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this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Science Memes
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I'm sorry, but if you go out on a cold day and see a barrel of water with ice on the top, you immediately know it's freezing cold and we're in the negatives. Water freezing being 0 is a solid, objective anchor point.
"When it feels cold" will vary from someone that lives in a generally warm climate to someone that lives in a colder climate but water will freeze at 0. That means the warm and cold people can base their range around that and intuitively understand how far or above or below 0 the extreme hot or cold areas are. Generally -40 to 40 are the extremes of livable areas.
Sure, water is a really good system and it works well.
And for F that range is -40 to 104. See how you get 64 extra degrees of precision and nearly all of them are double digit numbers? No downside.
Furthermore F can use its base 10 system to describe useful ranges of temperature such as the 20s, 60s, etc. So you have 144 degrees instead of just 80, and you also have the option to utilize a more broad 16 degree scale that's also built in.
You might say that Celsius technically also has an 8 degree scale(10s, 30s), but I would argue that the range of 10 degrees Celsius is too broad to be useful in the same way. In order to scale such that 0C is water freezing and 100C boiling, it was necessary for the units to become larger and thus the 10C shorthand is much less descriptive than the 10F shorthand, at least for most human purposes.
Fahrenheit stays winning in my book.
It could easily be argued that weather having to deal in so high numbers is a con for F and the positive negative distinction of C is an easy to understand system of how far from snow are we. As others I don’t believe one is particularly better than the other for the purpose of describing day to day weather. Your arguments ring hollow to me and often seem based on heuristics for F and often with the “close to this value” caveat making it seem like a stretch.