In Defense of Fahrenheit

http://lethalletham.com/posts/fahrenheit.html

28 90 7 years ago

The argument that 0-100 being an intuitive and useful daily use scale is actually a good one.

However, everything else falls flat.

Nobody actually uses decimals with celcius, because nobody can tell the difference between 8.2 degrees and 8.7 degrees. It's just 8 and 9.

Zero being freezing is a critical number to know, because that's when you can get black ice (+/- wind-chill) and snow.

Knowing that 35 is grossly hot is no more difficult than knowing -32 is freezing.

Celcius has simple ranges: Below 0: it's freezing, bundle up 0-10: it's cold outside, wear a jacket 10-20: good for physical activity, sweater and light jacket required 20-30: it's comfortable outside 30+: stay in the shade

That said, all our appliances (oven, barbecue) use Fahrenheit and I have no idea what temperature to cook at in celcius.

RenRav• 7 years ago

The decimal point wasn't brought up against celsius specifically.

I think the biggest factor of c/f preference is just what you grew up with and are most accustomed to using every day.

jobigoud• 7 years ago

There are objective landmarks outside of culture. The absolute zero, water freezing, water boiling, human normal body temperature, etc. It's better to use a unit where important ones are aligned to small practical. Probably something better than celcius could be designed.

username4442• 7 years ago

Completely agree.

Symbiote3• 7 years ago

That said, all our appliances (oven, barbecue) use Fahrenheit and I have no idea what temperature to cook at in celcius.

It surprised me when we recruited a developer from Canada, and on his second day at work he asked what temperature he should have set the oven to. I learned that Canada has appliances labelled in "American".

180°C is the most common oven temperature required, outside 160-200°C is unusual for normal cooking.

jld• 7 years ago

Ive always thought ovens could do fine with a five setting control.

Warming (180-200F)/90C

Low 300F/150C

Med 350F/180C

High 400F/200C

Broil

francislavoie• 7 years ago

Canadian here, 325-450F is the typical range I've needed to use, pizzas are often what I cook at those hotter temps. That's about 160-230C.

There's a surprising inconsistency in Canada for units because of our proximity to the US. For body weight and height, nearly everyone uses lbs and feet/inches, but official records (on my driver's license for example) uses kg and cm. Like you said, most appliances are F. Distances are in km but property sizes are still often in sqft (because lots of products come from the US). The list goes on.

dagw4• 7 years ago

outside 160-200°C is unusual for normal cooking.

Huh? I probably do more than 50% of my cooking outside that range.

cyberferret3• 7 years ago

It seems that in the extreme ranges of numbers (150+), the propensity for errors or confusion between the two scales gets riskier .

I was having an online discussion with someone in an electronics forum the other day, and we were talking about the ideal temperature for a soldering iron for a contact point using a particular type of solder and potentiometer.

He kept talking about setting the iron at 300 degrees. Now, my iron DOES have a setting up to 400 degrees, but in Celsius. He was talking in Farenheit, and had I not double checked with him, I would have fried my electronics to a crisp.

flukus• 7 years ago

Do dial temperatures actually correlate to internal temperatures accurately at all? From what I've seen it differs wildly from oven to oven and you're better off just learning where the low, medium and high spots are.

emilfihlman• 7 years ago

225°C is the standard for most frozen pizzas, fries, pretty much anything, really.

Jedd2• 7 years ago

Zero being freezing is a critical number to know, because that's when you can get black ice (+/- wind-chill) and snow.

For those of us who don't live somewhere that ever gets black ice, this is not a critical reason.

Also, I suspect that wind-chill does not work how you think it works.

That said, all our appliances (oven, barbecue) use Fahrenheit and I have no idea what temperature to cook at in celcius.

Spare a thought for those of us in enlightened civilisations that have to deal with myriad north-american based cookbooks ... but having said that, it'd take you a couple of weeks, with maybe a post-it note in the kitchen for the duration, to get the hang of the conversion rate.

Taniwha• 7 years ago

That's OK, cooking in the US is weird - they use cups in their recipes that are a different size from those used in the rest of the world - because of course they use fluid ounces/gallons/etc that are a different size from Imperial cups/flu ozs/gallons, much less different from a standard 250g metric cup

kylec5• 7 years ago

To provide a counterexample to your statement "nobody actually uses decimals with celsius", when I switch the climate control system in my German-made car to Celsius mode it does use decimals: either .0 or .5, and the toggle moves the temperature up or down by half a degree.

