Considering that 100F is almost 40C just put your scale from 0-40. It's completely subjective.

0C wear a woolly hat

10C wear a jacket or sweater

20C Teeshirt and jeans weather

30C Teeshirt and shorts weather

40C Get in the shade and keep hydrated

50C You want to avoid this end of the scale

It's almost all defending against the pro-Fahrenheit folks making strange arguments promoting it, like somehow you can't measure your life unless it's in F.

> It's almost all defending against the pro-Fahrenheit folks making strange arguments promoting it, like somehow you can't measure your life unless it's in F.

I didn't make that argument. Fahrenheit is more natural in a lot of cases because of the range and delineation between whole number temperatures. Celsius is slightly less so but not all the time.

My entire point, which was lost in the bikeshedding is that it is not "shocking" that the metric system isn't used everywhere in daily experience because non-metric systems were literally invented to be useful and practical. Are they perfect? No. Neither is the metric system for daily human use.

The U.S. is a big place and thus has wide-ranging temperatures, and that probably contributes to resistance to getting rid of Fahrenheit, amongst other things and other measurement systems. The U.S. built a huge amount of modern infrastructure before anyone else and has never experienced a "rebuild" period. For non-engineering purposes, there's no downside to using non-metric units, and a lot of downsides in converting. As the back and forth here shows, there's probably a strong argument to be made that the measuring systems don't matter at all in an ideal world where it's free to convert entire countries back and forth between them. But for some reason, a lot of the world feels very superior for using the metric system.

Again. Not "shocking" as the original comment I replied to mentioned.

Fahrenheit was defined the way it was not because it was "invented to be useful and practical", but because a mixture of brine to set 0℉ was easy to concoct reliably. That's as close as it got to being "practical".

Every other argument seems to boil down to "I'm not familiar with it, so it's hard", "dealing with 10s is easier than 5s", and "Fahrenheit has more resolution because I've forgotten decimal numbers exist".

The actual superpower of metric is that all the units relate to each other in simple ways. For instance most liquids you and I deal with on a daily basis have a similar density to water, so if you've got 100g of it, it's going to be ~100ml. You don't need to deal with arbitrary artifacts of the measuring system beyond the unit prefixes.

"The US is a big place" , but the world outside the US using Celsius is even bigger, more populated, and with more temperature differences.

Fahrenheit being more natural is purely subjective, there's no good reason at all for it.

Keeping the imperial system is just a matter of convinience because Americans are used to it and changing everything is difficult. Also some people think producers of food and any objects to sell might lose some margin by converting and rounding to the next round number of the new unit

> Fahrenheit is more natural in a lot of cases because of the range and delineation between whole number temperatures. Celsius is slightly less so but not all the time.

You mean "I'm already used to something and I dislike other things."

> Well mine and most everyone's is almost exactly 0-100 degrees F, and 50 degrees C is on the extreme.

You don't cook?

Their point was related to outside temperatures, which is what most people use temperatures for. And although I've never used Fahrenheit for anything, I don't think the 100c = boiling water is useful in day-to-day life.

I've used temperatures in the 60 something to 80 something range to measure the inside of food, my oven goes anywhere from 160 to 220 degrees, but water boils when it goes all bubbly. I know that that's at 100 degrees, but I don't do anything with that info.

I don't agree with bmitc's point that Fahrenheit feels more natural. But it seems like that anytime someone has something positive to say about Fahrenheit or imperial measurement, 10 different people need to tell them how wrong they are, and how there can't be anything positive about those systems of measurement. That doesn't seem necessary to me. Especially with temperatures where everyone just remembers a couple of numbers and associates them to a certain feeling or application, and whatever you've used your entire life will feel better or more natural.

Likewise anytime anybody says that Celsius feels natural as well, you also have 10 people tell them that they are wrong and Fahrenheit is a much better fit for human beings.

Now I think these discussions often go about cherry picking examples and just limit the discussion to outside temperatures is such a cherry picking.

The real power of the metric system comes from going all-in. You can't use everything but the temperature scale. If you would do that it would be even more obvious how disconnected the temperature scale is to the whole system.

Yeah, having metric everything makes it easy to do conversions and correlating with different properties of matter, you're using the language of science (and most of the world), with proper definitions in terms of reality: atoms (for kg), distance in terms of c*some_time, volume related to mass (1ml of water => 1g of water, you can get very precise with temperature as an input). Having a standard for orders of magnitude that's consistent (micro, milli, kilo, mega, giga) is just the cherry on top.

I use the knowledge of the temperature of boiling water to calculate "how much boiling water I need to add to a water in room temperature to have my prefect tea brewing temperature".