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Why still using the imperial system?
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this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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I really like Farenheit system for temperatures. 0 is really cold and 100 is really hot, but both survivable. It's a human-centric system.
0C is the temperature that water freezes, which is good but temperatures more often go negative with that system. 100C is boiling so you'd be dead.
What's so special about the 0 - 100 range? For either system, there's temperatures that have significance.
-20 C is getting dangerously cold (wear all winter gear available if you must be outside for anything longer than brief durations).
-10 C is very cold (winter coat, gloves, hat).
0 C is freezing (winter coat necessary, gloves and hat optional).
10 C is chilly (winter coat unzipped, or jacket and sweater).
20 C is comfortable (t-shirt and pants).
22 C is about room temperature (shorts become viable above this).
30 C is hot (nude comfortable; minimize clothing).
40 C is getting dangerously hot (depending on humidity and personal heat tolerance) (clothing that protects from heat might be more desirable than minimising clothing).
F has finer whole number resolution for temperatures typically experienced by humans. Obviously C can be represented by decimals, but I tend to think whole numbers are clearer.
Personally I use C and metric for all my scientific work and F for representing outside temperature.
Edit: Phrasing
I honestly can't say I need resolution finer than Celsius for air temperature. So many other factors have such bigger effects on the perceived temperature (humidity, UV index, if the sun is shining, wind speed, etc) that a granularity of 1°F doesn't make sense to me.
Pool temperature, on the other hand, yeah, 1°F or 0.5°C resolution is perceptible.
I responded a few posts higher with more detail about this, but after teaching myself Celsius I actually prefer the lower resolution. A change of degree Celsius has more meaning than a change of degree Fahrenheit. (Also many, though not all, weather sources are using the Celsius values anyway and then converting and rounding them to Fahrenheit, so you don’t really get the benefit of that granularity.)
I used to make this argument, that Fahrenheit made more sense for weather, but I decided to be (somewhat) scientific about it and test the hypothesis (with a sample size of 1).
So I switched everything I own over to Celsius and set about teaching myself.
This was back in 2019, and here I am still using Celsius 5 years later. I like it a lot more than Fahrenheit.
A couple of major reasons: first, you don’t actually need the precision Fahrenheit gives you for weather. The difference between 68°F and 69°F is so small that degrees Fahrenheit have very little meaning. It was startling to me how quickly I came to understand the differences between degrees Celsius because they have a lower resolution. And of course you can always use half degrees if you need to, but honestly it’s fine without.
What I realized is that, very often, the temperatures that you see on weather reports or apps are really just the Celsius degree values converted and rounded. For example, you’re far more likely to see 68°F or 70°F rather than 69°F, since 20°C=68°F and 21°C=69.8°F. This isn’t true for every weather source, but it was still interesting.
But more importantly, 0 is freezing.
This never seemed like it mattered when I was using Fahrenheit. I know 32°F is freezing, if it’s below that it’s gonna be snowing instead of raining. But the first winter I experienced in Celsius was eye-opening.
I realized that temperatures below freezing in Fahrenheit never really meant much to me. This is sort of hard to explain, but while I knew they were progressively colder there wasn’t much specific understanding. That is, 23°F doesn’t really mean anything to me.
But -5°C? That instinctively meant something to me the very first time I experienced it in Celsius. That’s going to be as far below freezing as 5°C is above freezing. No math involved. Simple. Valuable. Obviously you can do the math to figure the same thing out in Fahrenheit, but with Celsius you don’t need to.
Once you get to know the numbers, it’s just as good as an other system of measurement, and I find I like it more for the weather than I like Fahrenheit.