagination to conceptualize the usage of the fahrenheit system if you so pleased to use it in such a specific manner, which almost nobody here does. You could still do it though.
Cooking is basically water based chemistry, so it makes a lot of sense to use Celsius.
idk man, there’s a lot of temperatures in cooking that are like, kind of close? Not that close, but like, kind of close. Even then, the one case where i consider it genuinely mattering is boiling water which like, you can just kinda know.
Temperature doesn’t care about your feelings.
Oh, how rude.
Their friend is a dumbass though.
Strange, because it is bullshit.
Fahrenheit isn’t how people feel, otherwise 50° would be perfect temperature.
You Americans are just used to thinking in Fahrenheit, that is why you think it is how humans feel. As a European, I “feel” in Celsius.
Fahrenheit isn’t how people feel, otherwise 50° would be perfect temperature.
it is though? It’s like perfectly comfortable because you can dress up just enough to where you’re actually wearing a decent bit of clothing, but you can also dress down to a pretty light set of clothing as well.
This is also ignoring that this is both, arbitrary, and also completely subjective to the person.
The human body might end up liking 70f more than 50f, purely because it’s 96f inside the body, so something lower to allow heat transfer, but not low enough to be physically uncomfortable would be more expected.
Actually, here’s a good question, why do you land on the 50f point? Are you expecting the middle to be the most optimal point of perfection? Or is this just a metric brain thing?
Why would you pick 50 for the perfect temp? Genuinely curious why land on that number.
Because 0° is the minimum a body is supposed to endure according to the tweet, and 100° is the maximum a body should endure.
So the ideal temperature should be right in the middle.
But it isn’t, so Fahrenheit isn’t “how people feel”.
Why should the ideal temperature be right in the middle of the range?
It’s no surprise that the maximum end of the range is right around the body temperature, as it’s difficult for the body to keep itself cool once the environment is around or warmer than the body temperature. Sure, we can sweat, but that uses up a lot of water and people generally find that getting all sweaty to not be pleasant. Run out of water or raise the temperature too much and it gets dangerous pretty quickly.
On the other hand, if the environment is a lot cooler than the body temperature, then it is difficult for the body to keep warm. I’m sure for our distant ancestors who lived in what is now Africa, their minimum temperature was much higher, possibly putting the ideal temperature right around the middle of their range. Luckily for us, we have clothing and can put on more clothing to stay warm, which is how we can now make the minimum so low. But while we can use clothing to lower our minimum, we really don’t have anything different to raise our maximum vs. our ancestors - we’re both limited by how well we can cool ourselves by sweating. So for that reason it doesn’t really surprise me that our ideal temperature is towards the upper end of what we consider the minimum and maximum temperatures.
Because it is in the middle of that “0 is really really cold, 100 is really really hot” “human feeling” fahrenheit scale you guys keep going on about.
This is the first time I’ve heard about a “human feeling” scale so sure, 50 must be perfect.
Fahrenheit literally meant to base the scale with 100 being human body temp.
It was later rescaled by Cavendish to put the freezing point of water at exactly 32 and boiling point at exactly 212, giving a nicely-divisible 180-degree separation between freezing and boiling. That shift is why body temperature is 98.6.
I heard circular thermometers were how it was done then so he lined up 180° with 180°.
Horse* body temp
I’m pretty sure that wasn’t actually Fahrenheit’s intention, more a happy accident. Also if your body temp is 100°F then you’re running a mild/moderate fever.
I don’t usually run, but when I do, I run a mild/moderate fever.
The scale was adjusted later to make freezing and boiling points land on exact numbers with an easily-divisible 180-dregrees between them (180 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 20, 36, 45, 60, and 90).
https://archive.org/details/paper-doi-10_1098_rstl_1777_0038
I like this version better than “he had a fever when he measured 100 degrees” so I will choose to believe it without further research.
I hope you are correct.
The Report of the Committee Appointed by the Royal Society to Consider of the Best Method of Adjusting the Fixed Points of Thermometers; And of the Precautions Necessary to Be Used in Making Experiments with Those Instruments
Seems fancy and legit, I see no reason to actually read it and confirm the info.
