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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33867 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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Why the hell is everyone telling me this? I don't doubt that the US can get very cold. I'm just asking what unit of measurement is used. Most of the world uses celsius. In a story where the temperature is highly relevant it would be best to specify the unit.

  • -12

Eight celsius is cold enough that it might be unpleasant without proper clothing, but it's not 'passers-by should worry about hypothermia'.

Exactly. Which is why I'm voicing the lack of unit specification as an issue with the post.

Kinda clear from context he wasn’t talking about 46 F.

That depends on the assumption that the story is true and not made up bs.

It still wouldn't make any sense if it was 46 F out.

Why the hell is everyone telling me this? I don't doubt that the US can get very cold. I'm just asking what unit of measurement is used. Most of the world uses celsius. In a story where the temperature is highly relevant it would be best to specify the unit.

In the United States, it's very unusual for native speakers of English to report outdoor temperature in anything other than Fahrenheit. Even among scientists and engineers who regularly use the Metric system.

As a side note, it seems pretty clear to me that Fahrenheit is a much better scale for discussing weather since (1) 0-100 roughly covers temperatures your typical person experiences, including the occasional extreme; and (2) there's no real need to convert to other units like there might be among inches, feet, yards, and miles.

As a side note, it seems pretty clear to me that Fahrenheit is a much better scale for discussing weather since (1) 0-100 roughly covers temperatures your typical person experiences, including the occasional extreme; and (2) there's no real need to convert to other units like there might be among inches, feet, yards, and miles.

We're so not going back to this topic. It's purely a status quo preference. Which is a perfectly cromulent reason, but there's no need to insist that F is intrinsically better than C.

We're so not going back to this topic.

I'm not sure I understand you here. Is this sarcasm?

It's purely a status quo preference.

I would have to disagree with this. F really does appear to be better for discussing air temperature, for reasons mentioned by me and others.

I would have to disagree with this. F really does appear to be better for discussing air temperature, for reasons mentioned by me and others.

If this was the case, I would expect to see a nontrivial amount of people used to C, trying out F for a while as a result of travel, and saying "wow, this really is better".

What we seem to be seeing instead is everyone who grew up in a C regime preferring C, and everyone who grew up in an F regime preferring F, which seems to point to status quo preference.

If this was the case, I would expect to see a nontrivial amount of people used to C, trying out F for a while as a result of travel, and saying "wow, this really is better".

To an extent I agree with this. There is a little bit of a confound because the choice between F and C will be perceived as a choice regarding America in general. For example, I can imagine a typical liberal American college student spending a year in Europe and then crowing about Metric units as a kind of virtue-signalling. That being said, yes, I would expect that a non-trivial amount of Europeans, Middle-Easterners, Africans, etc. who spend a couple years in the US would admit, at least privately, that the F scale is better.

What we seem to be seeing instead

Where is this coming from? Is there a subreddit for foreign ex-pats living in the US?

To be fair, I tried out F as a Brit for fun / as a private in-joke post Brexit and I did like it and I still use it for weather, though I wouldn't use it scientifically.

It is quite obnoxious to be using a different unit than the locals. A better test might be how long it takes the average person to develop an intuition for the alternative unit. Such that they no longer have to explicitly or mentally calculate.

Your comment at a glance reads like the temperature is causing you to doubt the story (because the temperature is unlikely?). Instead, it seems like you meant the two sentences in your comment to be disconnected from each other.

It's a question to be answered separately from the first line but it is also related to the credibility of the story.

Americans are going to use Fahrenheit, that's just the way of the world. It's probably a better measurement system in many ways but I will never bother to learn it.

You can make whatever argument you want for metric, but F is objectively superior to C in daily life. There's no 'metric' advantage to C, you don't multiple or divide temperatures real world use cases. Both are effectively arbitrary.

However with Farenheit, 0-100 is basically, human habitable range. 0 is dangerously cold, 100 is dangerously hot. With Farenheit, 1-100 are basically every day weathers around the globe and in every day life describing your freezer up to your body temperature. Meanwhile 40-99 C are nearly useless.

The only time these numbers are really relevant in daily life is internal temperature of meats, but it's nearly arbitrary numbers with either measure, so C brings nothing to the table here.

Finally, Farenheit is over twice as precise as C, and right around human noticability. You can distinguish 1 degree F, but not really 1/10th degree Celsius, making F a more useful and intuitive unit.

