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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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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.