Comment by atonse
15 hours ago
Celsius in a lab (or in cooking) is perfectly fine.
But as a way to describe daily weather (and thermostats) it's woefully inadequate.
The sum total of "comfortable" temperatures in celsius has to be squeezed between maybe 17 to 24 - why? you never ever use anything above 40 except when talking about people that died from a heatwave.
It's based on the freezing and boiling point of water _at sea level_ which almost none of us ever encounter (whether it's sea level, or the boiling point of water).
Fahrenheit is a much more intuitive scale (again... to describe daily weather or human temperature) - 0 - 100 better models the temperatures we experience daily, and you can intuitively separate into 10s, the way you "feel"
For example...
100s - honey, please, let's move to a cooler place.
90s - uncomfortably hot
80s - hot in the sun, not too bad at night
70s - you'd probably want a light sweater at night
60s - light sweater all the time
50s - medium sweater
40s - sweater, maybe a coat
30s - coat
20s - sweater and coat
10s - why am i living in this region?
0s - honey, please, let's move to a warmer place.
The point is that there's enough resolution to describe the actual human experience with temperature.
For everything else, celsius is perfectly adequate, totally agree.
FYI, none of this has ever made any sense at all to somebody who didn’t grow up with Fahrenheit. Numbers don’t need to go roughly between 40 and 100, and then occasionally 212 and 450.
The difference between 20 C and 20.5 C is not generally noticeable. The difference between 20 and 25 really is.
You’ll just have to face the fact that you feel comfortable with a really weird system that nobody else can see the point of, but it’s what you’re comfortable with. That’s OK, you’re allowed.
It's common here to say something like "this week it's in the 70s." In places that use Celsius, "in the 20s" must be too broad, so do they instead say something like "high 20s"?
Here in a metric country (Australia) they use words like cold, cool, warm, hot.
Otherwise people turn to BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) hour by hour / day by day records and forecasts of temp. and rain with radar cloud coverage - these just use nearest whole Celsius numbers, eg: https://www.bom.gov.au/location/australia/western-australia/...
Almost everything you've conjectured about "how they do it in a metric country" has been wrong; builders don't use a third of a metre, for example, everything is typically in millimetres - 1200, 1600, etc (aka, 1.2 metres, 1.6 metres) along side usages of 1 mm and 5 mm for small tolerances, expansion gaps, etc.
Why would you assume that this particular turn of phrase would be common at all?
People usually just say the temperature they’ve heard in the weather report, without giving a range. If you say “over 20”, people don’t assume “close to 30”, because then you would have said that.
Celsius has plenty of resolution for this; in fact I would say Fahrenheit has too much. You can feel the change of one degree Celsius, you can’t really with Fahrenheit. To illustrate this, not only is your scale in tens, but I often only hear people quote the Fahrenheit temperature in tens. In Celsius we almost always give the whole number, because it makes a difference.
They also accidentally got MPH right for cars. Fastest highway is like 85. 100 is the fastest a normal car can go and also a reasonable point to arrest the driver.
I regularly see people going over 110 MPH on European highways. And no, I don't consider it reasonable to arrest people just because they reached middle RPMs on the top gear of their cheap SUV.
You can make pretty much the same chart for Celsius and it makes as much sense.
40 - scorching hot
35 - super hot
30 - sunny summer day
25 - nice warm weather
20 - nice breezy weather
15 - a little chilly
10 - bring a coat
5 - getting cold
0 - drivers be careful
-5 - is cold
-10 - seriously cold
Etc.
Body temperature also has a nice cutoff point of 37.0C before you start to worry.
> The sum total of "comfortable" temperatures in celsius has to be squeezed between maybe 17 to 24
30° is perfectly comfortable for me.