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Uh... pardon me if I'm mistaken, but this is where my bullshit radar started sounding.
When you mention temperatures are you talking F? So, less than -12 C?
According to my weather app, the current "feels like" temperature (in the afternoon in the Midwest US) is -20 degrees Celsius. And it's not going to get much warmer for at least a week and a half.
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.
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.
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.
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