alt Hacker NewsIt provides greater granularity in the range of human comfort, without descending into decimals. How is that not more useful for day-to-day human usage?
0F is cold, 100F is hot. I experience both of these temperatures outside where I live every year.
-20C to 40C seems much more arbitrary as a way to measure the zone humans mostly live in.
I would wager that the outdoor and room temperature are an overwhelming majority of human use for temperature. It seems like it would make sense to optimize for how temperature is more commonly used at a population level.
I would say those who see Celsius as a good system are also biased, because they grew up with it and it’s what they’re used to.
Replies
> 0F is cold, 100F is hot. I experience both of these temperatures outside where I live every year.
Most people never experience anywhere near 0F in their lives.
> -20C to -40C seems much more arbitrary as a way to measure the zone humans mostly live in.
The zone most humans live in does not routinely (if ever) get anywhere near -20, to say nothing of -40.
> 0F is cold, 100F is hot. I experience both of these temperatures outside where I live every year.
This is just your location, and things like this vary around the world a lot. Hell, they vary in the US. To me, where I live (in the US), 0F and 100F aren't really useful as benchmarks; we don't see either of those temperatures here, ever. The normal range is more like 40F-80F (with extremes maybe down to 25F and up to 90F, but those numbers push credibility a bit).
But ok let's look at averages. Do "most humans" (whatever that means) really live within 0F to 100F? That doesn't really pass the smell test for me; there are lots of humans who live in places where it regularly exceeds 100F. And in those places I doubt it gets anywhere near 0F, with many places never getting down to even 20F. There are also lots of places that get warm, but will never see 100F, and seldom see 90F.
It's all super super arbitrary.
Having said that, I still prefer F over C, but I don't pretend there's any rational reason for it: it's just because I grew up with Fahrenheit, and no matter how hard I try, I just can't feel Celsius the same way. I feel like you maybe don't interact with too many people who grew up with Celsius; you'd probably realize they feel the same way about C as you do about F, and that there's no rational reason for it. It's just what you were trained to think and feel in, and it stuck.