I work with Americans and this hits home hard. It's especially infuriating when they format their dates. "I had a meeting with so-and-so on 4/5" and nobody has any fucking clue what they mean.
The worst part is how hopelessly oblivious they are about it. It's not even like they don't care that nobody does things their stupid way - it's the fact that they're so insulated that they can't even fathom that nobody does things the same way they do. It just goes to show how clueless they are about the rest of the world and how little they get out of their neighborhoods.
It drives me mad. At this point, it's just offensive how ignorant they can be sometimes. If you have to work with other people, you should at least make an effort to be aware of the fact that others do things a different way and try to avoid situations like this, but they just refuse to do so.
I'm American and always use 30 Dec 2023 as my date scheme. It makes much more sense. I also work in a multicultural laboratory, so there should be no question as to what date it is, but some of my colleagues still use mm-dd-yy.
That makes it even worse. When the date uses slashes I expect it to be American, but with dashes anything other than yyyy-mm-dd doesn't even read as a date to me
Thanks, I appreciate it! I also try to use the name of the month instead of the number as frequently as possible. To be honest, it's not really the order of the fields that matters - format it whichever way makes you happy! Just make sure it's not ambiguous so other people can tell what you mean. And be aware that not everyone interprets things the same way you do
Like the American below, I generally use 30-December 2023 partly because I work with an international company but mostly because after the century rolled over and we had years that looked like months I got confused.
Had a boss that formatted all dates as YYYY-MM-DD because that makes them sort correctly in lists.
I work in an international company too! And yet, this confusion persists :-/
I also format everything YYYY-MM-DD for my personal use too. When writing prose, usually some other format is just fine, but I really would love if everyone did year-month-day
The MM-DD format, as a euro, pisses me off.
I use YYYY-MM-DD though. It's the recomended format by ISO, and it allows me to name files with that format and sort by name.
12:00AM is midnight because AM is morning, and it's the beginning of the morning.
Using 12-hour time is just a historical artifact from all our analog clocks having 12 hours on their face and not wanting to have to add 12 to the number on the clock for half the day.
Where I'm from, 12:00 a.m. (00:00) is the middle of the night (we call it midnight here), and morning begins when the sun rises (and we say "good morning" during our mornings).
Put more specifically, A.M. and P.M. are abbreviations for "ante meridiem" and "post meridiem", which are Latin for "before mid-day" and "after mid-day" respectively. Since a new day begins at midnight, it follows that midnight is 12:00 A.M. since it's the 12 o'clock that is before mid-day.
12AM is midnight. As for the other part I have this mind blowing concept for you, our culture is not the same as yours. We have our own ways of doing things, just like you.
Why should anyone cut time in two zones? How does it help or benefit anyone? If anything, it only serves to add extra confusion. In the era of electronic time keeping, there is a wonderful opportunity to ditch an extremely stupid decision that was proliferated by analog clocks.
We have 24 hours in a day, just count them one by one. Boom. Problem solved. No confusion, no complications, no nothing.
Because unless you live underground, are blind, or live so far north or south that the day night cycle loses cohesion it's literally as easy as "Can I see daylight?" If you really want to fix it round hours out to 20-30 for easier conversion between days and smaller units, 7 day weeks? That's backwards and hard to convert mentally, make them 10 days. Months are just tied to the lunar cycle we can do better surely. Years are stuck though unless we speed up or slow the Earth's orbit. While we are at it, one time zone, if everyone is on identical clocks it'll save so many issues, I don't want to know when 21:00 is in Hong Kong, I'll just call at Universal 11:00
Where I'm from, 12:00 a.m. (00:00) is the middle of the night (we call it midnight here), and morning begins when the sun rises (and we say "good morning" during our mornings).
So if you worked at a hotel or airport or a coffee shop or something and you saw someone shortly before sunrise you would say "Good night" not "Good morning"?
Not all languages work the same way as English does. You shouldn't think in English terms in this case. His language may use hello as a rule in these situations or have a completely different word without equivalent in English.
The notations can be confusing, especially around noon and midnight. Is midnight am or pm when it's equally distant to both the previous and the next noon? Why does 12am not follow 11am???
Where I live we use 12hr time in casual spoken language but pretty much always specify the time of day as well, like eight in the evening or twelve at midnight. But for anything written or even remotely formal, 24h time is used for obvious reasons.
Agreed. I've never understood the logic of splitting the hours of the day in half. 1800 is so much nicer than 6PM.
I don't think that's purely an American thing though. If I had to guess, I'd say that most of the world uses 12-hour clocks instead of 24-hours. I could be wrong though. Nevertheless, I usually write all times in 24-hour format. But it always sounds awkward trying to use it in speech. I haven't figured out a good way to do that yet.
Except that water boils at different temperatures when exposed to different amounts of pressure.
So this works pretty universally on earth.... Near the ground/ocean level (plus or minus a few hundred meters). Once you get outside of that specific condition the numbers move.
The nice thing about celcius and kelvin is that they're the same scale, but celcius is just shifted 273.15 units. And it's more intuitive for humans to work with smaller numbers with bigger relative differences. But yes, kelvin would be a lot better to work with, especially considering stuff like doubling temperature (doubling energy) would actually work correctly in kelvin.
But if there's one thing that makes a lot of sense to base temperature enough for human use, I would indeed say it's water, because all life uses water, we are completely surrounded by it, and it's super important to nearly everything we do too.
Sure, but the vast majority of people live in low lying areas and even then it doesn't shift that drastically. You need to climb a mountain to see the difference when it comes to applications of daily life.
Although now that I think about it. The same criticism applies to pretty much every definition of temperature that is based on the behaviour of matter. This also applies to Kelvin. Temperature is a property of matter and every type of matter behaves differently.
it can be just as strange to have to think in terms of adjusting for 273.15K for the misleading “freezing point of water” or 298.15K for STP, another arbitrary standard of measurement. Kelvin is no better than Rankine
This touches on something important, which is that Celsius is based on an arbitrary pressure. It's based on an elevation that suits the region which defined it.
