Above 0 C water is fluid
Below 0 C water turns to snow / ice
At 100 C water boils
What in terms of the human experience is non-functional in the above? “Below zero” has real, tangible, instantly and universally observable meaning in the C land. Not so in the F realm.
I can’t fathom how is it difficult to feel the difference between clearly distinct numbers such as 15, 20, 25 and 30 C.
Eh, in my experience 0F is actually “cold”. 32F means that water theoretically freezes and you put on a medium-duty jacket if you’re going to be out for more than a few minutes. And 32F/0C is academic anyway – in the real world it’s not a “real, tangible, instantly and universally observable meaning”; there’s plenty of days in the 30-32F range where the ice is melting off the driveway due to stored/reflected heat or whatever so it’s not as though “32F/0C means the icy hand of frozen winter stretches across the land”. It’s more like “32F/0C means it’s starting to get a bit wintery out”.
Yes, but the point is that 32 is rather random.
Why not set that at 31 or 33 or literally anywhere else? It’s not like 0F has any real, tangible meaning. The 0 point could have been set a few degrees lower or higher without making any real difference. Both -5F and 5F are still cold, no matter who you are.
0 C, on the other hand, has a very clear meaning. Above that, liquid water. Below that, frozen water.
That’s just it though – it doesn’t mean that except if you have no external conditions, pure water, and are at the correct stable atmospheric pressure. In the real world, water freezes somewhere around or a bit below 0C/32F depending on a bunch of stuff. So, if I’m not guaranteed that the birdbath will be frozen over at 0C/32F (and in my birdbath, it won’t be) then neither system is accurately informing me of the conditions anyway.
In any event, it’s not as though 32 is a hard number to remember or causing anyone grief and confusion about what the weather’s like. You learn this stuff in kindergarten.
Edit: Apparently 0F is the freezing point of temperature of a combination of ice, water, and ammonium chloride in an attempt to pin the number to something more consistent than just “water”. So it is pegged to an actual academic phenomenon, just not one that comes up much in my daily life. Though it’s probably useful if you’re picking a brand of road salt.
“WE” learn this stuff in kindergarten. Just like we learn English.
But tell a bunch of people from Germany or China that learning English is so easy that even kindergartners can do it. I don’t think they’ll think your argument holds a lot of water.
Surely you’re not suggesting that memorizing a single number is comparable to learning a language?
That’s kind of the point, though. It’s NOT a single number. It’s a whole system of numbers. It’s also when water boils. Or typical human body temperature. Or what temperature represents a hot day. Or a bunch of other temperatures.
Your argument boils down to “well, I’m used to it, so it can’t be that hard”. It’s an argument for familiarity (for something drilled into you daily from a young age), not an argument about actual ease of use or utility.
But you need to memorize that same stuff for Celsius. Maybe you can insist that 0C is so easy but there’s nothing inherently simple about memorizing the average body temperature or room temperature or what temperature to bake a frozen pizza at in Celsius. This is just stuff you learn.
(Ironically, 100F was intended to be average body temp for a healthy young male adult – easy!)
I’m beginning to get that feeling I get when a visitor to my house “helpfully” points out how I should reorganize my kitchen.
“It would be much easier and more efficient to store THIS over THERE. You’d save a lot of time and effort. It’s only rational.”
If the best argument for going 100% metric (culturally and personally) is that it’s rational, I have to politely decline. It’s not like the metric system is unknown in the US. It’s omnipresent. Mechanics use metric tools, researchers and scientists use the same units and measures as the rest of the world, the military uses it, my rulers and tape measures have metric markings.
Think of our quaint cultural attachment to our measures as being like my aunt always storing her casserole dishes in the oven.
With the exception that, as human beings, water is rather important for us.
As above, Kelvin (or Rankine) actually make the most sense.
But this is shifting the goalposts. The original argument you made was that Fahrenheit was somehow more natural because 0F was a very cold day. If you are now arguing that it’s rather arbitrary, great. But you can’t have it both ways - it can’t be arbitrary/familiar and also make ‘more’ sense at the same time.
