I mean, to follow up directly because I honestly don’t understand the point being made:
@Sage Rat, the forecast today is for 9C. The forecast for tomorrow is 6C. Do you actually think that I don’t know what that means? Or do you think maybe I know what it means in exactly the same way, with exactly the same negligible mental effort, that you know what 48F today and 43F tomorrow means? What precisely is the difficulty you imagine I, a person who has grown up using Celsius, have in understanding Celsius?
Who are “they”, and what are they measuring? You have left out some essential context.
The way it is supposed to work it, you pick a unit of a convenient order of magnitude for what you are doing, km in your example. Then you are not going to swap it out just because your readings roll over from 999 to 1000. Conversely, if you are measuring 0.8 Mm, 0.9 Mm, 1.0 Mm, … there is no reason to mention km. [Example: the logarithmically scaled x-axis runs from 0.001 megaparsecs to 1000 megaparsecs. ] And for further use cases there is scientific notation…
By not using Fahrenheit, when talking about the weather, you’re just making it harder on yourselves. Just like Chinese people make it harder on themselves by forcing each other to speak in a strange language, instead of just using English.
I mean all the kids Sage_Rat knows learn to speak English quite naturally. They don’t have to be forced to learn what all those monosyllabic sounds mean. All the kids who learned Chinese had to spend eight years in school studying it. It can’t possibly be as natural and intuitive as English.
If French and Chinese were natural and intuitive they wouldn’t have government imposed standards. That right there is proof that they are artificial imposed frameworks. Like Metric.
OK, but remember, the French were all set to permanently impose decimal time after the Revolution, and ended up angering a Sumerian moon god. So one had still better exercise some prudence before tampering with the natural harmonies and order of things.
For outdoor temperature, the nice thing about the Fahrenheit scale is that, most of the time for most locations, you can use a two-digit positive integer to describe it.
Using a negative number to quantify temperature is kinda dumb, IMO.
“Negative temperature = below freezing” is actually one of the things that makes a lot of sense.
Growing up, I always thought 32 was just a weird number for it but we all just got used to it/memorized it, like a lot of unit conversions. I distinctly remember elementary school where lots of kids eventually (after a few months) figured out that it was 3 feet in a yard and not vice-versa. And water boils at 212 deg. And that mystically there were 27 cubic feet in a cubic yard. And so on.
As adults, after decades of experience, we think these all ‘feel natural’ but they certainly don’t feel that way when you’re learning them in elementary school.
As an American living in the USA, what exactly am I supposed to do about metrication?
Should I replace the imperial lead screws of my lathe and milling machine with metric lead screws so that the cranks turn in whole-number revolutions in metric?
Should I send a strong letter to Home Depot and Lowes asking them to stock more than a nominal quantity of metric fasteners and building materials?
Should I make metrication a key point in my voting decisions, above all of the evil stuff that we are known for having problems with?
I already use metric units where they crop up in day-to-day life–we don’t live in a vacuum.
Again, I treat it like language: it’s a regional thing, and works fine for everyone living here.
And like language, if you wish to interact internationally, you use other languages where necessary.
I suppose, but what other measurements use negative numbers? We don’t use negative pressure to indicate pressures below one atmosphere. We don’t measure negative distance, or negative volume, or negative mass just because they’re less than a handy benchmark. But somehow it makes sense to claim a negative temperature for a thing that is hundreds of degrees hotter than 99.99% of the universe.
We’re going negative on temperature whether its Fahrenheit or Celsius. It’s just a matter of where the inflection point is - at the freezing point of water or some arbitrary temperature some random 18th century Dutch scientist decided to set.
If you want to avoid negative temperatures entirely, stick to Kelvin (or Rankine, I suppose).
Otherwise, if we have to choose between Celsius and Fahrenheit, we’re deciding between which arbitrary point to use, and the freezing point of water makes more sense to me than whatever 0 F was intended to represent.
No, but your community probably is going to institute some rules so that people feel that they are getting a fair deal. Either that or some other more generous butcher will set up shop next door and drive you out of business.
And likewise, if I had to measure 2x4s in metric, and did so every day, I’d get conversant in it pretty quickly. That still doesn’t mean that 2x4s are best measured in metric or that it’s a meaningless distinction which to work with.
My guess is that the range from 0 - 100-and-change is a fitting range to put most human experience of weather in. I mean, it’s all arbitrary. In both scales, you have to hit the negs at some point for describe temps for big swaths of the world, too. I grew up with F, and still use F in most day-to-day interactions, but Celsius feels equally natural to me to talk about temperatures, maybe even easier, as I don’t have particular need for the finer gradations of Fahrenheit.