It is, but if you look at how Farenheit was conceived it's absurdly nonsensical. 0°F is the freezing temperature or some mixture of chemicals, and 90°F is a guess at human body temperature lmao.
And the freezing/boiling points of water are arbitrary except in that they are used to actually define both scales. They provide easily measurable standards.
No, 0° was the lowest temperature recorded in the city Fahrenheit lived, and 100° was considered normal body temperature, with the quality of thermometer available at the time.
It’s quite arbitrary, but ends up mapping pretty nicely to comfortable ranges for humans.
Well TECHNICALLY it's not based on the state change of water.
It's based on the formula C = K - 273.15 where K = 1.380649×10^−23 / (6.62607015×10^−34)(9192631770) * h * Δν[Cs] / k where k is the Boltzmann constant (1.380649×10^−23 J * K^-1), h is the Planck constant, and Δν[Cs] is the hyperfine transition frequency of Caesium
Temperature isn't a measure of entropy, but the internal energy of a system. Internal energy is the total energy sum of kinetic and thermal and gravitational energy.
You might wonder how that's calculated, and the short answer? It isn't. We rarely look at the actual value. This also goes for enthalpy and entropy. What matters most of the time is the difference in enthalpy/entropy/energy. If you take a look at various enthalpy numbers across textbooks and software and steam tables, you'll see the value vary significantly depending on what they use as their 0 point. No matter where the scale starts though, the difference between two distinct points will remain the same.
I honestly am not sure what I made confusing. The definition I gave is the SI definition of Kelvin & Celsius since 2019. The formula I gave is more verbose than it has to be but it's what you get when you expand it.
I'm not sure of the semantic difference. When I think "a meter is the distance travelled by light in X seconds" I think m = c/299792458 s, same with Kelvin.
Every scale and unit is, ultimately, arbitrary. We all do have a very good understanding of what freezing and boiling water is, though, we don't have a good intuition of "coldest day in some random place in some random year" is. Then there's a couple of other common points of orientation: 20C is room temperature, 37C body temperature and thus warm baths and "it's too bloody hot outside" hover around that (you actually want wet-bulb temperature for that, but it's still a point of orientation), another point is about 60C which is the hottest you can have a beverage and drink it without excessive slurping. Also a common temperature in cooking as that's when a lot of stuff starts to denature, e.g. egg white is about 62-65C, the temperature you want to hit for carbonara to not get scrambled eggs.
Practically everything we deal with in everyday life (short of winter weather) is within that 0-100 range. Which is due, to, well, water being liquid in that range.
I've never been to a sauna before, but are you guys okay with boiling yourselves and then immediately freezing yourselves? Doesn't that seem very painful? Are you guys used to being Wim Hof all the time?
The thing to remember is that air is a great insulator. Air at 100°C isn't nearly as bad as say water or metal at the same temperature against the skin. In fact, the air that comes in contact with the comparatively cold human skin will cool down rapidly, forming a layer of cooler air around you and lessening the sensation of heat further.
100°C is a quite hot one. It could hurt your nose and ears a bit, especially if they having a steaming session.
The cold water (normally ~10°C) does not hurt at all. The first minute your brain is not able to differentiate the temperature at all. After that it gets quite quickly into: ohh I should leave!
Btw: you should try sauna at some point. Especially with the steaming it's amazing. There are also milder ones with ~80°C, I would recommend at the start.
Between 50 and 63 I'm in heaven. Anything higher than that and all i want to do is go swimming, which as an adult with responsibilities, i never get to.
Anything lower than that, and i have to wear more clothes and look fatter than i am.
Not to defend Fahrenheit, it's a nonsense scale, however: As with most subjective scales the entire scale can be split into good and not good. The top part is good and the bottom part is not good. The middle of the top part is seen as average good.
So around 75 degrees would be perfect, which is close enough for something as subjective as temperature.
This is why in things like movie or game reviews a 7/10 is seen as average. Like it's good, in the good part, but right in the middle not anything special. A 5/10 or lower is seen as not good, not worth seeing, not worth your time etc. This works for reviews, grades, person attractiveness rating etc.
but that's not for the overwhelming majority of people.
Surely you're aware that the overwhelming majority of people do not live in the US. Nearly everyone is fine with Celcius. Billions of people, as opposed to a few hundred million that have been socialised to using the other scale
Weather/room temp wise we probably never will. I'd rather think of my environment in terms of 0 to 100 than in terms of -18 to 38. For science and engineering, Celsius is ideal, and I can convert between the two in the very rare occasion I need to because I'm not an idiot who can't do basic math.
That's entirely a matter of habit. There is nothing special about 0°F (random point in the cold range?) or 100°F points (random point in the hot range?), you've been lied to.
We don't think -18°C to 38°C, we think -50°C to +50°C (regular Celsius weather thermometer, covers almost any temperature observed on Earth), with 0°C differentiating between snow/ice, "wintery" weather, and rain/mud, "non-wintery" one. That's how we know whether to take umbrella (no point if it snows, hat is your best friend), what kind of shoes are the best fit - cold-resistant or highly waterproof - or which kind of jacket is gonna fit the situation. Melting point of water is actually incredibly important weather-wise and entirely ignored by Fahrenheit scale.
When it's not winter, normal range is 0-40°C, with 20°C designating comfort temperature.
The SI base unit for temperature is Kelvin with 0 K being the coldest possible temperature. 273.15 K is the melting point of ice. But it’s a lot better suited for temperature differences. Celsius is only a derived unit.
And well, all units and measurement systems had a lot of changes over time because some things turned out to be impractical or inaccurate.
