• PhilipTheBucket ( PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ) 
    13·
    2 years ago

    Fahrenheit is better.

    0 is real cold, 100 is real hot. How much sense does that make? Lots.

    What the fuck is Celsius? Maybe if you are doing chemistry it is better. 0 is kind of cold but not really, 40 is real hot, 80 is unsued in practice, 100 is when water boils. Great, that’ll come in real handy the next time I need to find out whether it is boiling-water temperature or not outside. How much sense does that make? 0. Which is the right number to use for roughly the bottom of the scale.

    For everything else, the US’s medieval “how many hogsheads in a farthing” units are far inferior, I will 100% agree. Fahrenheit is better though. If you disagree then why not just use Kelvin, that’s even more chemically accurate and even less related to human relevant temperatures which is the goal I guess.

    • drolex ( drolex@sopuli.xyz ) 
      21·
      2 years ago

      I might not agree with you but I respect you for taking the defense of the freedom units on a yuropean post.

      RIP we will bury your mangled corpse 182.88 centimeters under ground.

    • CyberEgg ( CyberEgg@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
      14·
      2 years ago

      No, it’s not better. Nor is it worse per see, it’s just a matter of being used to it. The advantage of using Celsius in day to day stuff is just that I don’t need to learn and convert two different scales. Because we all do chemistry every day (unless you don’t cook. In that case, learn to cook, it’s quite the skill).

      • blitzen ( blitzen@lemmy.ca ) 
        2·
        2 years ago

        I’ll counter the cooking argument with the following; you already have to learn different measurements even if it’s all nominally in Celsius degrees because cooking temperatures and ambient temperatures do not overlap. That there’s no real reason a degree in the same unit is helpful when knowing 30 degrees C is “hot” and chicken needs to be cooked to 74 degrees C, or bread at 190. They are already different things.

          • blitzen ( blitzen@lemmy.ca ) 
            5·
            2 years ago

            I’m saying there is literally zero advantage to ambient temperature and cooking temperature being on the same scale. There’s no actionable information gained by knowing that shorts weather is 20C and chicken needs to be cooked to 74C. You wouldn’t ever, say, need to increase the temperature of chicken 54C because it is 20C out. They are mathematically on the same scale, and can use the same units of measurement, but if they do it’s coincidental. Effectively they are different things.

            I wouldn’t advocate for a different system of ambient temperature measurement but for the fact that Fahrenheit already exists. I feel confident that I’ve outlined pragmatic advantages, more than simply “I’m used to it.”

            • CyberEgg ( CyberEgg@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
              6·
              2 years ago

              I’m saying there is literally zero advantage to ambient temperature and cooking temperature being on the same scale.

              But there’s also no disadvantage. Also, we’re measuring more temperatures than just weather and cooking. And having everything on the same scale makes it just convenient and relatable to each other. We have a feeling for what’s hot and what not just by seeing a number, because we know and use that scale for everything.

              wouldn’t advocate for a different system of ambient temperature measurement but for the fact that Fahrenheit already exists.

              I mean, I grew up on Celsius and never came into contact with Fahrenheit before the age of 17 or something. It didn’t exist to me before that, I had no disadvantage before knowing it existed, nothing was missing, etc.

              I feel confident that I’ve outlined pragmatic advantages, more than simply “I’m used to it.”

              Cannot confirm.

              • blitzen ( blitzen@lemmy.ca ) 
                2·
                2 years ago

                I get what you’re trying to say, and I don’t fully disagree with you. But your point about what a temperature “feels” like actually illustrates my point. We both know what a ten degree swing feels like in our respective measurements, but I would say that that feeling means nothing in regard to 10° difference in cooking temperatures. The feeling you would use to know if your steak is overdone or underdone is not the same feeling as it being shorts weather versus sweater weather.

                • CyberEgg ( CyberEgg@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
                  4·
                  2 years ago

                  But your point about what a temperature “feels” like actually illustrates my point.

                  How so? By “having a feeling” I don’t mean a sensing way but an estimate.

                  Also by your logic we should use a different scale for almost any other purpose. Different materials have different rates of heat transfer and therefore feel (in the sensing way this time) different at the same temperature. 27°C for water temperature feels much colder than 27°C of air temperature and the difference is so vast, most people consider the former too cold to be in and the latter very warm to even hot. So do you want to apply different scales to water and air/weather? Or is it more convenient to just have one temperature scale and get used to things being sensed a little different?

