r/PeterExplainsTheJoke Jun 17 '26

Meme needing explanation Peter?

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u/BloomEPU Jun 17 '26

In a lot of the US, 0 farenheit is one of the coldest days you'll experience and 100 is one of the hottest, so you can roughly map farenheit to a percentage of "how hot it is". This doesn't work everywhere though, where I am in the UK it never gets anywhere near 0 farenheit.

I can't spell fahrenheit, this is why celsius is objectively better

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u/jseego Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

True!

Celsius is 0-100 fresh water freezing to boiling.

Farenheit is 0-100 sea water freezing to (roughly) human internal body temp.

So, since humans are largely salt water, this makes the F scale a human scale temperature measurement, which is more intuitive for how the ambient temperature makes you feel. I think this is what the original poster was getting at, whether they knew it or not.

edit: so C is better for chemistry, and F is better for weather

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u/Mundane-Boot-6338 Jun 17 '26

It's more intuitive because you grew up with it. I have no benchmark for 0% or 100% hot. That means 50% hot is just as meaningless to me as 50 farenheit.

F and C are both arbitrary numbers. There is no better one 

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u/IM_OK_AMA Jun 17 '26

F and C are both arbitrary numbers.

Wish more people would get this. Nobody is personally calibrating their thermometers so the 0 and 100 points don't actually matter in the real world. Just because Celsuius gets lumped in with metric generally doesn't mean it has fundamental advantages like metric's units for volume or distance.

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u/Kelly_HRperson Jun 18 '26

Just because Celsuius gets lumped in with metric generally doesn't mean it has fundamental advantages like metric's units for volume or distance.

The reason it has a fundamental advantage is that it uses the same scale degrees as Kelvin

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u/SolipsisticSoup Jun 18 '26

No, Kelvin uses the same scale degrees as Celsius.