Initially Celsius had 100° as the freezing point of water, 0° as the boiling point of water. Fahrenheit had 0° as the coldest temperature he could produce and the (wrong) average human body temperature at 90°. Kelvin was initially defined via Celsius, that got reversed, they have the same scale. There is also Rankine, which starts at 0 like Kelvin, but uses the Fahrenheit scale.
And the US partially uses SI units anyways, all units are derived from them to use their superior base unit definitions. This system came into existence to have unit definitions that are better reproducible and change less over time. Since everything was redefined and all numbers changed anyways, they also tried to make use of the "new" decimal representation of numbers. And new unit names were nice to create some general units, in contrast to foot and pound, which were always different from place to place, at times even from city to city.
I don’t expect the US to ever switch. The US switched to international yard and pound instead of switching to a decimal system. After US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa agreed on that one, all countries who remained using these units had a uniform definition for them. Since then you don’t need to know any longer which yard or pound it was. Though not all units got standardized by that.
And some countries didn’t drop all old units and metricized some instead. Even SI kept the ton(ne). You can’t know what 1t exactly means without knowing the context, it can be 2240lb, 2000lb or 1000kg (~2204.6226lb).
Aviation is already backwards; aviators give distance to travel in nautical miles, visibility in statute miles, altitude and runway length in feet, speed in knots, weight in pounds, volume in gallons, and temperature in celsius. My favorite is the standard adiabatic lapse rate is given as 2°C/1000 feet.
I'm in Winnipeg. I saw an old buddy today grabbing some beer wearing shorts and a t shirt. He walked past the cars when we left, I assume he was walking home.
It was -4c today. My kid took his gloves and jacket off at the park. He's 2. We were there for over an hour.
It's not really cold around 0c. It's definitely manageable if you're moving around.
I was on holiday at Disneyland Paris at 14 in December or January one year and it was -14/15 °C and it was the coldest place I've been and it definitely felt like it. I'm from Ireland for reference so winters are pretty mild here.
Depending on where you live, going below freezing, even down towards 0F (-18C), is common. I'd say things don't go into "too cold to go out" territory until the single digits for me.
Fahrenheit is the best human-focused temperature scale. 0 is super cold, 100 is super hot, 50 is the line between short sleeve and long sleeve weather (assuming no wind). Anything outside these bounds, it simply isn't worth going outside. But then everyone at a latitude <|37|° will say "that's not that hot" and everyone at a latitude >|40|° will say "that's not that cold," so really it's the best Kansas-focused temperature scale
That last sentence was a largely facetious, poking fun at people who live in areas where it can get colder than 0° in winter or hotter than 100° in summer, who have a habit of telling other people that the extremes aren't that extreme. In reality the fahrenheit scale is pretty useful the world around, barring deserts
It's the only way this meme makes sense. It's a complaint that humans don't like the average of the temperates that produce the feelings of extreme hot and extreme cold. You'd have to change math, change physiology, or lose linearity.
Actually, earthquake magnitude can be projected to negative numbers. It's well defined but it stops describing earthquakes. For instance, a -3 magnitude earthquake is the energy released by a cat knocking your cell phone off of a nightstand. (see page 290 of this book). Pretty sure the others are also logarithmic scales which are well-defined for any negative number. It just so happens that those negative numbers don't describe anything we care to describe with those scales.
That's going to add a lot to simplicity and ease of understanding, for sure. And don't change the name of the scale or it will be too easy to distinguish them
25c is literally cock and ball torture what are ya on about. Then again I'm an Irish guy who hasn't left my country in nearly a decade so I don't even know what more than 25c feels like
I'm Brazilian and, although I'm not in the hottest area, summer easily hits 40°C, so yeah, 25°C is not perfect, that would be 20°C, but is pretty good still
Tbh, in summer I sleep with the airco on 27c. Where I live summer gets a nice and toasty 30c+ 24/7 @ 80%+ humidity. 25c feels amazing compared to that.
Before I moved here, I'd also have said 20c was ideal though :)
I'm similar, but two of the countries I've lived in are Australia (Victoria, central QLD and NorthWest WA) and the USA (Texas and Pennsylvania), so I've lived in 6 very different climates (also lived in the UAE)
The only one of these that got even close to 0°f was Pennsylvania, which over a few years has a few nights that dropped below 20°f, which was slightly less common as Victoria and central QLD seeing 120°f. WA and UAE frequently saw 120°f in the summer, a similar rate to Texas seeing 100°f (where I was) this last summer.
I doubt there are very many places where you'd reasonably expect to see 0°f and 100°f in the same year.
Where I live now stays between 30 and 90F. I lived in Saskatchewan and it would go between -40 and 100F. Crazy weather. Closest was maybe Denver but even Denver gets into the -20s F regularly.
I grew up in Iowa which would see 0f and 100f every year easily. Now I live in Bangkok which is basically just 90-100 year round. I'm not sure Celsius helps either that much. But outside Iowa I haven't cared much about the temp outside ever either.
I dunno, here in the Rockies that doesn't sound that weird. High altitude, low humidity. We'll get at least one or two 100+ heat waves in the summer (106 is the hottest I've seen here), and in the winter it can drop below zero at night. Granted, the last couple decades has made the former more common and the latter less, so I don't know if we'll see sub 0 this year. It used to be pretty common though
Interestingly if you take the middle of the freezing point (32F) and 100F, you do get a mildly warm 71. No this does not prove anything, yes I'll still say it.
Then if you average THAT with 50, you get 60.5... and you see all three numbers make a triangle. Illuminati confirmed.
Then you map it onto Celsius and see 32°F is 0°C, 71°F is 21,7°C and 100°F is 37,8°C.
Which coincides almost perfectly with the 0-20-40 framework we intuitively use in Celsius. 0 is deadly cold without warm clothes, 20 is warm, and 40 is deadly hot.
