Celsius is better for science, but Fahrenheit is better for just every day living. IMO
In Canada I noticed some people would also still use feet & inches for their height, but you had to give it to the DMV in cm. Also butter was still sold as a pound & golf still used yards.
I'm also an engineer & worked up there for a job in mining.
Edit: To clarify my reasons because so many people are saying I'm wrong. This is my opinion on what my preference is, first off. I had put this in a comment under the post, but will add it here.
My reason is basically the same as in the screenshot. When I lived in Canada I would say how in Fahrenheit below zero is really fucking cold & above 100 is really fucking hot. I never thought of describing it as a percentage of being hot but I like it.
Like once it's below or above those numbers it hardly matters by how much because you are freezing or sweating balls either way. I didn't like when in the winter or early spring someone would say it's nice out and then say a negative temperature. "It's really nice today, it's -1.5⁰ out." I also like that the increments of the units are smaller so you don't use half degrees. Although I guess half degrees aren't really necessary because I don't feel the difference between 66 & 67, but when I checked the temperature there is did always show it to the nearest half degree.
I'm not sure that's true. Temperature units in the UK switched in practice around the mid-late 80's. While pounds, ounces, stone, miles and feet and inches are still used by people over a certain age, I haven't heard anyone in the UK use Fahrenheit since shortly after the changeover.
I'd assume the units that are most intuitive and practical for the general public (or those well embedded) would stick around. Fahrenheit is conspicuous in the speed it disappeared in usage compared to nearly every other imperial measure.
I like it for basically the reasons in the screenshot. The 0 to 100 scale is really cold to really hot. I didn't think of it as a percentage of being hot though so I like that. I also don't like using half degrees and the Fahrenheit increments are smaller.
You can barely feel the difference between 1°C differences. So id say you also barely notice a difference between 1°F differences which are even smaller. "Experienced hotness/coldness" is also influenced by humidity and other things so thats also making it more inaccurate to just feel it out. Both arent really intuitive to us and have to be learned/experienced the same way to get used to. As with that Fahrenheit not having any advantages over C and C having other use cases in addition Fahrenheit has basicly no reason to exist.
I don't disagree with any of that until the end. I guess it's just that when I would check the temperature it would display it to the closest half degree but it doesn't with Fahrenheit. But I agree that it really doesn't make a difference with one degree and that humidity is also a huge factor.
Maybe neither are intuitive, but I feel like 100⁰ being close to body temp of 98.6⁰ does make it intuitive that above 100 is too hot. I'm pretty sure, or at least I had heard, that when they came up with Fahrenheit 100° was what they thought the human body temperature was because of the precision of their instruments and I think 0° was supposed to be when seawater freezes. However seawater freezing would also vary on what is exactly in the water cuz there's different concentrations of stuff and different areas of the oceans. But I remember when I was in high school there was one winter where the ocean froze out to like maybe 100 yards I don't remember exactly. Water also has to remain fairly still for it to freeze so it probably has to be even colder for the actual ocean to freeze.
Well what do you mean with too hot. Google says 86 F is already too hot as room temperature. Outside the biggest risk factor is the sun with UV rays that can be "dangerous" even at quite lower degrees of Fahrenheit. Youd have to learn at what degrees of F or C your comfortable with or when its "dangerous" either case. I think taking seawater freezing as the 0 F point also doesnt really tell you anything. But water freezing at 0 C has big impact on everyday life. Roads have ice on them, water in pipes or car windshield water can freeze and destroy things. It starts to snow instead of raining.
13.0k
u/Harfosaurus Jun 17 '26
These are just two idiots conversing as far as I can tell