                  Btw, you’re not gonna convince me that Fahrenheit is better for any purpose. It doesn’t matter which scale we use because we don’t convert. The metric system is superior for weight and distances and such because we are constantly converting from centimetres/inches to metres/feet/yards to kilometres/miles, from gram/ounces to kilogram/pounds to tons/(idk what the imperial equivalent of tons is), from millilitres/ounces (again??) to litres/gallons (and don’t get me started on cups and shit in your kitchens), all the way up and down all day everyday.
                  We don’t do that with temperature. Ergo it doesn’t matter which scale we use as long as we’re used to it and can handle it.

            • anuwubis ( morgunkorn@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
              5·
              2 years ago

              I do pastry with butter, and pralines (chocolate bonbons), the ambiant temperature and the temperature of the products are very highly correlated.

              It makes a huge difference if i’m trying to make the same recipe in a somewhat controlled environment during the winter when the thermostat regulates the temperature, and during the warm summer months where it can be easily 5 to 8 degrees warmer in the kitchen (no A/C in my house).

              • blitzen ( blitzen@lemmy.ca ) 
                4·
                2 years ago

                No doubt, ambient temperature can make a difference, especially in baking. I’m glad you brought up that point. But I guess what I’m saying is that it is not a direct 1:1 comparison. If it’s 5° warmer in your house and you have to add 5° to the final cooking temperature, that would be a direct correlation but if you’re saying it’s 5° hotter in your house therefore you need to bake something for x% longer, the scale at which you measured your home temperature is immaterial.

        • cute_noker ( cute_noker@feddit.dk ) 
          2·
          2 years ago

          It is very useful to know that you can cook a chicken in a sauna. Checkmate.

          But seriously it is because it is easier to just use international standard for everything.

          Imagine the carnage of every single country having their own definition of a mile. (Every single country has their own definition, but that pain is (almost) gone thanks to km.)

          There are just 8 different temperature systems on Wikipedia.

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_of_scales_of_temperature __ Why does it need to be more complicated than necessary?

    • blackn1ght ( blackn1ght@feddit.uk ) 
      10·
      2 years ago

      It just boils down down to which you’ve grown up with. You’re so used to using F it just seems obvious, but at least to me, the numbers seem a bit random and arbitrary.

      But I know that 0C is literally freezing out and that the roads and pavements could be icy. And I also know that 30C is a very hot day (to me) just through experience and not knowing any other scale and being exposed to C all the time.

    • mariusafa ( mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
      6·
      2 years ago

      I don’t know about you but I do not only use temperature in order to know if my body is hot or if outside is cold or not. I usually use temperature scales in order to know if my computer is hot, my car/bike engine, my food, water for cooking, water for showering, and sometimes since all life is water based I like to know if my food is freezed or is boling. And since at sea level water freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C (damn how cool!), then I have an scale that I can use for weather but at the same time for everything else it’s very intuitive to use in an habitat where all life depends on water. Cook this at 120: oh okay the recipe wants me to boil water I may not even need to measure the water because when it starts boiling that’s it.

      Having water as a reference is quite normal if you are going to need a scale for more than just forecasting weather, like, for everything else.

      • PhilipTheBucket ( PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ) 
        2·
        2 years ago

        I don’t know about you but I do not only use temperature in order to know … if outside is cold or not

        Yeah what maniac would care about something like that

        I usually use temperature scales in order to know if my computer is hot, my car/bike engine, my food

        Oh, I see, the things that everyone uses temperature for all the time. Perfect sense.

        I like to know if my food is freezed or is boling

        You all are doing a terrible job of selling me on Celsius here.

      • PhilipTheBucket ( PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ) 
        4·
        2 years ago
        • 0: Real cold
        • 100: Real hot
        • 200: Low bake
        • 350: Medium bake
        • 450: High bake
        • 1000+: Melts metal, like go wild, that’s about where off the chart starts

        👍

        • -20: Real cold
        • 0: Water freezes, real useful if you need to know that one in your daily life and “32” is too hard to remember
        • 30: Real hot (for some fucking reason)
        • 90: Low bake
        • 150: Medium bake
        • 230: High bake
        • 600+: Melts metal

        😢

        It’s like the exact opposite of distance units. Normally you look at the metric ones and say “thank god! It just makes sense. It’s all tens and it’s logical” and then the imperial is all wacky numbers.

