Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

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In what way is the progression you described more sensible?

In Fahrenheit the entire "scale" is useful to describe weather. If I turned a knob that set the temperature of a room to 0% rotation, or 0 degrees, the room would be cold. If I set the knob to 100% rotation, or 100 degrees the room will be hot.

In Celcius the scale is arbitrarily cut off at 40. The resolution that you can represent a temperature at is severely limited if you don't have a decimal point.

I don't know anyone who went to school in the US and didn't learn SI units. Science in the US uses SI units. Fahrenheit is just a very convenient way to express weather on a 0% to 100% scale.

>Literally the entire rest of the world has moved on, and is just laughing at us.

Maybe young kids with nothing better to do on the internet. As an American born outside of the US who's traveled a lot, one thing people tend to agree on is Fahrenheit is very convenient for weather.

The parent post of all of this is provocative nonsense (I mean really, apparently this person doesn't know that we can do instant bank transfers, and fails to understand that sales tax isn't a constant across states and even county lines in some places)

Temperature is important for a lot more than just weather. Fahrenheit starts breaking down more once you start using it for other purposes. And why should we have different scales for weather versus other common things like cooking?

Are you really in America? Because I've actually never seen a cooking appliance that didn't use Fahrenheit, I just forgot that's another place where we use Fahrenheit.

>And why should we have different scales for weather versus other common things like cooking?

Because it's not (currently) useful to measure weather on the planet we call "Earth" relative to the boiling point of water.

If/when the ambient temperature starts to move in a direction where it does scale from the freezing point of water to the boiling point of water, we'll have much bigger issues than worrying about what units we're measuring weather in.

My oven, unfortunately, does use Fahrenheit, with no way to switch to Celcius. Since I'm in an apartment, that won't change. My food scale, however, does grams, and my electric kettle does Celcius.

And I would contend that it's much worse to have two separate temperature scales, one for weather and one for everything else (including cooking), than to just use one for everything. People who grow up with Celcius have no problem whatsoever using it for weather. It makes total sense. Once you've used it exclusively for a month, it'll make total sense to you too. I promise. I frequently run into people who forget that water freezes at 32 and boils at 212. It's much harder to forget the numbers 0 and 100.

As I said I'm not from the US originally, I've lived in countries with Celsius for a lot longer than a year...

You're building the strawman argument that the only reason people use Fahrenheit is the cognitive load of switching then tearing it down.

Frankly it's a bit condescending.. (oh you don't really want to use Fahrenheit, you're just too lazy not to, don't worry it's easy to switch!)

And it's false, as evidenced by people in England and other countries I've visited who still refer to weather in Fahrenheit at times.

It really is the more expressive scale for weather, and even people who don't use it and despise Imperial units are usually up front in at least admitting it as such.

People don't usually need to remember when water boils or freezes when thinking about weather, or even cooking since cooking occurs at temperatures both well above and just below boiling. They know around 0 degrees it can snow and around 100 degrees they might get heat stroke if they're not careful.

> As an American born outside of the US who's traveled a lot, one thing people tend to agree on is Fahrenheit is very convenient for weather.

I don't think anyone in India uses or even understands Fahrenheit.

That doesn't sound very useful to me, and certainly is not benefit enough to use Fahrenheit.

No one is forcing you to use Fahrenheit, but you're deriding a nation for using it. Maybe just reconsider your comment?

If you'll see my other comments you'll notice I defend it as not being so ridiculous, and that celsius is also arbitrary. I didn't deride a nation for using Fahrenheit.

No, just derided it for units it uses outside of science.

> In Celcius the scale is arbitrarily cut off at 40

100 is just as arbitrary.

> one thing people tend to agree on is Fahrenheit is very convenient for weather.

I've traveled a lot too, and not once have I heard that. But that is just as anedoctal as your claim. What is not anedoctal, is that weather reports outside of US almost exclusively use celcius.

Just remember 0-40c is 32-104f. So a decimal point in Celsius gives a higher resolution.

That is a good point, but even if it weren't, does it matter? Let's call it 0-38C vs 32-100F (ignore my rounding). Does that additional precision in the latter really matter for every day weather temperatures? 75F and 76F both round to 24C, but does it actually make any difference in my daily life to have that degree of precision? I'm wearing the same clothing regardless. The difference between 75F and 80F is meaningful, and Celcius gives you that discrimination ability, but single Fahrenheit degrees aren't meaningful enough in common tasks.

I'm also somewhat amazed that no one has brought up Kelvin (my one true love) in this discussion yet. But that's my astronomy background talking. Black body radiation is a total mess unless you use an absolute temperature scale in the equation, for example.

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