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Seriously.
(lemmy.ca)
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this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
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This is why Celsius is the only SI unit that isn’t just wholly better than its imperial counterpart. Both F and C are fairly arbitrary, but in my view F has the slight edge by giving numbers 0-100 in most weather conditions across earth.
Kelvin is the SI unit. Anyway also for the weather Celsius is clearer: Below 0 = snow, above 0 = rain. And Celsius at least has fixed points that can be recreated - if all thermometers and data on scales were lost we could easily recreate °C, but not °F.
Ah well I should have said metric measurement then. It is part of the metric system, yes?
If you can’t remember the number 32 then I guess. Personally I think it’s pretty bizarre to have negative temperatures all the time but whatever floats your boat.
Regarding losing all thermometers and data… if you lost the definition of Celsius there would be no way to recreate it. This seems maybe more likely then your scenario.
No seriously what is significant about 0F? I live in a place that sees a lot of negative F too.
It's so arbitrary. If it was 0 at freezing water and 100 at human body temp I'd understand it but no, it's literally nothing significant in people's lives. It has no tangible anchor.
It's purely emotion keeping it around.
0°F is the coldest night Mister Fahrenheit has ever witnessed, thinking it couldn't become any colder than this.
100°F is Mister Fahrenheit's slightly feverish body temperature.
?????
PS: Pretty much all other countries also had their own measurement systems and simply switched to metric because it made sense. I'm glad we did, and that pretty much all others did too.
PPS: I'd also be up for revamping time measurement, why can't we have 10h a day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute? 100.000 seconds in total per day, currently we have 86.400 so a second would only become slightly shorter.
The French tried to implement that in the First Republic, together with 12 months à 30 days per year, 3 weeks à 10 days per month and 5 (6) extra days at the end of the year to make it work (from Christmas to New Year, how thematic!)
It failed because the French were fearing they'd have to work more (if they'd also only have 2 days off per 10d instead of per 7d). One of the biggest tragedies in French history. Without the week reform the time reform might've succeeded.
Nothing. It’s equally arbitrary as setting 0 to be the freezing point of water.
But it covers the weather for the vast majority of people, the vast majority of time, better than Celsius does. That’s what I mean.
If you want to remove sentimentality from your temperature then use Kelvin but Celsius is just as arbitrary and sentimental as Fahrenheit is.
0 as the freezing point of water isn't arbitrary though, and neither is boiling.
They're both very useful reference points since water is universally available and you can easily tell when it freezes and boils, it makes it comparatively trivial and accessible to create your own thermometer which is likely to at least generally agree with someone else's.
this is the one aspect where i kind of prefer imperial measurements for distance, basing measurements on the human body means everyone has easy access to a reference that is likely to be not too tremendously wrong.
Obviously not super relevant these days, but back in the day it was a pretty neat feature. Like fuck, it wasn't that long ago that the meter and the kilogram were still defined by a SINGLE specific object kept in a climate controlled vault.