This post about the Fahrenheit scale goes well with The Imperial System post! So anyway, the lesson here is that the scale is apparently not completely arbitrary:
Fahrenheit was made to help create nice, whole numbers for measuring BODY TEMPERATURE. It uses a granularity so somebody could eyeball a measurement using a decent, mercury thermometer. Now, we have very accurate digital, and can get a nice decimal placed Celsius reading. But for the 1700s this was a great new invention.
Note: they were using a temperature scale before this one, where water froze at 7.5 degrees and the human body was in the 20’s.
(via: Imgur)
That’s all well and good, but how about you just stop using the Fahrenheit scale and get with the rest of the world.
It’s not like America doesn’t use Celsius because they do in many different fields.
It’s the same thing with metric measurements, in sciences they use the millimetre.
Just come and join us in the land of metric.
Kind regards,
The rest of the world
Imperial is great for cooking when you don’t have a scale. Or anything accurate, for that matter.
Signed, a mother of Scouts. Who go camping a lot. 😀
Unclear how ‘Imperial is great for cooking’, especially when camping…? Celsius is equally good for cooking – it’s all just ‘temperature’. And when I’m camping, I either boil water, or I stick something on a skillet – and nobody needs to know the actual temperature in C or F. But I’m keen to hear it explained.
It’s all about proportions. Imperial is based on halves, so if, say, your measuring implements are left behind or melted*, but you have a coffee cup, you can still bake. And trust me, these kids are learning to cook and need the concrete measurements. I don’t know how they managed to take two hours to make boxed mac & cheese and STILL made it watery. (But hey, not like the adults had to eat it.)
*No, that hasn’t happened to me. Yet. I have vast faith in the ability of kids to do inspired and horrible things.
And you don’t need _temperature_ for measuring volume, or proportions.
Or just dont worry about how someone else measures temperature when it has no bearing on you? How insecure of a person are you that you get a superiority complex over units of measurement lol
EXACTLY! The amount of hate and time he put into screaming “OMG, you tell different temps than me,” makes you wonder how many “Karen” tiktok videos they have appeared in.
It is a real problem, in scientific/technical areas only the metric system is used and people who grew having another system makes more mistakes because they are not accustomed, and those mistakes can be very serious (NASA crashed a $125 million orbiter on Mars due to a bad unit conversion to the metric system)
There is no logical reason to use Celsius over Fahrenheit. The reason metric is preferable is that everything is easy to convert into everything else, but this doesn’t apply to temperature as neither scale is related to either method of measurement. And Fahrenheit, with the smaller graduations, is more precise to a smaller change from one degree to the next so if anything it should be preferable due to the higher precision possible without losing yourself in a ton of decimal places.
of course there is a direct relation between the celsius scale for temperature and other scales of metric measurements:
“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.”
That’s why we have the BTU.
There is another reason as well. Imperial units (Boston Tea Party, my left foot!) were designed for people who do not know calculus and operate with values like half, quarter (sounds familiar?) and so on. It made a lot of sense 200 years ago and no sense at all right now. Our math (and metric system) uses decimal base. Imperial units do not.
The problem with the Fahrenheit scale, right from the outset, is the calibration at 0 degrees. You need to get the proportion of salt exactly right. Celsius makes much more sense. 0 degrees is where pure water freezes, and 100 degrees is where it boils (at 1 atmosphere, of course).
Both are completely arbitrary, since they are based solely on the whim of the definer. Saying “I will base it on water” or whatever the specific thought process was is just choosing to use a thing because it is the thing chosen.
And one of them is “arbitrary” on freezing and boiling point of water, and one of them is arbitrary on the correct % of the correct salt in a mixture plus the assumed internal temperature of an animal. So handy!