However with Farenheit, 0-100 is basically, human habitable range. 0 is dangerously cold, 100 is dangerously hot. With Farenheit, 1-100 are basically every day weathers around the globe and in every day life describing your freezer up to your body temperature. Meanwhile 40-99 C are nearly useless.

You do not use 100 points of precision to tell the weather.

Like the other guy said, everybody just recognises like 3 to 5 ranges of temperature for the weather. Very cold, cold, light jacket, t shirt, very hot.

Do you think you need a much wider range of numbers to work this out? You don't, and in practice nobody does. They just snap-lock certain ranges to be relevant.

Celsius is definitely intuitive and a metric system more broadly works better on the whole.

The people of Arizona spend a surprising amount of time discussing each degree between 100 and 120, and they do actually matter for "eh, pretty hot, the metaphorical ice has broken on the sand river" and "get in a pool or inside right now before you faint."

I'm from Australia. We talk about the heat too.

Do you say "celsius" every time you do? Because I wouldn't expect you to. If someone said "it's 40 degrees out! I'm sweltering!" I could infer what they mean.

Both systems seem to provide about the same value as far as I can tell, more than for length measurements, where metric has clear benefits.

I do like that 100 is a nice round number, and have always been a bit disappointed that in human terms it represents a mild fever, not the baseline human body temperature.

Do you say "celsius" every time you do?

Lol of course not. My GF literally said "it's 43 tomorrow" 2 mins ago.

You’re conflating two separate points. When setting a thermostat you can tell the difference between 66 and 67. It’s a good increment of noticable but slight. Celsius degrees are too far apart and tenths are too small.

Separately, 0-100 is roughly human haitable weather

On the metric point, there’s nothing more “metric” about Celsius. It doesn’t math any differently. It’s just set to a different reference point, which is less human centric

Celsius degrees are too far apart and tenths are too small.

There is no way you can start with "objectively better" and end up with this lol. You're talking about a half degree of difference. My aircon works in denominations of .5. If you have a preference for 18.5 degrees, there's no limitation on this if you use Celsius.

It's quite interesting to see the metric absolutists come out defending using ½ as a base unit of increment. Maybe powers of two fractional inches aren't so bad after all.

Parsimony is objectively better. Fewer significant figures for the relevant precision.

We can get into philosophy of good and what not, but this is a silly gotcha. I’m making a point about an objective feature and describing why I think it’s better

Nah man. I think you're just used to it.

This is complete nonsense. All you've done is follow 'objectively superior' with a list of subjective claims.

For that attitude, I retract any concession that other metric units may actually have merit. Imperial all the way.

These units are the worst thing you Yankees have done since dumping loads of valuable tea into the sea. I trust you Ameribarbarians will see the light of reason one day and join the civilized world!

The Imperial system isn't something that Americans did. Blame perfidious Albion for that one.

It may not have been something they've invented, but they're sure the one's hoisting it upon the rest of the world. I know the perfidious Albion and her consequences have been a disaster for humanity as well.

It is objectively true that the range of double and single digit numbers is more fully used by F for day to day use. You can make subjective arguments about how relevant that is, but I think those numbers are easier to remember and work with.

The one advantage of C, that it benchmarks nicely to water, is not really something you need to think about, and doesn’t even hold true for people living at altitude.

I’m an American who goes out of his way to buy metric tools. I’m a big metric fan. Temperature is the one area were it’s just worse.

It is objectively true that the range of double and single digit numbers is more fully used by F for day to day use.

That would depend on your day to day, wouldn't it? 0°F is a random freezing temperature while 100°F would make a really cold sauna. 0°C is a much starker boundary where the outside world begins to transform, turning either to snow and ice or into slush and water. A day in frost is very different from a day in the positives. If the temperatures dip below 0°C your crops will die. And I could just as well say that Fahrenheit wastes an extra digit into the entire 38°C to 99°C range.

The one advantage of C, that it benchmarks nicely to water, is not really something you need to think about, and doesn’t even hold true for people living at altitude.

I don't know anyone quite so privileged that they don't need to think about water. I personally don't live on a mountain top and find it neat to know what the temperature of something is from the physical phenomena occurring in its water content without having to memorize the magic numbers 32 and 212.

I’m an American who goes out of his way to buy metric tools. I’m a big metric fan. Temperature is the one area were it’s just worse.

Well, I'm glad you can see reason somewhere!