Whereas in Fahrenheit mode the toggle moves the temperature up or down by a single degree, which seems cleaner and simpler to me (not to mention the F display uses 2 digits, while the C display uses 3).

seszett3• 7 years ago

the F display uses 2 digits, while the C display uses 3

The °F display must use three digits as well when it's more than 37°C, which isn't that rare (at least for me, maybe not where you live).

KaiserPro• 7 years ago

There is a desperate attempt by some news papers in the UK to bring back Fahrenheit, The problem being only those over 40 really knows what it means to have a 85f "scorcher"

its only being done as a symbol of "freedom" from the EU loving french.

cyberferret3• 7 years ago

The author argues against Celsius because it 'feels' wrong? Well, I've grown up with Celsius all my life, and Farenheit just 'feels' wrong to me.

Everything is relative. The author deems 35 deg C as being "grossly hot", but that is just the average temperature to me where I live. He calls 0 degrees not even cold, but for me, that is almost unbearably cold.

Having a datum of 0 for freezing makes sense, especially for professions like flying (I used to be a pilot). Knowing that you are close to a point when water will turn from liquid to solid can be life saving, and I have no problems with using negatives to determine HOW solid.

czechdeveloper• 7 years ago

0 is also very important for driving, camping etc. Water freezing is just so important point.

kortilla2• 7 years ago

Memorizing 32 is not much different than memorizing 0, despite how obvious it seems to the centigrade folks.

paol2• 7 years ago

The "intuitive" argument comes up a lot in relation to units of measure, and it just makes me wonder how people can have such lack of self awareness.

Anything that is familiar is easier, that tells you nothing about the thing itself. This seems so obvious to me I wouldn't even think of basing an argument around it. Is the concept of subjective experience that hard to imagine for some people?

WilliamEdward• 7 years ago

I mean no disrespect in saying this, but i genuinely think Americans don't like to leave their comfort zone too often and it results in a lot of subjective bias.

I read something like 40% of Americans have never left their country, and about 10% have never left their own state. That means a great deal of them have never experienced a temperature outside of their own.

adrianratnapala2• 7 years ago

The "intuitive" argument comes up a lot in relation to units of measure, and it just makes me wonder how people can have such lack of self awareness.

As someone who has grown up with a mix of various Imperial (not US) measures and metric ones, I often find some more intuitive than others even when I am familiar with both.

The most obvious his human height. A tall man is about 6' or more. Most people are some number of inches less than that. Moreover, the inch and not the centimetre is roughly the amount at which you would casually notice two people were slightly different in height.

On the other hand, for horizontal distance, metres (or yards) make more sense than feet. To the extent that when American tell me how far away something is in feet, I just multiply by three before trying to use the info.

I think weight in stones is similarly better than either kilos or or pounds, but I am personally more familiar with kilos.

jmauritz• 7 years ago

This, the author is a phd surely he should see his own bias here?

"I found it annoying to use negative numbers for temperatures that aren't really that cold, and then have 35℃ be grossly hot." living in Sweden i've always used 0 as the "feeling" middle point, temperatures usually ranging between -20 / +30 C, feels very natural.

That saying the task seems quite fun, would be nice to replicate it coming from a celcius background.

devoply2• 7 years ago

I have lived under both regimes, and it's easy to adjust to either one... It's just a matter of a few years.

kylec5• 7 years ago

Do you have a preference for one vs the other?

classichasclass4• 7 years ago

It's not so much 0 that's the problem with Centigrade for weather purposes, it's the 100. 100 F is rather warm. 100 C is DEAD.

I don't have a problem with Centigrade for other stuff, but I think Fahrenheit captures the human ambient environment range better.

Disclaimer: American, where I remember the vain national attempt at metrication as a young child and still have to convert everything mentally when visiting my Australian in-laws

cyberferret3• 7 years ago

But I still find the 100 a useful demarcation - especially when cooking. I find it handy to know how far away my soup or tea water is away from boiling without doing complicated maths in my head.

The equivalence to the percent scale also makes it easier to conceive - i.e. if I see my kettle on the hotplate registering 75 degrees C, I immediately think "Oh, it is three quarters of the way to boiling".

seszett3• 7 years ago

But surely Americans use temperature for cooking too and not just for weather, and then 100°C is boiling which is also at least somewhat useful to know.

clouddrover3• 7 years ago

Fahrenheit captures the human ambient environment range better

It doesn't. It's just a number which denotes a temperature. You'd quickly get used to celsius if you switched to it.

crispinb• 7 years ago

Quite. He's solving a nonexistent problem. Next he'll tell us that English is H. Sapiens' natural language.

