I’m accustomed to temp ranges from 8 degrees to 102 degrees Fahrenheit.
Mike Holmes is sweating like a pig building a wall on a 38 degree day. I’d freeze my nuts off without a jacket. Oh wait, he’s talking Celsius. 100 Fahrenheit.
Then I watch a reno show from Canada and the homeowner is complaining its 18 C in her bedroom. :eek: brrr thats cold. Or is it? Turns out its 64 F. Not really that bad.
This BBC report predicts snow and it will get down to -7C. :eek: Minus anything means Arctic temps in my Fahrenheit world. Turns out its 19 F. Not even cold enough to get excited about. Talk too me when it drops below 10 F.
The weirdest thing is Celsius people live in this tiny range from -5 to 38C. Only 43 increments of temperature. :dubious: btw what ever happened to centigrade? One day the world renames it to Celsius? I didn’t get a vote on that.
Celsius is fine for a scientific lab. Give me a Fahrenheit thermostat in my house.
Sorry, I meant to write -10 to 38C. 48 increments of temperature. Thats 14 to 100 Fahrenheit or 86 increments of temperature.
Of course in the arctic I know it gets 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. But few people live there. -40 C oddly enough equals -40 F. http://www.wbuf.noaa.gov/tempfc.htm
It seems normal to me, and Fahrenheit temperatures seem illogical.
Being Canadian, I’m used to Celsius and kilometres. However, I’m also used to weight in pounds and height in inches/feet - I don’t know how many kilograms I weigh or how many centimetres tall I am.
No, because I’m capable of grasping that different scales can have differing increments. If anything, I find the arbitrary nature of Fahrenheit much more boggling. “Let’s put 0 degrees at the coldest day of winter in some town in France, that’s going to be relevant to maybe a couple thousand people later on. And then we’ll have 100 degrees at body temperature, but let’s bollocks up the measurement so actual body temp is 98.6 degrees, that makes perfect sense.”
Hardly. I was raised on Celsius, and it’s those wacky numbers the Americans seem to cling to that are weird to me.
Frankly, my day-to-day decisions based on temperature would be more than adequately covered by a something like a ten-point scale topping out at “fucking hot” and bottoming out at “fucking cold”, with “warm”, “ok”, “cool”, and “chilly” somewhere in between. 43 is more than adequate.
(and I think that the idea that temperatures in human-inhabited areas bottoms out at -5C is sorely mistaken).
It’s been “Celsius” longer than I’ve been alive.
The one thing I do really like about Celsius is that negative temperatures mean that any precipitation is going to be snow, while positive temperatures mean it will be rain (with a small window of miserable slush around zero).
you think a body temp of 37C makes any more sense than 98.6? They are both arbitrary numbers on a scale. We learn what a fever is by age 4 and relate a number to it.
In my world, it’s more liky 65 increments, from -40 to +25. It’s not quite so dramatic since I moved closer to the coast, but in Saskatchewan, it was quite a range. Then obviously I’m heating water up to 100 (or a little less for green tea).
Yes, but the whole point of Farenheit was that 100 was body temperature. So even the little bit of logic it held got lost when he messed up the measurement. Unlike Celsius, which accurately pegged water’s freezing point at 0.
-48 to 40 in my lifetime in this province. 88 increments of temperature.
But really, your OP is like someone saying “Wow, I can’t believe this apple pie only has 6 slices! It should have 8! How do people get by with only 6 slices of pie?”
I think it makes a lot more sense to assign base values to the phase changes of water, since that doesn’t vary with each individual and can be observed in nature.
Interesting. I was taught centigrade in my high school chemistry class in the late 70’s. I can’t recall hearing it called Celsius until much later. Probably in the 90’s when I got the Internet weather forecasts. <shrug> Whatever the world’s people want to call it is fine. Either word works.
Fun fact: “98.6 degrees” is a classic example of significant figures done wrong. Body temperature is 37C which means it tends to be between 36.5 and 37.5 (which is about how much human body temperature varies from measurement to measurement, so further accuracy is not valuable).
98.6F is just 37C translated by formula without regards to sigfigs. It implies that body temperature is between 98.55 and 98.65 which is a lot more precise than ithe measurement actually is. It would be more accurate to say that body temperature in Fahrenheit is “99-ish”.
Yes, it’s always bothered me. I realize, intellectually, that Celcius scale makes more sense, but as an American I am simply accustomed to the scale of Fahrenheit, and prefer the smaller gradations.
Does a home Celsius thermostat go up/down by half degrees? 22 to 23C is a noticeable jump in heat. (71.6 to 73.4). 22 would be chilly for my tastes and 23 would be a bit warm if I’m doing housework.
Regardless of its origin, the fahrenheit 0-100 range pretty much covers the range of “normal” temperatures a person might encounter, with anything outside that range being “abnormal”. This is convenient and allows most everyday temperatures to be expressed with sufficient specificity with just two digits. If you were designing a new temperature unit for everyday use from scratch, I don’t think you’d end up with something too different from the fahrenheit scale.
By comparison, celsius is totally arbitrary. Basing a scale on the freezing and boiling points of water is great for laboratory use but meaningless for everyday life.
The fact that celsius thermostats apparently need 3 digits of precision to provide the user enough control is proof of fahrenheit’s superiority.
Yes, my programmable thermostat is set in .5 degree increments. I’ve still got the house set at 21.5 and I’ll creep it up in .5 degree increments until it hits 23. Probably late January if December stays a little mild. Nighttime temps stay at 19 degrees year round.
Because people never boil things, or encounter ice. Ever.
Really, all you did was list a bunch of arbitrary features of the Fahrenheit system, then assert that they are somehow necessary. If economy of digits was a huge advantage, we’d express temperatures in hex or something.