Turns out Celsius is good for weather, too. or it's illuminati
50 is great for just a light jacket and jeans. You'll never get too hot, you won't get too cold. So, yeah, as long as you've got clothes on it's pretty perfect.
If I want to wear less clothes then 70 is a good bit better, but 50 is damn comfortable.
Ah, so you're missing summer as you head into the coldest part of the year, while I'm coming out of winter and summer is looking too hot. I can agree that 20 is great
What makes 0°F (-17,7°C) special for a human body? Is it the limit after which we don't feel any colder? No.
And what makes 100°F (37,7°C) special? Maybe we can't feel any hotter? No, we can. Is it the body temperature? No. What is it?
Maybe 50°F (10°C) is perfect? Nah, cold!
If we change 0°F to, say, 0°C and 100°F to 40°C, does it change the notion that 0°F is very cold for a human body and that 100°F is very hot? No, and as a bonus you get 50°F equaling that perfect 20°C.
Fahrenheit scale is super arbitrary and it's hilarious when it is posed as a "human-centric" scale. At the same time, the concept of Fahrenheit scale is unnecessarily complicated and the notion between Celsius is extremely clear - you can easily calibrate Celsius thermometer with nothing but kettle and freezer, right at home, right now.
Fahrenheit scale is super arbitrary and it's hilarious when it is posed as a "human-centric" scale.
The Fahrenheit scale is literally based on what was thought to be the limits of human comfort though. 0° F started as the lowest measured temperature in Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit's hometown, and 100° F was his estimate of normal human body temperature.
You think it's arbitrary because you're used to a different scale. To me, having a scale go from 0C to 40C seems arbitrary, especially because I live in an area where for 3 months out of the year, it's constantly below 0C, and it's critical to know the difference between -5C and -15C, rather than just lumping them both into the same "sub-zero" category. I'm the same vein, categorizing 10C as "jacket weather" is borderline useless. The "jacket" I'm going to wear at 10C is much heavier than the one I'm going to wear at 17C (if I wear one at all), for example.
By the way, you can do the exact same breakdown of the Fahrenheit scale, except it's more than twice as granular, and it goes from 0 to 100, like a bunch of other metric measurements... It boggles my mind when metric users use the 0 to 40 Celsius scale up as an argument against Fahrenheit.
You just described the difference between -5C and -15C without any difficulty at all. The rest of the world uses Celsius. There's zero actual tangible benefit to using fahrenheit. The US doesn't have any economic, social, political, technological, artistic, or theological advantage because they use fahrenheit.
It's what you're used to. That's it. That's the only reason you would like it. It's fine to say that. "It would be a pain in the arse for a few years adjusting the nation to using Celsius" is fine as your reasoning for liking it.
The UK finally fully switched from imperial weights/volumes for goods to metric in '95. Some people kicked up a fuss for a while about it, but a recent poll showed that 98% of people don't want to bring imperial back.
All the arguments that dragged on for years about how difficult and confusing it would be to use unfamiliar units were worthless drivel. Buying a 450g package of mince instead of a 1lbs package of mince is something you get used to insanely quickly unless you're a moron. If the US decided to switch to Celsius you'd have a bunch of people kicking off, but life would go on and after a while no one would want to switch back anymore.
You just described the difference between -5C and -15C without any difficulty at all.
After converting to Fahrenheit lol.
It's what you're used to.
That's kind of my whole point. It's what I'm used to, and you listing out the Celsius scale breakdown isn't going to convince me to want to use Celsius for everyday uses. Of course I could get used to it, but it would take a wholesale, nationwide switch, just like it took the UK. Until then, telling me how much better Celsius is is just pissing into the wind, and honestly, a little underinformed.
I haven't listed any scales. That was someone else. I just chipped in to point out that arguing about scales or which one is better is pointless. You like what you're used to, which as I said I'd fine, it's just dumb to be passionate about something that's arbitrary. The only reason other people are trying to convince you that Celsius is fine it's because it's pointless for humanity as a whole to have different measurement units in different countries.
At some point the people living in the middle of the North American continent will have to switch, it might be 1000 years from now but the standardisation will come eventually. There will be loads of people like you complaining, but then once the switch happens it'll be absolutely fine and nothing of value will be lost. All the arguing that will happen between then and now about which system is better will have been pointless.
The reason we even care is that maintaining two systems is heavily impractical and adds to confusion all around the world - simply because 4% of world's population can't bother to make a change.
We wouldn't care what you use - perfect barbecue temperature scale, length unit of football field, weights in blue whales - if it wouldn't affect the rest 96% of the world who have to decipher your blubber.
Everyone uses Celsius and metric, make a damn switch, it's not that hard and you won't lose anything. You only use it because you've used to it, there is literally nothing else to it. Everyone switched, everyone's happy with it. Do it already.
P.S. Also, Fahrenheit is currently officially defined through Celsius, as a scale that is at 32 degrees on melting point of water (0°C), and 212 degrees on its boiling point (100°C).
Fahrenheit's hometown is certainly the metric everyone should use /s
Celsius is not arbitrary, it is based on objective physical reality, and the only arbitrary thing about it is atmospheric pressure, which is more or less equal on the sea level. The rest is us finding convenient patterns, not the other way around. 0-40 is not a scale, it's an arbitrary range and adaptation of Celsius to subjective feelings of hot and cold - one that you ironically need for Fahrenheit, too. Actual thermometers normally go -50°C to +50°C.
On sub-zero, it is the same idea: -5°C is a weather for a light winter jacket, -15°C is a weather for a heavy winter jacket, -25°C is for heavy jacket and some pullover, etc etc.
The 0-40 argument demonstrates that we don't need some arbitrary scale based on Fahrenheit's recording in his hometown in order to conveniently estimate temperature. The groups for each dozen of degrees are just for easy reference. 17 degrees is optional for your taste, to me it's light jacket weather in overcast or t-shirt weather when sunny. There are no perfect temperatures for anything and anyone, and it just doesn't make sense to get into more detail.