I found it annoying to use negative numbers for temperatures that aren't really that cold

All Australians understand perfectly well that anything below 20C (or 25 above the Tropic of Capricorn) is cold.

alkonaut2• 7 years ago

The temperature scale is a) rather arbitrary b) rarely converted in everyday life.

So it's the least bad american unit. If I was suddenly forced to switch from C to F I'd just adjust. It's not that bad.

The others such as distances and volumes are insane and of course not because of the units but because of being non-decimal. Example: figuring out the volume of a swimming pool given its dimensions. Which length unit would you measure the pool in, in order to have a calculation for the volume (in gallons) that doesn't require a calculator? (A: a unit that is 6.14 inches long)

Jedd2• 7 years ago

The author lists the importance of a global temperature scale, then shows a map of North America overlaid with some dots.

For many people that's Celsius, but for many others it's Fahrenheit.

That second 'many' is disingenuous. For about 90% of the planet's population it's Celsius, and for about 10% it's Fahrenheit.

Author also has some pretty arbitrary and bewildering requirements, including wanting a scale of 0 to 100, yet also avoiding any 3-digit numbers.

Any claims about 'intuition' are misguided -- Celsius makes more sense because a) most people use it, and b) it maps onto the rest of the SI units.

That I happen to feel comfortable at a somewhat arbitrary 21 (c) is not a sufficient or satisfactory reason for other people to let go of deprecated temperature scales.

OrderlyTiamat• 7 years ago

The requirements list reads as a description of farenheit, which the author then uses in a roundabout way to conclude his presupposition that farenheit is the better unit.

acqq• 7 years ago

For about 90% of the planet's population it's Celsius, and for about 10% it's Fahrenheit.

I thought only the US and a few very small countries use Fahrenheit, which is not more than 5% of the world population?

Freak_NL• 7 years ago

A quick glance at the numbers on Wikipedia puts it a bit under 5%, the bulk of which is inhabitants of the US, but I did leave out the Bahamas for convenience.

Thorrez5• 7 years ago

The truth is, outside of a chemistry lab I don't care that much about the freezing and boiling points of water

Even in a chemistry lab, Celsius isn't that great, it's Kelvin that actually has an advantage. And Rankine would be about as good.

alkonaut2• 7 years ago

C goes 90% of the way there because 90% of temperature usage in science is for delta-T. That said, you need to be aware of it so you don't accidentally use the occasional absolute temperature in C at some point.

Thorrez5• 7 years ago

Yes, C is useful in science because it's commonly used, not really because of any inherent usefulness. The network effect is the usefulness, and if F had that network effect it would be just as useful.

dgellow• 7 years ago

A Kelvin temperature is just the Celsius temperature +273°.

Thorrez5• 7 years ago

A Rankine temperature is just the Fahrenheit temperature +459.67°.

Tepix3• 7 years ago

I care very much about the freezing point of water outside. It means ice on the roads.

Thorrez5• 7 years ago

My point was about in the chemistry lab, not outside.

AngryData• 7 years ago

0F is also works for that application too in a slightly different way, it is when a salted road starts to freeze back and becomes slippery again.

enriquto• 7 years ago

LOL. Do people really still use fahrenheit over there?

dragonshed• 7 years ago

More imperial entanglements than you can possibly imagine.

fanf22• 7 years ago

American customary units are not the same as imperial units. The British imperial reform in the early 1800s altered the volume measures, whereas the US continued using the Queen Anne wine gallon and the Winchester grain bushel.

IgorPartola• 7 years ago

Or we could just stop this Freedom Units bullshit and be like normal people. It feels wrong is not a reason to keep doing the stupid thing.

Tepix3• 7 years ago

In practice a difference of 1 degree celsius is slightly noticeable. But given that 1 degree Fahrenheit is only 5/9 degree celsius, do you really care if it‘s 74 or 75F outside?

kylec5• 7 years ago

I can definitely feel the difference between when I set my car to 72F vs 73F (or any pairing of consecutive degrees F)

williadc• 7 years ago

Fahrenheit seems to be a good scale for weather. It would be a pretty simple matter to make a human friendly scale based on Celsius - halve the unit. Freezing is zero degrees, and boiling is 200 degrees. I call this unit Celinheit:

Here's how that looks when compared with Fahrenheit:

  0F == -35 Ch
 10F == -24 Ch
 20F == -13 Ch
 32F ==   0 Ch
 40F ==   9 Ch
 50F ==  20 Ch
 60F ==  32 Ch
 70F ==  42 Ch
 80F ==  53 Ch
 90F ==  64 Ch

100F == 76 Ch 110F == 86 Ch

The advantages of this system:

* 40-60 would be considered about ideal.

