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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?
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.
but it literally has numbers?
You know that celsius starts at -273.15 degrees right? That's ENTIRELY arbitrary, and by your logic, makes the system useless.
you're literally just making this up?
no, Celsius starts at +273.15 K, because that's where an element we are all dependent on to live and in contact with every day undergoes an important phase transition.
What happens at 0°F?
What happens at 0°F?
why does it matter? Water freezes at 32 degrees f. What happens at 32 degrees C? What happens at 212 degrees C?
Also no, it doesn't start at +273.15 K, that's not how number ranges work. If you have a list of numbers between -10 and 10. And you were to sort them, least to most, -10 would be at the bottom, obviously.
you realize that temperature is a measure of the energy within a substance/material right? It's intrinsically tried to the physics and atomic structure underlying the material substance. That always starts at the lowest temperature point, the point being where it is is just a reference
it starts at +273.15K because that is the lower of the two reference points used in its creation. the Kelvin scale was created later and builds on the Celsius scale. of course lower temps are sorted first, that's not what matters. it's why we call these scales "degrees", after all.
why it matters is because the scale i use every day constantly gets "verified" by passing the zero marker and showing that things outside freeze. that makes it a good reference point that builds its own intuition.
that's what this is all about, after all: how useful a scale is for everyday use. a scale that is relevant to my needs and that has important events happen on easy-to-remember points of the scale requires very little teaching.
why it matters is because the scale i use every day constantly gets “verified” by passing the zero marker and showing that things outside freeze. that makes it a good reference point that builds its own intuition.
any number is equally as good for an arbitrary reference point. And it can arguably be even more confusing, let's take a page out of CS acronyms and short hands. GB and GiB (often shortened improperly) GB being 1000, GiB being 1024. Now i feel like i don't have to explain why this is a bad thing.
1024 is an odd unit, but it's sequential powers of 2, so it's trivial to think about. 1000 is a nice unit, but it doesn't map nicely into storage, or binary strings.
like to me the difference between 0-100 and 32-212 is basically nothing. Sure it's a weird number, but they're both numbers so. Really the only proper utility it has is the SI unit meta, and the fact that it maps into kelvin. Outside of that i don't see why 0 or 32 as the freezing point are any different. It might be more visually pleasing, but like, fahrenheit also takes that one as well, given that the 0f-100f thing is accurate. I feel like they're just equivalent.
i just don't see why it matters, like at all. People do much more complicated things on a daily basis. People remember random strings of numbers as passcodes, people remember random strings of letters as for passwords.
idk i feel like it's just weird to sit here on the internet and complain about how you need water to freeze at 0 degrees, and how it must boil at 100 degrees. When neither of those are like, relevant? For most day to day activities at least. Maybe in the winter, but again, 32.
would it be nicer if fahrenheit suddenly had water freeze at 0f tomorrow, as well as boil at 200f? Probably, but like, i wouldn't care. It just seems like such an odd thing to care about to me.
this all started because of the claim that Fahrenheit is better for "human" temperatures. when saying "that's just because you're used to it" apparently wasn't valid, it spiralled on into this massive discussion where i've tried to show with what i feel is quite a lot of anecdata that indeed, you only feel that Fahrenheit is better for human temperatures because you're used to it. meanwhile, the rest of the world can't understand these numbers at all because they are not used to them, and use Celsius for human temperatures every day.
of course it doesn't matter. at least, not in a vacuum. but when interacting with the rest of the world, it does.
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.
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.
it was literally about fahrenheit*
Specifically, it was about how in fahrenheit we can refer to really hot temperatures as "OVER 100F"
but it was also a shitpost, like this post, so we probably shouldn't care about it this much lmao
i am referring the the post i responded to.
yeah, that was my post.
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?