Welcome to peer review!
It literally was not.
I cited and linked my source from the 18th century when it was redefined. What’s yours?
50 degrees is a damn good temperature. I won’t stand here and let you besmirch 50 degrees.
Its not the “perfect” temperature but what temp in celcius is “perfect”? What a ridiculously proposition that there’s a perfect temperature.
20 is perfect.
that’s pretty comfortable, but between 50 and 70f which is about 10 and 20 c is the “comfortable range”
As is typically responded to this ‘response’: there are a large number of people-many European-who would unironically say that 50°F (10°C) is, in fact, the ideal temperature.
They’re wrong, of course, but they exist.
But you’re also assuming that the exact middle of the range is where the ideal sweet spot should be. That’s wrong. People generally can better handle larger temperature deviations that are colder than their ideal than hotter deviations.
The difference is that humans emit their own heat. Combined with our funny tendency to wear insulative clothing that can asymptotically approach zero net heat exchange with the atmosphere, acceptable temperatures skew wildly towards and beyond freezing.
Meanwhile, without some kind of acting cooling mechanism, any temp even slightly above fever temp is inevitably fatal. You can only take off so many layers. What are you going to do, take off your skin? Sweating helps us humans a lot, but evaporative cooling can only do so much to reverse the heat gradient.
50 F is excellent… with a light jacket or a blanket. Not so much if you’re naked.
otherwise 50° would be perfect temperature.
I love it when it’s 50ish out and sunny. You don’t get all sweaty, plus you can wear cozy socks and sweaters or just go out in short sleeves and both are perfectly fine. The bugs all start going into hiding at that temperature but the grass and leaves are still green
As a European I can perfectly feel the 0 degree. I step outside and 5 seconds later I can tell you if it’s below zero or not.
For me “it’s now really hot” in summer is exactly when it’s over 30C. It being 86F doesn’t make any more sense. Approximately above 35C I will avoid going outside. Which would be 95F, not 100. From here, the temps in summer in the south of Europe are often around 100F at peak. Above or below doesn’t matter.
All that Fahrenheit scale is good for is if you live in a continental climate, more to the south, e.g. some useless place like Oklahoma, where 0F is approximately year low, and 100F is approximately year high.
For all other places, where the temperature delta over the course of the year is not as extreme, this Fahrenheit scale is as unintuitive as celcius, e.g. you just get used to it.
For me “it’s now really hot” in summer is exactly when it’s over 30C. It being 86F doesn’t make any more sense. Approximately above 35C I will avoid going outside. Which would be 95F, not 100. From here, the temps in summer in the south of Europe are often around 100F at peak. Above or below doesn’t matter.
you guys need to stop converting directly between temperatures, you’re right at 86f, bump it up to 90f and woah, suddenly it’s actually a nice round number.
You’re too conversion pilled to realize that the human experience isn’t fundamentally and objectively representative. 1 degree celsius isn’t super noticeable, just like 5 degrees fahrenheit isn’t super noticeable either.
Rating inflation. If someone called you a 5 or 6 out of 10, you’d feel bad. 7/10 is the bottom of acceptability, just like 72° is room temperature.
That’s the most amount of copium I’ve seen on lemmy so far.
riddle me this then mr european man (i assume for the context of shitposting)
would you feel ok with getting half of everything you did being completely wrong, or would you feel ok with only three of those 10 things being completely wrong.
half is formidable, like you tried, probably. 7/10 is on the way to being good at it though.
I don’t understand this shitpost question.
it’s a question surrounding human bias on the subject of correctness. Most people would argue that 7/10 is “ok or good” where as most people would argue that 5/10 is “not the worst, but not good”
we’re not fundamentally biased to the midpoint of something, we’re fundamentally biased to the perceived average of something.
You think that’s some copium, watch this:
When you’re a child having a sick-day, you get to stay home from school and watch TV, which is absolutely 💯. What temperature do you need to have to get a sick-day? 100°
In foreign units, 100° is the temperature at which water boils. What has boiling water ever done for anyone? Literally nothing. But in freedom units, water boils at 212°. 212 is a palindrome and palindromes are so cool, they could be classified as 💯. As we all know, 100 is the coolest number, which is why that’s how high grades go.
