• uienia@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Americans always regurgite the “Fahrenheit is how people feel” nonsense, but it is just that: nonsense. Americans are familiar with fahrenheit so they think that it is more inituitive than other systems, but unsurprisingly people who are used to celsius have no problems using it to measure “how people feel” and will think it is a very inituitive system.

    • ShakeThatYam@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I like that Fahrenheit has a narrower range for degrees. 1C is 1.8 degrees F. So, F allows you to have more precision without the use of decimals. Like, 71F feels noticeably different to me than 64F, but that is only a 3.8 degree difference in C.

    • Lizardking27@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I mean, you’re 100% wrong. Fahrenheit isn’t “how people feel” arbitrarily, it’s almost literally a 0-100 scale of how hot it is outside. You need no prior knowledge to interpret a Fahrenheit measurement. Which really reflects poorly on everyone who says “Fahrenheit doesn’t make any sense” because if they were capable of any thought at all they would figure it out in 2 seconds, like everyone else. I’m a lab rat that uses Celsius all day every day, I’m just not a pretentious stuck up tool about alternate measurements just because I refuse to understand them.

  • eldain@feddit.nl
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    9 months ago

    Kelvin is for scientists.

    Celsius is for people.

    Fahrenheit is a translation layer between Celsius and Americans. All their weather stations have been Celsius for ages, it’s a societal decision to use an arbitrary unit instead. The “69F censoring” which turned out to be a rounding artefact illustrated that nicely. Their government could change that, power to them that they decide not to 🤷‍♂️

  • aeronmelon@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Celsius can be used in place of all three, the others cannot.

    The freezing point of water is also a great place to zero the scale.

    • namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev
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      9 months ago

      I could be wrong on this, but I think Kelvin is basically required for thermodynamic measurements. Entropy measurements, for example, depend on ratios between temperatures relative to absolute zero. You could still manage using centigrade of course, but you would have to offset all of your temperature measurements by 273.15

      Probably a lot of other physical applications that also depend on having an absolute zero reference, but that’s the only one I can think of for now.

  • Dr. Coomer@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    The thing about Fahrenheit is kinda wrong. 0 is when salt water freezes, and 100 was supposedly measured by a woman’s body temperature when she was sick.

  • taiyang@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Reading these comments, my spiteful genie wish is to invent and proliferate a log base 10 scale, something like earthquake magnitudes or decibels. Y’all hate F or C? Welcome T, where 1 equals 1 Kelvin, 2 equals 10 Kelvin, 3 equals 100 Kelvin, 4 equals 1000 Kelvin, and so on.

    It’s easy! Humans live somewhere around 3, as does boiling and freezing, while the sun is between a 4 and a 5 at the surface and the core is closer to an 8.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Take a look at the mean molecular kinetic energy.

      As a bonus, it’s measured in Joules. Or eV if you want a sensible unity, but I don’t think you’ll want it.

      • taiyang@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Yessss … something positively baffling, like the body temperature of my cousin’s guinea pig when experiencing a slight fever.

        • Hagdos@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Yeah, or the freezing temperature of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride. Wait, that’s Fahrenheit already.

  • unreasonabro@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Yeah, the reason you can’t stop thinking about it is because it makes no sense but you insist it does so your brain can’t stop processing it, trying to figure it out, but every answer you come up with is crap and you know it. It’s called cognitive dissonance, you’re really not supposed to lean into it.

    • SkippingRelax@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Only if you are from the US. Everyone else is just nodding, thinking about time someone said that, and moving on