No, the argument I made was that (a) the freezing temp of water wasn’t something that much affected my daily decisions; not enough for me to care if it’s the theoretical “bottom” of the scale or not, and (b) neither scale accurately reflects whether or not the water outside my house will be frozen. Thus arguments that Celsius is “better” for me because 0C = Ice or that it’s “real and tangible” doesn’t really hold up.
(Arguably, on any given day, my body temperature probably matters more to me than the freezing point of water anyway)
I can sort of see that distinction but it still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Over a range of pressures and conditions that cover the majority of experienced conditions for human beings, water will still freeze at 0C. Unless you have a thermometer that is accurate out to several decimal places.
Arguing that it actually froze at 0.01C (which is where it freezes at the triple point - 0.006 atmospheres) or at -0.001C (for several tens of thousands of atmospheres) is a bit of an odd one. The range of pressures for which you could see a measurable difference would be greater than occurs at the deepest ocean trench or in outer space.
And we already use Celsius (unwittingly) for body temperature, anyway. We set ‘standard’ (nobody is actually standard) at 37C which translates to 98.6F. We add an extra decimal place due to the conversion for reasons I don’t even understand.
I don’t expect to actually encounter ice outside until the temps are in the high 20s. Tell me that it’s 29F outside and I might be extra careful walking to the car. Tell me that it’s 32F and I assume it’ll be damp out.
Anyway, all of this is kind of silly anyway. The actual point is that the US isn’t working to export Imperial systems to the world but there’s a contingent who firmly believes that the US should convert to metric. So the onus is on them to convince people that metric will improve their lives enough to bother doing it. Arguments tend to either be about things like international commerce, engineering or medicine (where metric is already used anyway) or hyperbolic examples about how we won’t have to convert rods to furlongs anymore or won’t keep accidentally measuring our baby formula in troy ounces or will finally be able to crash-solve how much sand it takes to fill a Buick. Or stuff like this where I’m supposed to just accept that I’m being dreadfully inconvenienced by remembering that water freezes at 32F despite that never once being an issue for me. [Edit: Or the shame argument at the US being the near-sole holdout as though lol that’s going to work…]
This is probably why we haven’t converted yet. 
I have the right to print the units of measure I want on my package. Compelled speech might mean I don’t have to use your units.
Not actively working. But my plywood sheets are still only available as a stupid 1220mm x 2440mm size.
According to the wiki article on Human Body Temp,
And?
If you ask a bunch of school kids or even adults in the US what they learned about it in school, they’re not going to say human body temperature typically covers a range, which is true. The majority are going to parrot 98.6 degrees and not think about how odd that precision seems.
It’s interesting that the middle of the celsius range for body temp is an even 37º. Even with smaller units, Fahrenheit is still a decimal.
I turn a hose on in my swimming pool. Hm, this is taking a while. Will it take an hour, or several hours? Should I leave the hose on overnight? I don’t want to be stuck sitting here watching it fill, but I want to turn it off when it’s full so I don’t turn my backyard into a swamp.
So, I use the hose to fill up a 5-gallon bucket, and time how long that takes. From there, I can… wait, no, I can’t calculate it, because my swimming pool isn’t measured in gallons.
There are two kinds of people in the world, those who use metric and those who don’t use units at all. The people who don’t use units at all won’t care just what units they’re not using. But anybody who does actually need to use units much prefers metric.
Sounds like more than ample time to figure it out. Even time enough to hop on Google in case you don’t know how many gallons of water to the swimming pool cubic fathom.
It’s funny because my paycheck is literally dependent upon me daily measuring and calculating things to pass on accurate information and we use imperial units without any problem. Feels more like the two kinds of people are those who have no issue with imperial units and those who get upset by this and insist that the first group is actually struggling a lot to, uh, measure swimming pools with buckets or something.