        With Fahrenheit you can say, “How is it outside?” “50s” / “60s” / “70s” / “80s” and it’s instantly a comprehensible answer. Maybe “low 70s” “mid 70s” if you want to be precise and you mean at an exact particular time of day. Meanwhile, the Celsius weather channels are over here putting decimals in their temperature predictions because the units are too unwieldy to even tell people what temperature it’s going to be if they have perfect integer precision. Of course, three significant digits is way too many, so they’re half making up nonsense for the one-tenths place, but they have to do it anyway. Why do they have to? Because they’re using Celsius, like a bunch of chumps.

      • nuko147 ( nuko147@lemm.ee ) English
        1·
        2 years ago

        1st time i watched a baking recipe in YouTube: Woman says, now you bake at 350 degrees. And i was, what kind of oven has she? Mine goes only up to 250… 😂

    • stoy ( stoy@lemmy.zip ) 
      5·
      2 years ago

      Sigh.

      There is no temperature scale that is better than the other when it comes to how you define a comfortable temperature.

      Doing that is all about what you are used to.

      Arguing about weather to not the waether is hot/cold outside at 23 is just a matter of what the numbers mean to you.

      Looking at science, C is better than F, simply because C uses are simpler definition, K is even better since it starts ar absolute zero.

      K is however a more annoying scale to use for normal/human temps.

      The C/F debate is just damn annoying at this point, neither side will be able to convince the orher that they are right.

      Just learn a few basic points on the scale in the other scale.

      • PhilipTheBucket ( PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ) 
        3·
        2 years ago

        K is however a more annoying scale to use for normal/human temps.

        I just want you to ponder on that statement for a bit

        Now imagine that you live on a planet where everyone outside your country uses Kelvin and swears it is normal

        • stoy ( stoy@lemmy.zip ) 
          2·
          2 years ago

          That is fair, but we don’t live on a planet like that.

          So my argument stands for this planet.

          However, lets look a bit closer at a world like that and it would be used.

          In daily life I doubt that people would say:

          Take it slow now, it is slippery, the temp just dropped to two hundred and seventy three point fifteen degrees out!

          People would probably say something like:

          Take it slow now, it is slippery, the temp just dropped to freezing!

          Or during the summer, peeps would not say:

          Perfect weather, two hundred and ninety six degrees, slow breeze and scattered clouds!

          They would probably shorten it to:

          Perfect weather, ninety six degrees, slow breeze and scattered clouds

          • PhilipTheBucket ( PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ) 
            1·
            2 years ago

            during the summer, peeps would not say:

            Perfect weather, two hundred and ninety six degrees, slow breeze and scattered clouds!

            They would probably shorten it to:

            Perfect weather, ninety six degrees, slow breeze and scattered clouds

            You’ve almost got it! Now talk about the opposite problem where all the temperatures are at weird low values and 0 is in the wrong place

          • PhilipTheBucket ( PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ) 
            2·
            2 years ago

            Yes it does.

            Fahrenheit decided that we should use a scale based on what humans feel like is the full range of sensible temperatures, with that range set to 0 through 100.

            Celsius decided that we should use a scale based on what liquid water feels like is the full range of sensible temperatures, with that range set to 0 through 100.

            Kelvin decided that we should use a scale based on what atoms feel like is the the full range of sensible temperatures, with that range set to 0 through NaN (exception thrown).

            So, chemists the world over like to use one of a couple of different scales depending on whether they are primarily concerned with the world defined by water, or the world defined by atoms, because it’s convenient to use scales that are generally aligned with the feelings and behaviors of the entities you are concerned with.

            And then sometimes humans come into the room, and say hey those are cool but also I’d like to use a scale that is generally aligned with the feelings and behaviors of humans, and for some reason everyone in this thread falls down on the ground and starts screaming and wailing, saying they are wrong and stupid for wanting to do that.

            • stoy ( stoy@lemmy.zip ) 
              4·
              2 years ago

              Celsius has nothing to do with feeling.

              Celius simply set two logical endpoint of the scale, 0 when water freezes into ice and 100 when it boils into steam.

