this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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Fahrenheit fans always say stuff like this, but it just doesn't work. 100 isn't too bad in that respect, but 0 is just insane. If you want it to be equivalent, 0 °F would be 0 °C. Because there's no way that -18 °C is as cold as 38 °C is hot.
Besides that, knowing about things like snow or ice outside, whether your fridge is likely to cause some stuff to frost over, etc., or whether the thing you're cooking has reached boiling point are all just as valid things for your day-to-day experience.
But besides all that, SI is a package deal. You use Fahrenheit and now you've got to redefine all the other units that are derived from the Kelvin, because now you're suddenly using Rankine.
My point is that Fahrenheit is not like our other units of measure. 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 1760 yards or 5280 feet in a mile is ridiculous. There's no benefit to these units with arbitrary scaling factors for conversion. That lack of consistent scaling factor is the primary difference with metric, and it is also precisely why metric is superior. The image's assertion that these units are stupid is valid.
But for temperature, there are some aspects of Fahrenheit that work out nicely, and learning 32 and 212 for the freezing and boiling points of water is not that bad. It's not as nice as 0 and 100, but this difference leads to certain other temperatures being in the range of 0 and 100. My enjoyment for which temperatures fall between 0 and 100 feels about as arbitrary as your enjoyment for water being liquid within this range. At the very least, the difference here is not as clear cut as it is for other units, so I don't buy into the idea that Fahrenheit is a bad unit of measure.
To put it simply: I don't see any redeeming quality for our other units of measure, but I do for Fahrenheit. I'm not saying that Celsius is bad or that Fahrenheit is better. I'm merely saying that the phase changes of water are not enough to convince me that Fahrenheit is stupid.
I hard disagree with one of your positions; I think 0 F is cold but 100 F is insane. I assume we grew up in different climates. I say this only to make the point that it's subjective, but 0-100 is still the range of what people generally find tolerable.