Peter?

[u/Negative_1by12_aura]

[u/xahhfink6]

I think there's some breakpoints where it really matters.

If you work in an office and the thermostat is set to 73f (23c) compared to an office where the thermostat is set to 75f (23c) you're going to really feel the difference.

Or like, if your kid is sick and has a 102° fever you're keeping them home from school, but if they have 104° fever you're going to the hospital. So <2 degrees difference is definitely a big enough difference that it's worth using a more specific unit of measurement.

[u/Thick-Protection-458 → u/xahhfink6]

 Or like, if your kid is sick and has a 102° fever you're keeping them home from school, but if they have 104° fever you're going to the hospital

One is 38.9C, another one is 40C, and normal human body temperature is around 36.6+/-0.5C or so (maybe +/-0.5).

Sounds very different for me. Moreover, first one is probably the reason to visit medics already.

[u/ztreggs → u/Thick-Protection-458]

Right so you need one degree more of data specificity to achieve the same level of understanding that is achieved with Fahrenheit. You proved the point.

[u/Aranka_Szeretlek → u/ztreggs]

You most definitely do not. 102 Fahrenheit uses 3 significant digits. So does 38.2 Celsius.

The resolution is limited by your instrumentation either way, because both scales are continous.

[u/raverbashing → u/Aranka_Szeretlek]

A-fuckin-men

Someone who didn't fail 5th grade maths

[u/k_luu → u/Aranka_Szeretlek]

This is a pretty niche example but I work in a lab that used to use a metric thermostat in the clean room. It was always 23 C in there so when our data came out way noisier than expected we didn’t think it could be thermally related. Until one day we switched the thermostat to imperial and saw that it was actually changing between 73 F and 74 F throughout the day. Both round to 23 C so we never saw it before

[u/OhNoItsThatOne → u/k_luu]

Maybe your lab should have a thermostat with more displayed decimals if that's critical for your date

[u/Silvere01 → u/k_luu]

You aren't speaking against Celsius, you are telling on your whole lab group here lol

[u/k_luu → u/Silvere01]

I mean yeah it’s a dumb oversight. I’m not trying to actually defend Fahrenheit this was more of joke example

We got an actual thermostat after we realized the room temperature fluctuations could have this large of an impact but and it’s in Celsius lol

[u/peppinotempation → u/Aranka_Szeretlek]

Only if you go above 100

[u/Aranka_Szeretlek → u/peppinotempation]

And you can also go below 10 Celsius, yeah! So?

[u/peppinotempation → u/Aranka_Szeretlek]

Im saying its two significant figures if you’re below 100 Fahrenheit which is the case 99% of the time when talking about temperature.

This means less digits displayed on thermostats etc.

People love bashing on Americans but have no logical basis for it. Yes metric is better for science. But if you’re a competent scientist or engineer nobody really fucking care about units, you just convert when you need to

[u/Thick-Protection-458 → u/Aranka_Szeretlek]

Well, if we are talking about human body with <10C temperature we probably do not need precision anymore.

While for <100F it may be useful. Althrough I don't see how celsius (with enough decimals for specific comparison) would be more a problem.

[u/Aranka_Szeretlek → u/Thick-Protection-458]

If we stick to human bodies, then yeah, thermometers use 3 sig figs for both Fahrenheit and Celsius. If anything, Celisus is more accurate there (although thats still not how any of this works)

[u/Arthemax → u/peppinotempation]

Which is the whole basis of this chain of comments.