Between 50 and 63 I’m in heaven. Anything higher than that and all i want to do is go swimming, which as an adult with responsibilities, i never get to. Anything lower than that, and i have to wear more clothes and look fatter than i am.
Not to defend Fahrenheit, it’s a nonsense scale, however: As with most subjective scales the entire scale can be split into good and not good. The top part is good and the bottom part is not good. The middle of the top part is seen as average good.
So around 75 degrees would be perfect, which is close enough for something as subjective as temperature.
This is why in things like movie or game reviews a 7/10 is seen as average. Like it’s good, in the good part, but right in the middle not anything special. A 5/10 or lower is seen as not good, not worth seeing, not worth your time etc. This works for reviews, grades, person attractiveness rating etc.
but that’s not for the overwhelming majority of people.
Surely you’re aware that the overwhelming majority of people do not live in the US. Nearly everyone is fine with Celcius. Billions of people, as opposed to a few hundred million that have been socialised to using the other scale
Fahrenheit is the best human-focused temperature scale. 0 is super cold, 100 is super hot, 50 is the line between short sleeve and long sleeve weather (assuming no wind). Anything outside these bounds, it simply isn’t worth going outside. But then everyone at a latitude <|37|° will say “that’s not that hot” and everyone at a latitude >|40|° will say “that’s not that cold,” so really it’s the best Kansas-focused temperature scale
Weather/room temp wise we probably never will. I’d rather think of my environment in terms of 0 to 100 than in terms of -18 to 38. For science and engineering, Celsius is ideal, and I can convert between the two in the very rare occasion I need to because I’m not an idiot who can’t do basic math.
That’s entirely a matter of habit. There is nothing special about 0°F (random point in the cold range?) or 100°F points (random point in the hot range?), you’ve been lied to.
We don’t think -18°C to 38°C, we think -50°C to +50°C (regular Celsius weather thermometer, covers almost any temperature observed on Earth), with 0°C differentiating between snow/ice, “wintery” weather, and rain/mud, “non-wintery” one. That’s how we know whether to take umbrella (no point if it snows, hat is your best friend), what kind of shoes are the best fit - cold-resistant or highly waterproof - or which kind of jacket is gonna fit the situation. Melting point of water is actually incredibly important weather-wise and entirely ignored by Fahrenheit scale.
When it’s not winter, normal range is 0-40°C, with 20°C designating comfort temperature.
Aviation is already backwards; aviators give distance to travel in nautical miles, visibility in statute miles, altitude and runway length in feet, speed in knots, weight in pounds, volume in gallons, and temperature in celsius. My favorite is the standard adiabatic lapse rate is given as 2°C/1000 feet.
The SI base unit for temperature is Kelvin with 0 K being the coldest possible temperature. 273.15 K is the melting point of ice. But it’s a lot better suited for temperature differences. Celsius is only a derived unit.
And well, all units and measurement systems had a lot of changes over time because some things turned out to be impractical or inaccurate.
Initially Celsius had 100° as the freezing point of water, 0° as the boiling point of water. Fahrenheit had 0° as the coldest temperature he could produce and the (wrong) average human body temperature at 90°. Kelvin was initially defined via Celsius, that got reversed, they have the same scale. There is also Rankine, which starts at 0 like Kelvin, but uses the Fahrenheit scale.
And the US partially uses SI units anyways, all units are derived from them to use their superior base unit definitions. This system came into existence to have unit definitions that are better reproducible and change less over time. Since everything was redefined and all numbers changed anyways, they also tried to make use of the “new” decimal representation of numbers. And new unit names were nice to create some general units, in contrast to foot and pound, which were always different from place to place, at times even from city to city.
I don’t expect the US to ever switch. The US switched to international yard and pound instead of switching to a decimal system. After US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa agreed on that one, all countries who remained using these units had a uniform definition for them. Since then you don’t need to know any longer which yard or pound it was. Though not all units got standardized by that.
And some countries didn’t drop all old units and metricized some instead. Even SI kept the ton(ne). You can’t know what 1t exactly means without knowing the context, it can be 2240lb, 2000lb or 1000kg (~2204.6226lb).
It’s the only way this meme makes sense. It’s a complaint that humans don’t like the average of the temperates that produce the feelings of extreme hot and extreme cold. You’d have to change math, change physiology, or lose linearity.
Actually, earthquake magnitude can be projected to negative numbers. It’s well defined but it stops describing earthquakes. For instance, a -3 magnitude earthquake is the energy released by a cat knocking your cell phone off of a nightstand. (see page 290 of this book). Pretty sure the others are also logarithmic scales which are well-defined for any negative number. It just so happens that those negative numbers don’t describe anything we care to describe with those scales.
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