As per granularity, people invented decimals, but normally it's simply not necessary to tell the difference between 17°C and 18°C, let alone between 63°F and 64°F. There are so many factors influencing the temperature feeling, and one degree ain't one.
I'm the kind of person that hates it when the water's too hot while taking a shower. Friends that I am living with take their shower way hotter to a point that I cannot resist the temperature
How the fuck do you base your own temperature system on something so subjective ???
Honestly people who insist on using Celsius for their daily lives rather than just for science have way more comfort than me having to deal with fractions of a degree on a regular basis. But I guess that's the point of metric, dealing with precise decimels constantly rather than just having a unit conveniently sized for the thing you're doing.
I checked for others who, like me, are too European to understand the joke: 50°F is 10°C.
A nice swedish summer evening (if it isnt raining).
Edit: cheers my fellow scandinavians and nordics!
Why wasn't I born in Sweden 😭.
Or a nice winter in the Balkans.
That's just about perfect if you ask me.
You mean too rest of the world
Perfect for me would be more around 20°C
Ah, 10 is fine...
You mean to say that 50 °F is (approximately) 283 Kelvin, right? ;P
Shorts weather that one
Thanks bro I was about to ask
The hero we needed.
I checked too before I saw your comment, I can confirm.
I work with Americans and this hits home hard. It's especially infuriating when they format their dates. "I had a meeting with so-and-so on 4/5" and nobody has any fucking clue what they mean.
The worst part is how hopelessly oblivious they are about it. It's not even like they don't care that nobody does things their stupid way - it's the fact that they're so insulated that they can't even fathom that nobody does things the same way they do. It just goes to show how clueless they are about the rest of the world and how little they get out of their neighborhoods.
It drives me mad. At this point, it's just offensive how ignorant they can be sometimes. If you have to work with other people, you should at least make an effort to be aware of the fact that others do things a different way and try to avoid situations like this, but they just refuse to do so.
Apologies... /rant
I'm American and always use 30 Dec 2023 as my date scheme. It makes much more sense. I also work in a multicultural laboratory, so there should be no question as to what date it is, but some of my colleagues still use mm-dd-yy.
That makes it even worse. When the date uses slashes I expect it to be American, but with dashes anything other than yyyy-mm-dd doesn't even read as a date to me
Nah. I'm British, and today is 31/12/2023. We use slashes. American's are just wrong.
Thanks, I appreciate it! I also try to use the name of the month instead of the number as frequently as possible. To be honest, it's not really the order of the fields that matters - format it whichever way makes you happy! Just make sure it's not ambiguous so other people can tell what you mean. And be aware that not everyone interprets things the same way you do
Like the American below, I generally use 30-December 2023 partly because I work with an international company but mostly because after the century rolled over and we had years that looked like months I got confused.
Had a boss that formatted all dates as YYYY-MM-DD because that makes them sort correctly in lists.
That's how you know it's the correct date format
I work in an international company too! And yet, this confusion persists :-/
I also format everything YYYY-MM-DD for my personal use too. When writing prose, usually some other format is just fine, but I really would love if everyone did year-month-day
I insist on YYYY-MM-DD because it allows me to use "MM-DD" for short and piss off the euros
The MM-DD format, as a euro, pisses me off. I use YYYY-MM-DD though. It's the recomended format by ISO, and it allows me to name files with that format and sort by name.
sickos.jpg
Everyone should be using ISO8601 anyway. yyyy-mm-dd is superior to both and leaves 0 ambiguity to the reader no matter where they're from.
Besides the dates, I also still don't know if 12am is noon or midnight. Do Americans know? Is there a problem with simply counting to 24?
12:00AM is midnight because AM is morning, and it's the beginning of the morning.
Using 12-hour time is just a historical artifact from all our analog clocks having 12 hours on their face and not wanting to have to add 12 to the number on the clock for half the day.
Where I'm from, 12:00 a.m. (00:00) is the middle of the night (we call it midnight here), and morning begins when the sun rises (and we say "good morning" during our mornings).
Put more specifically, A.M. and P.M. are abbreviations for "ante meridiem" and "post meridiem", which are Latin for "before mid-day" and "after mid-day" respectively. Since a new day begins at midnight, it follows that midnight is 12:00 A.M. since it's the 12 o'clock that is before mid-day.
That doesn’t make it less confusing, it’s the beginnng of the morning but uses the highest available number.
Yes, it makes perfect sense to count our hours as such:
12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
/s
12AM is midnight. As for the other part I have this mind blowing concept for you, our culture is not the same as yours. We have our own ways of doing things, just like you.
Why should anyone cut time in two zones? How does it help or benefit anyone? If anything, it only serves to add extra confusion. In the era of electronic time keeping, there is a wonderful opportunity to ditch an extremely stupid decision that was proliferated by analog clocks.
We have 24 hours in a day, just count them one by one. Boom. Problem solved. No confusion, no complications, no nothing.
Because unless you live underground, are blind, or live so far north or south that the day night cycle loses cohesion it's literally as easy as "Can I see daylight?" If you really want to fix it round hours out to 20-30 for easier conversion between days and smaller units, 7 day weeks? That's backwards and hard to convert mentally, make them 10 days. Months are just tied to the lunar cycle we can do better surely. Years are stuck though unless we speed up or slow the Earth's orbit. While we are at it, one time zone, if everyone is on identical clocks it'll save so many issues, I don't want to know when 21:00 is in Hong Kong, I'll just call at Universal 11:00
Sure, there's a lot wrong about the way we work with time and date. Months are not even tied to lunar cycles, we have around 13 of them in a year.
But conversion from 12 to 24 hour format is already there and easy to switch to without losing anything. Let's start going rational.
PM is evening, AM is morning.