Finally, using USA standards, calculating calories in food merely requires measuring how much energy is required to raise 3.5 oz water 1.8° F by burning the food and then dividing by 1000. Using your weird unpatriotic methods, you’d have to measure how much energy is required to raise 100 grams of water 1° C by burning the food and then not dividing by anything??? Sounds lame!
Someone give me a Gatorade, those mental gymnastics were a hell of a workout
Even better, I don’t even feel a fever until it’s 104°F. I’ve just looked it up, and that’s exactly 40°C. Even my body likes round centigrade numbers.
50F is the perfect temperature.
That’s 10°C for those who want to judge you. And you’re wrong, the perfect temperature is 17°C. Not too cold, not too hot.
The correct rebuttal is that 69 degrees is ideal ambient temperature.
EDIT: replied to wrong comment
Fahrenheit is literally a German dude making a scale from, “scheiße its chilly outside” to “oh mein gott, its hot out!”
Yeah. But Celsius refers to inside room temperatures. 0°C = yay, ice skating! 100°C = yay, sauna!
Ah America, bigger is always a better isn’t it?
I like the saying “Fahrenheit is what you feel, Celsius is what water feels, and Kelvin is what the universe feels”.
Fahrenheit is what that one German town’s lowest air temperature measured back in 1708.
If fahrenheit was what humans felt, then 50° would be room temperature.
This isn’t the case, because humans can handle significantly larger deviations from “comfortable” on the cold side than the hot side, so again Fahrenheit gets it pretty much right.
Fahrenheit is what Americans feel, Celsius is what everyone else feels, and Kelvin is just Celsius +273.
Fahrenheit is what everyone feels. It’s a scale of 0 to 100 of how hot it is outside. Excluding extreme outliers, it covers the range of temperatures the average human might experience. In Celsius that’s like -20 to 40. I personally use Celsius anyway, because I don’t consider it much of an inconvenience, but Fahrenheit is certainly the more human-centric scale.
This is no way describes how I feel. I almost never experience below -5C, e.g. like 20F, but from there down it doesn’t really matter if it’s 10F or -10F. You need special clothing and then you’re fine.
While my pain point is at 95F, most people I know consider “hot outside” being around 80F, and “unbearably hot outside” at around 88F. So, how is this intuitive?
I almost never experience below -5C
Okay. Fahrenheit did. 0°F was supposedly based on the lowest air temperature he measured in his hometown.
This isn’t about pain points and special clothing, it’s about measuring the typical range of climate.
Exactly. He did. I don’t. So, don’t push on me some guy’s hometown lowest temperature as a 0.
(Also he did a bit more than just measure the low of his hometown, but it sorta correlates to his location)
It’s a system designed to correlate to typical ambient temperatures, which it does. Just as Celsius is designed to correlate to water temperatures, and Kelvin is designed to correlate to absolute temperatures. Hence the top comment: Fahrenheit is how humans feel (range of climate temperatures humans live in), Celsius is how water feels (range of temperatures for liquid water), Kelvin is how the universe feels (range of all temperatures).
Denying the nature of the general scale because you don’t personally use the whole thing is as silly as calling Celsius pointless because you don’t personally use ice cubes.
this is pretty well aligned with how it works here in the US as well. The idea is literally, anything below 0 f is “fucking cold” and anything above 100f is “fucking hot”
sure, 80f is pretty damn warm, that’s how numbers work, they have a range. It’s not like there’s a distinct point where “hotness” begins and “coldness” ends
90f is generally pretty hot, but it’s mostly tolerable, you drink water, you’ll be fine, once you get into the 100f range, you start to run into accidental heat exhaustion heat stroke problems if you aren’t really on top of it.
below 0f, your nose hairs are basically guaranteed to be frozen, and any facial hair you have is probably going to get frozen over time as well.
It’s a heuristic, you’re not supposed to treat it as an ultimatum.
Kelvin is just Celsius +274.15
Ftfy
Oops you’re right. I just converted 1°C to kelvin and brain farted
