Everyday, as an American

Bob@midwest.social to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 1247 points –
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Yeah, I think it's mostly just a familiarity thing. To me 0°C is cold af, 10°C is chilly, 20°C is nice and 30°C is hot. 100 km/h is fast but not really fast, though I'm probably biased in this regard from regularly driving on the Autobahn lol

exactly! whenever anyone says imperial units are "more intuitive" and better reflect "how it feels to humans", i can only think: obviously, you grew up with it. that's what you know.

no matter what measurement system you were raised on, it will feel intuitive to you and reflect how you as a human experience the world because you are used to measuring things in those units. having said that, i'd much rather we used metric if for nothing else than the ease of unit conversion.

When it comes to Fahrenheit, there is some merit to the idea - 0 to 30 is a small scale compared to 0 to 100, and unlike Imperial vs. Metric, Celcius has no base 10 system that makes any more sense than Fahrenheit does. . The opposite is true of kilometers and miles - kilometers is more refined since each unit is a shorter distance.

I'd prefer the Metric system, but Farenheit over Celcius for temperature measurement.

The fixed points (for 0 and 100) are much more logical though and can be used to accurately recreate the scale anywhere (well.. it'll be slightly off on higher altitude since boiling temperature changes but it's still not far off).

0°C = water freezes (= it's snowing)

100°C = water boils

meanwhile:

0°F = the coldest night Mr Fahrenheit experienced, thinking it couldn't get any colder than that

100°F = Mr Fahrenheit's own body temperature (he had a slight fever apparently)

How would you recreate that??

The temperature of water boiling is not a useful metric when it comes to the weather, as it's extremely far outside of where humans can live. Science uses Celcius standard, and that seems to work fine, but I see no reason why we should use it for the weather.

The temperature of ice melting, on the other hand, is hugely important for weather. 0 point is placed at a very important spot as far as weather observations go.

Can't say that of Fahrenheit.

We'll just keep things as they are becuase it seems to be working fine.

The previous systems also worked fine in other parts of the world, but pretty much every country came to the conclusion that it's simply smart to switch to the metric system, giving up their own with seemingly random conversions.

And those that didn't don't seem to be suffering any ill effects as a result.

I think we can agree that the freezing point is super important when it comes to the weather.

So where would you place the second mark (you have to define two spots) so it "makes sense for the weather" (I don't see how it makes less sense for the weather than Fahrenheit, at least Celsius tells you if it'll snow or not while Fahrenheit tells you nothing) while still making sure that it can easily be recreated?

The temperatures are intuitive for me because Celsius is all I've known. The car going 60km/h or 100km/ h I know the difference and how it feels sitting in the car. The speed of wind in the forecast needs to be m/s to make any sense. Over 20 m/s I better tape the windows so that the storm won't break them

Out of curiosity, what would you consider "too cold to go out"? Not really about the metric/celcius system, but 0c is light jacket weather for me.

Anything below or around zero degrees is undershirt, shirt, sweater and warm jacket weather for me. Though it rarely gets colder than single negative digits where I live. I'll go with a light jacket from like 10-15 degrees upwards. I can't handle the cold very well lol.