I prefer 24hr time but 12hr is not confusing
Exactly and it's such a minor thing to bitch about, I understand the date system frustration but over using AM/PM vs 24?
Where I'm from, 12:00 a.m. (00:00) is the middle of the night (we call it midnight here), and morning begins when the sun rises (and we say "good morning" during our mornings).
So if you worked at a hotel or airport or a coffee shop or something and you saw someone shortly before sunrise you would say "Good night" not "Good morning"?
Not all languages work the same way as English does. You shouldn't think in English terms in this case. His language may use hello as a rule in these situations or have a completely different word without equivalent in English.
The notations can be confusing, especially around noon and midnight. Is midnight am or pm when it's equally distant to both the previous and the next noon? Why does 12am not follow 11am???
Where I live we use 12hr time in casual spoken language but pretty much always specify the time of day as well, like eight in the evening or twelve at midnight. But for anything written or even remotely formal, 24h time is used for obvious reasons.
Agreed. I've never understood the logic of splitting the hours of the day in half. 1800 is so much nicer than 6PM.
I don't think that's purely an American thing though. If I had to guess, I'd say that most of the world uses 12-hour clocks instead of 24-hours. I could be wrong though. Nevertheless, I usually write all times in 24-hour format. But it always sounds awkward trying to use it in speech. I haven't figured out a good way to do that yet.
Thailand splits theri days in 4 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_six-hour_clock)
Please, correct the link, cause now it has closing bracket included.
On substance - even that makes more sense, with 4 zones designating morning, afternoon, evening, and night. 2 zones conflate them.
In my country it's normal to pronounce time in either format, and it doesn't make any confusion.
Also we don't use AM or PM when using 12-hour format: we say night/morning/day/evening. Like "3 in the day" means 3PM, or 15:00.
"Fifteen-o-o" works just fine as well.
In America you'll hear "It's three in the morning" or "It's four in the afternoon."
"Three in the morning" is super weird, like, it's not morning, this thing is called night :D
heck even inside these borders.. the concept of timezones blows their minds at work lol..
them: "yeah let's set a meeting at 9am!"
me: eastern? pacific? central? help me... heeeelllp meee
Yes, we'll have the meeting on 3/2/2023
And I'm like.... FUCK. I'll have to ask again.
And get answered like: "2nd of March, DUH"
I hate when software is hard coded either those stupid fucking dates. I generally uninstall
Oh god or when you can choose between 4/5/23 or 5/4/23 and your like.... '_'
I do everything like this 2023-12-24
Isn't basing a temperature scale on the freezing and boiling points of water a bit arbitrary in and of itself?
The reason they are arbitrary numbers in Fahrenheit is because they weren't considerations when the scale was made.
Water is everywhere.
Cooking, weather, etc. You are also water.
Except that water boils at different temperatures when exposed to different amounts of pressure.
So this works pretty universally on earth.... Near the ground/ocean level (plus or minus a few hundred meters). Once you get outside of that specific condition the numbers move.
So yes, fairly arbitrary.
Let's all switch to Kelvin.
The nice thing about celcius and kelvin is that they're the same scale, but celcius is just shifted 273.15 units. And it's more intuitive for humans to work with smaller numbers with bigger relative differences. But yes, kelvin would be a lot better to work with, especially considering stuff like doubling temperature (doubling energy) would actually work correctly in kelvin.
But if there's one thing that makes a lot of sense to base temperature enough for human use, I would indeed say it's water, because all life uses water, we are completely surrounded by it, and it's super important to nearly everything we do too.
Sure, but the vast majority of people live in low lying areas and even then it doesn't shift that drastically. You need to climb a mountain to see the difference when it comes to applications of daily life.
Although now that I think about it. The same criticism applies to pretty much every definition of temperature that is based on the behaviour of matter. This also applies to Kelvin. Temperature is a property of matter and every type of matter behaves differently.
This touches on something important, which is that Celsius is based on an arbitrary pressure. It's based on an elevation that suits the region which defined it.
It is, but if you look at how Farenheit was conceived it's absurdly nonsensical. 0°F is the freezing temperature or some mixture of chemicals, and 90°F is a guess at human body temperature lmao.
And the freezing/boiling points of water are arbitrary except in that they are used to actually define both scales. They provide easily measurable standards.
I think it's the freezing point of brine
No, 0° was the lowest temperature recorded in the city Fahrenheit lived, and 100° was considered normal body temperature, with the quality of thermometer available at the time.
It’s quite arbitrary, but ends up mapping pretty nicely to comfortable ranges for humans.
Well TECHNICALLY it's not based on the state change of water.
It's based on the formula C = K - 273.15 where K = 1.380649×10^−23 / (6.62607015×10^−34)(9192631770) * h * Δν[Cs] / k where k is the Boltzmann constant (1.380649×10^−23 J * K^-1), h is the Planck constant, and Δν[Cs] is the hyperfine transition frequency of Caesium
So even MORE abstract and unrelatable
This makes no sense. K is not a constant. Is there a variable in there?
Temperature is a measure of entropy. It depends on the disorder in a system somehow.
Temperature isn't a measure of entropy, but the internal energy of a system. Internal energy is the total energy sum of kinetic and thermal and gravitational energy.
You might wonder how that's calculated, and the short answer? It isn't. We rarely look at the actual value. This also goes for enthalpy and entropy. What matters most of the time is the difference in enthalpy/entropy/energy. If you take a look at various enthalpy numbers across textbooks and software and steam tables, you'll see the value vary significantly depending on what they use as their 0 point. No matter where the scale starts though, the difference between two distinct points will remain the same.
I honestly am not sure what I made confusing. The definition I gave is the SI definition of Kelvin & Celsius since 2019. The formula I gave is more verbose than it has to be but it's what you get when you expand it.
https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/definitions-si-base-units
From what I can tell, you're using definition of the units? In that case K doesn't equal that equation, but it is in units of that equation.