              It has nothing to do with feeling.

                • stoy ( stoy@lemmy.zip ) 
                  3·
                  2 years ago

                  Interesting, in my last two comments, I have not mentioned Fahrenheit, I have simply said that Celsius did not build his scale based on feelings.

                  I refrained from bringing up F because as I tried to explain in my initial comment on this post, it doesn’t matter, neither of us will ever change our minds that the temperature scale we grew up with is not the best.

                  This argument about weather one temperature scale is better than the other for day to day use is stupid, I use C, you use F, lets leave it at that.

      • PhilipTheBucket ( PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ) 
        3·
        2 years ago

        I don’t know if people are old enough to remember this. Back in the 70s, they really made a push in the US to convert the road signs to metric. From time to time they have tried, and people have always resisted. Anyway, in the 70s they studied it, made a commission (which in the end Ronald Reagan destroyed as he did so many other things), and tried again. They started putting sneaky little kilometer signs underneath the mph and “mile 5” and whatever markers, just to get people used to the idea. (They are still around, in some places.)

        Nope. People could see where it was going. America as does some other countries has a proud tradition of shooting holes in road signs with guns. I don’t know why people do this, but when the metric signs came along they shot the shit out of them. I don’t know that the unsustainability of keeping them installed when people kept shooting them into semi-oblivion was part of what made them abandon the idea, but it certainly couldn’t have been good for the morale of the people working on it, and probably it made a difference.

        That is all the good and all the bad of America rolled up into one. The people had spoken. Keep your god damned kilometers. We’re not changing the date for Thanksgiving. It’s not the Gulf of America. Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me. And so on. Hopefully.

    • Snowwomen ( Snowwomen@discuss.tchncs.de ) English
      3·
      2 years ago

      I like in a Celsius country but have switched all my digital thermometers to F for exactly this reason. It’s just more intuitive, and I happen to like it at 70F, so below that convenient number is cool, and above it is warm.

    • blitzen ( blitzen@lemmy.ca ) 
      3·
      2 years ago

      Despite the downvotes, you are absolutely correct.

      Let’s all start out agreeing that units of measurement (distance, length, weight, etc.) in the US is absolutely idiotic. I will back up every European who says this, 100%. Miles, inches, pounds, pints, quarts, fractions; it’s a mess. Objectively, if I remove all my cultural biases (I’m American) metric is just better. A lot better. No question.

      And when we are talking about scientific pursuit, and probably cooking too, Celsius is a great unit of measure.

      But ambient temperature, the temperature of the environment, Fahrenheit is better. It covers the range of human experience and neatly ties it to a 1-100 scale. It’s a “how hot is it” scale. Celsius’ -18 – 38 degrees just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when describing the temperatures you will experience during 99% of your time on earth. Further, Celsius’ units are slightly too big to useful, I’ve seen weather reports in Europe say the expected temperature to a 10th of a degree, while Fahrenheit is granular enough not to need to.

      Metrics base ten is great when it comes to distance and weight. And it accurately allows for relative comparison (ten meters is twice that of five.) But ambient temperature does not work like that; 20 degrees is not twice that of 10, and the base 10 units doesn’t effectively exist for temperature.

      To all those who will downvote me, I get it. You’re very used to being on the objectively right side of sanity re: units of measurement and rightfully so. But I ask you to set aside your cultural bias and muscle memory for a moment and objectively think about what range of measurement makes more sense for ambient temperature and ambient temperature only.

      Put another way, with Celsius, one has to be accustomed to the possible range of values. With Fahrenheit, most people understand 1-100 intuitively.

    • Venus_Ziegenfalle ( Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org ) English
      1·
      2 years ago

      The thing about Fahrenheit being more intuitive is it will just depend on what scale you’re used to. If anything having the scale relate to water makes more sense for cooking but again since nothing is being converted it doesn’t really matter. If you want an actually superior American unit of measurment imo look no further than cups. Using volume over weight has made following recipes much easier for me.

        • Venus_Ziegenfalle ( Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org ) English
          1·
          2 years ago

          Yes that’s what we do. Standardized cups have become available over the last years because people are slowly realizing volume is objectively easier to work with but still in most European recipes you will only find volume for liquids so you will indeed need a kitchen scale. Or you just eyeball everything which is what I used to do but then you might as well use a cup.