* Each 10 degree "band" has a feeling, similar to Fahrenheit.

* Converting to metric would be really easy.

Disadvantages:

* https://xkcd.com/927/

Ndymium• 7 years ago

The advantages of this system: > * 40-60 would be considered about ideal.

Why would that be an advantage? I consider about 20–25°C ideal. Why is it worse than some other range?

* Each 10 degree "band" has a feeling, similar to Fahrenheit.

As a user of the celsius scale, each 10 degree "band" already has a feeling to me.

0n34n7• 7 years ago

Celsius is much more useful than stipulated here. For example, it takes 1J (Joule) to heat 1g (which is also 1ml) of pure water 1 degree Celsius.

The metric system is all weighted and related from temperature to mass to distance. This is what makes it so useful for Science, and frankly, every day use.

kylec5• 7 years ago

Please provide an example where you need to convert between Joules, grams, and Celsius in "every day use"

fanf22• 7 years ago

Estimating how long it will take the kettle to boil :-)

bramblerose• 7 years ago

One calorie, not one Joule. Water has a specific heat of ~4.2 kJ/kg.

ericd• 7 years ago

I think a lot of people here are missing the most important point, which is that Fahrenheit roughly maps 0-100 to the most common temperature ranges experienced in daily weather, which is by far the most frequent use of temperature for most people.

jim-jim-jim• 7 years ago

I think alternative measurements are cute and I encourage their usage simply because they make epic reddit science guys so irrationally mad.

The year is Reiwa 1, it's 51° F out, and I weigh 9.92 stone. Deal with it.

dosshell• 7 years ago

The truth is, outside of a chemistry lab I don't care that much about the freezing and boiling points of water

What? Freezing point of water is one of the most important things with temperature outside. Will it snow or rain? Will the lake freeze or melt? Will the road be slippery or not. That is like... the most important thing about temperature and outside.

However, I agree that the boiling temperature of water is not much used outside in a daily life.

hpaavola• 7 years ago

For everyday use the unit does not matter at all. We could drop numbers completely and just say it's freezing, cold, chilly, ok, warm and hot and be done with it. For cooking we could just use simmer, boil, stew and bake.

But Celsius interacts with other units nicely. So when you actually need some precision, Celsius works nicely. Kelvin is of course the one to choose when talking about scientific matters, but Celsius works well enough for everyday things and when precision is needed.

burfog2• 7 years ago

Rankine is even better. (like Fahrenheit plus 459.67°)

You get the same step size as Fahrenheit, so you can adjust your house temperature without a decimal. (some of us care) It is also good enough for industrial food processing without that decimal, for example in canneries.

You get a correct zero. Fahrenheit and Celsius are just wrong. Think about the meaning of something like "twice as hot", which is a thing people say. With a correct zero, there is no need for negatives unless you are doing quantum physics research. If you aren't convinced, imagine we had a weight scale that used 0 for a very small adult and 100 for a very large adult.

All the normal temperatures people deal with, including oven temperatures, are exactly 3 digits. The 3-digit numbers 100 to 999 are like Fahrenheit from -359.67° to 539.33°.

DonHopkins2• 7 years ago

So why is the metric system based on water, instead of liquid hydrogen? Why not use the most common essential element, instead of some arbitrary compound?

Metric seems pretty anthropocentrist to me, since humans are 50-60% water, while the universe is 75% hydrogen.

In the Universal Hydrogen Metric system, 0 °H would be -259.2 °C, and 100 °H would be −252.87 °C.

fxj• 7 years ago

tldr; Fahrenheit maps the subjective feeling of very cold to very hot to a scale from 0 to 100.

Celsius on the other hand gives you additional information about the state of water at this temperature (0C frozen, 100C boiling).

The author didnt talk about the correct physical unit, Kelvin, which tells you about the possibitiy of the temperature (no Kelvin values below 0).

lukeschlather• 7 years ago

Celsius is pretty easy to wrap my head around, even though I think in Fahrenheit. I think my main argument against Fahrenheit is when I'm cooking and look up food safety information I usually convert to Celsius in my head because I have a pretty intuitive sense of temperatures as a percentage of the boiling point of water but Fahrenheit I really don't. I also don't imagine anyone using Celsius as their "native language" routinely converts to Fahrenheit in their head just to get a better understanding of what a temperature means.

sys_64738• 7 years ago

I think there are a lot of similarities between F and C as there are with the use of military time. In the US we use AM/PM for civilian use but in England you see them use military time for things like TV show times, and train/bus times. It all seems very regimental.

In Defense of Fahrenheit

Related Stories