I'm not sure of the semantic difference. When I think "a meter is the distance travelled by light in X seconds" I think m = c/299792458 s, same with Kelvin.
Every scale and unit is, ultimately, arbitrary. We all do have a very good understanding of what freezing and boiling water is, though, we don't have a good intuition of "coldest day in some random place in some random year" is. Then there's a couple of other common points of orientation: 20C is room temperature, 37C body temperature and thus warm baths and "it's too bloody hot outside" hover around that (you actually want wet-bulb temperature for that, but it's still a point of orientation), another point is about 60C which is the hottest you can have a beverage and drink it without excessive slurping. Also a common temperature in cooking as that's when a lot of stuff starts to denature, e.g. egg white is about 62-65C, the temperature you want to hit for carbonara to not get scrambled eggs.
Practically everything we deal with in everyday life (short of winter weather) is within that 0-100 range. Which is due, to, well, water being liquid in that range.
If you want to be radical, use Kelvin. At least it scaled identical to C so it's easy to comprehend.
I would like to dump on America for this but as Scotland is in the UK we have some unholy abomination of in between when it comes to our measurements.
Found the Finn, everyone
I've never been to a sauna before, but are you guys okay with boiling yourselves and then immediately freezing yourselves? Doesn't that seem very painful? Are you guys used to being Wim Hof all the time?
The thing to remember is that air is a great insulator. Air at 100°C isn't nearly as bad as say water or metal at the same temperature against the skin. In fact, the air that comes in contact with the comparatively cold human skin will cool down rapidly, forming a layer of cooler air around you and lessening the sensation of heat further.
SCIENCE
YEAH BITCH
100°C is a quite hot one. It could hurt your nose and ears a bit, especially if they having a steaming session.
The cold water (normally ~10°C) does not hurt at all. The first minute your brain is not able to differentiate the temperature at all. After that it gets quite quickly into: ohh I should leave!
Btw: you should try sauna at some point. Especially with the steaming it's amazing. There are also milder ones with ~80°C, I would recommend at the start.
100°C is nice. And what's a steaming session? Throwing water onto the rocks for steam every now and then is just standard operating procedure.
Hmm, I think I'd rather try that at some point.
Yes. It's wonderful. It feels great physically and mentally. Wim Hoff is a bit crazy tho tbh
Good for you.
Wim Hof, the guy who shredded his intestines by giving himself an enema from a public water fountain while waiting to meet his estranged son?
Wait, he actually did that???
You don't actually start boiling at 100C lol
Yeah I might be kinda dumb sometimes
Found the Scandinavian
I object. Kelvin is the superior one.
Hmm, I sure love adding 273.15 to literally every single temperature I encounter
Oh sure, so what are you, a Newton scale guy? "What is it outside? 6? Lovely. High of 12? Fuck that noise I'm staying inside at a nice comfortable 5."
Adding 273.15 is much easier than fucking with F.
I've never heard Celsius be explained more perfect than this. Thank you.
50 is pretty nice what are you on about
Yeah, I'm not going to the beach at 50F, but I can hike, golf, just hang out outdoors, etc. If it's sunny 50F can even feel rather warm.
Perfect running weather.
I don't touch a jacket until 40, 50 is perfect.
That's peak hoodie and jeans weather. Literally perfect.
Fahrenheit is like school grades: 60 is minimum tolerance and beyond 100 adds nothing but misery.
That's not how school grades work were I live but I guess I now understand Fahrenheit
With school grades, when you get >100, you get bullied by your peers
Anything past 85F adds nothing but misery.
About 30C to the people who use real units
Is it bad that this association exists in my mind because of a Kids Next Door joke?
Hell yeah C's get degrees while perfect A students tend to burn up in the world
I'd say 50 is perfect
This guy fats
I diagnose you with "weak, non-Finnish blood."
Put a coat on, loser
Found the Canadian
Between 50 and 63 I'm in heaven. Anything higher than that and all i want to do is go swimming, which as an adult with responsibilities, i never get to. Anything lower than that, and i have to wear more clothes and look fatter than i am.
What the fuck, aren't most buildings kept at 72? How do you exist anywhere except in a walk in fridge?
Believe it or not, i did used to work in a walk in fridge, and the shifts typically ran 16 hours, but 24 wasn't unheard of.
I never said i got these temperatures. I just said I'm uncomfortable otherwise.
Depends entirely on where you live. Surprising what people will accept as normal when their gas/electric bill is on the line.
64-68 °F is fairly standard here. No more than 68. (18-20 °C)
I agree in Midwestern as I put on my shorts and tshirt (I'm not fat, BTW... you just sort of get used to those balmy 50° days)
As a former Midwesterner (grew up there and lived there for 26 years), I never got used to the cold so I eventually moved South.
But turns out now I get cold at anything below 70F lol.
Exactly! 👍
Not to defend Fahrenheit, it's a nonsense scale, however: As with most subjective scales the entire scale can be split into good and not good. The top part is good and the bottom part is not good. The middle of the top part is seen as average good.
So around 75 degrees would be perfect, which is close enough for something as subjective as temperature.
This is why in things like movie or game reviews a 7/10 is seen as average. Like it's good, in the good part, but right in the middle not anything special. A 5/10 or lower is seen as not good, not worth seeing, not worth your time etc. This works for reviews, grades, person attractiveness rating etc.
Yet, Temperature is not a nonlinear star-rating by IGN, is it?
Are you saying global warming is actually caused by the bias of IGN reviewers?
The flooding of Amsterdam was really epic, 10/10 IGN
Can you prove that?
Why not? Most people only meaningfully engage with temperature scales when checking weather forecasts. It's all pretty subjective.
If course there's a need for Celsius or Kelvin in scientific applications, but that's not for the overwhelming majority of people.