When boiling water for cooking, the temperature doesn’t matter, just the state of matter. That’s what I mean when I say you don’t think about it day to day. The boiling and freezing point of water as they relate to other temperatures almost never come up. The freezing point does matter a bit, but you never care what temperature your water is boiling at, just that it is doing so. I doubt most people living above sea level even know their normal boiling point it is so inconsequential.

Well, sure if you're cooking so crudely that you don't even need to know the temperature, then there's no argument for one system one way or the other. Then would you support switching to Celsius in a context where the boiling point of water does matter? Like a lab where superheated liquid water might explosively flash into steam or if you're dealing with distillation. Even if you're, say, in Denver, it's easier to recognize and remember that 95°C is the local boiling point since it's close to 100°C.

You can make whatever argument you want for metric, but F is objectively superior to C in daily life. There's no 'metric' advantage to C, you don't multiple or divide temperatures real world use cases. Both are effectively arbitrary.

I basically agree. The strongest argument I can think of for Celsius is that the freezing point of water has some degree of relevance for day-to-day life, and therefore there is some basis for making it 0 instead of 32.

That being said, people mainly use temperature to discuss air temperature not water temperature. And as a lot of people have pointed out the scale from 0F to 100F does a pretty good job of roughly capturing the variation of temperature experienced by people. Much better than the C scale does.

Fahrenheit set its 0 at 0 because that was the coldest temperature old fashioned dial thermometers could measure, and its degree as 5/9 of a degree celsius to make it 180 degrees(like degrees of an angle) on old timey dial thermometers between the freezing and boiling point of water. They're both arbitrary and random.

Fahrenheit has nothing to do with dial thermometers; it was originally set with mercury and alcohol liquid thermometers.

Zero fahrenheit was supposed to be the coldest precisely replicable temperature Fahrenheit could create in his lab - the freezing point of saturated ammonium chloride solution. (Ordinary salt brine actually freezes at -6 degrees fahrenheit, but Fahrenheit didn't have access to sodium chloride that was pure enough to make this temperature replicable). The upper fixed point was supposed to be body temperature at 96 degrees fahrenheit (in the spirit of Imperial units, using a number with lots of factors including powers of two, rather than one that looks pretty in decimal), but it turned out not to be consistent enough, or easy to measure with the thermometers fahrenheit had access to.

The scale was restandardised to 32 and 212 as the freezing and boiling points of pure water after the Royal Society endorsed the Celsius scale.

But "Freezing point of brine is about zero, body temperature is about 100" is the original motivation of what the numbers are in degrees fahrenheit.

Fahrenheit wrote about ammonium chloride (sal ammoniac) brine and salt brine, but those two have different freezing points, both lower than 0F (-13F for ammonium chloride). It's likely he used neither, and the real fixed points were temperature of an ice-water mixture (32) and body temperature (96).

The division of the scale depends on three fixed points, which can be determined in the following manner. The first is found in the uncalibrated part or the beginning of the scale, and is determined by a mixture of ice, water and ammonium chloride or even sea salt. If the thermometer is placed in this mixture, its liquid descends as far as the degree that is marked with a zero. This experiment succeeds better in winter than in summer. The second point is obtained if water and ice are mixed without the aforementioned salts. When the thermometer is placed in this mixture, its liquid reaches the 32nd degree.

Clearly Fahrenheit knew that his 0 wasn't really fixed.

But "Freezing point of brine is about zero, body temperature is about 100" is the original motivation of what the numbers are in degrees fahrenheit.

And that turns out to be a pretty good scale for talking about air temperature in day to day life.

I've heard this a million times from Americans, but you can just remember what C number means what outdoors (0 is freezing, under 10 is time to wear a proper coat, 20 is the beginning of tshirt weather, 30 is the start of too hot, and 40 is time to get out of Texas), and the only thing I actually need precision in degrees for is cooking/baking, where chemical reactions really do matter. I don't believe for a second that Americans actually use it as a % scale rather than finding their own personal breakpoints just as one does with Celsius (I suppose some do, some people also don't have internal monologues). If you can actually distinguish degrees of 1F, it may be that Irish thermostats are much better than American ones.

I can absolutely distinguish a thermostat set 1 degree. Not, I can walk into a room and tell you the temperature to a degree of precision. But in a building that I am intimately familiar with, like my house, I can tell when the thermostat is set differently at night. A degree F happens to be about the amount you can roughly distinguish

My experience of American thermostats is that 65 degrees is too cold and 80 degrees is too hot. Yet somehow 72 degrees is also too hot and 74 degrees too cold, while 68 degrees is too cold and 67 too hot. Weather's weird here.

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