Surely you're aware that the overwhelming majority of people do not live in the US. Nearly everyone is fine with Celcius. Billions of people, as opposed to a few hundred million that have been socialised to using the other scale
75 perfect?
Well at least you have the right attitude the way our climate is headed
i appreciate your level headed analysis
Every time someone brings this up, another decade gets added until the US switches to Metric
You mean another eagle and five hamburgers.
Weather/room temp wise we probably never will. I'd rather think of my environment in terms of 0 to 100 than in terms of -18 to 38. For science and engineering, Celsius is ideal, and I can convert between the two in the very rare occasion I need to because I'm not an idiot who can't do basic math.
That's entirely a matter of habit. There is nothing special about 0°F (random point in the cold range?) or 100°F points (random point in the hot range?), you've been lied to.
We don't think -18°C to 38°C, we think -50°C to +50°C (regular Celsius weather thermometer, covers almost any temperature observed on Earth), with 0°C differentiating between snow/ice, "wintery" weather, and rain/mud, "non-wintery" one. That's how we know whether to take umbrella (no point if it snows, hat is your best friend), what kind of shoes are the best fit - cold-resistant or highly waterproof - or which kind of jacket is gonna fit the situation. Melting point of water is actually incredibly important weather-wise and entirely ignored by Fahrenheit scale.
When it's not winter, normal range is 0-40°C, with 20°C designating comfort temperature.
The SI base unit for temperature is Kelvin with 0 K being the coldest possible temperature. 273.15 K is the melting point of ice. But it’s a lot better suited for temperature differences. Celsius is only a derived unit.
And well, all units and measurement systems had a lot of changes over time because some things turned out to be impractical or inaccurate.
Initially Celsius had 100° as the freezing point of water, 0° as the boiling point of water. Fahrenheit had 0° as the coldest temperature he could produce and the (wrong) average human body temperature at 90°. Kelvin was initially defined via Celsius, that got reversed, they have the same scale. There is also Rankine, which starts at 0 like Kelvin, but uses the Fahrenheit scale.
And the US partially uses SI units anyways, all units are derived from them to use their superior base unit definitions. This system came into existence to have unit definitions that are better reproducible and change less over time. Since everything was redefined and all numbers changed anyways, they also tried to make use of the "new" decimal representation of numbers. And new unit names were nice to create some general units, in contrast to foot and pound, which were always different from place to place, at times even from city to city.
I don’t expect the US to ever switch. The US switched to international yard and pound instead of switching to a decimal system. After US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa agreed on that one, all countries who remained using these units had a uniform definition for them. Since then you don’t need to know any longer which yard or pound it was. Though not all units got standardized by that.
And some countries didn’t drop all old units and metricized some instead. Even SI kept the ton(ne). You can’t know what 1t exactly means without knowing the context, it can be 2240lb, 2000lb or 1000kg (~2204.6226lb).
Aviation is already backwards; aviators give distance to travel in nautical miles, visibility in statute miles, altitude and runway length in feet, speed in knots, weight in pounds, volume in gallons, and temperature in celsius. My favorite is the standard adiabatic lapse rate is given as 2°C/1000 feet.
Celcius us a horrible scale for science or engineering. The world literally explodes when water freezes.
Oh shit I better pull that ice out of my freezer then, I about blew up the world
There are many people (particularly in northern regions) who would consider 50° to be quite mild/pleasant
New Englander born and raised. Thats hoodie and shorts weather. Best time of the year.
Minnesota checking in. This is exactly correct. Great time for sitting around a fire.
this meme also works in Celsius.
0°C is not very cold... chilly maybe.
Yes it is, but that's not very cold.
It is actually, literally freezing, then again temperature feeling is a bit relative. Anything under 20 is chilly to me.
steals your clothes and now?
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
I'm in Winnipeg. I saw an old buddy today grabbing some beer wearing shorts and a t shirt. He walked past the cars when we left, I assume he was walking home.
It was -4c today. My kid took his gloves and jacket off at the park. He's 2. We were there for over an hour.
It's not really cold around 0c. It's definitely manageable if you're moving around.
I steal them back 🤷.
It can be much more freezing than that.
People have no idea what -25°C feels like...
I was on holiday at Disneyland Paris at 14 in December or January one year and it was -14/15 °C and it was the coldest place I've been and it definitely felt like it. I'm from Ireland for reference so winters are pretty mild here.
It was -28°C the night I was born, 1st of February. People around here don't remember a winter as cold as that one.
Maybe that's why I like the cold, IDK.
-40°C and -40°F is where I take the kiddos outside with a cup of boiling water and let them make snow.
lol 🤣
That is true. Would like to experience that one day, I was thinking of moving to Alaska or Canada in the not so distant future, somewhere very cold.
Depending on where you live, going below freezing, even down towards 0F (-18C), is common. I'd say things don't go into "too cold to go out" territory until the single digits for me.
Tbh all I care about with wether temp is wether it's possible to snow or not. So on that front Celsius is quite intuitive and useful.
1 or 2 to about 5°C is snowing temperature. Yes, I agree, quite intuitive.
I like the snow. I like cold, in general. I hate summers, I'm always too hot and sweaty.
45 is very hot, 0 is very cold, 22.5 is ok
Ok is -273.15 C.
Nice.
22.5 is about the point where it starts being too warm
In a few years, with global warming on the rise, we may be saying that 50C isn't that hot.
FML
Fuck, you're right
We see 50C in Australia from time to time now thanks to global warming.
Very hot in Celsius is like.. in the 30s. At 100C you'd be dead.
If you score 100 on a test then that's a perfect, therefore 100 is the perfect temperature.
And if you score 51 you pass, so 51 is the passing temperature.
51 would not be a passing grade in most of the US
Im confused as to where 51 would be a passing grade anywhere.
Places where they make the tests harder
Wouldn't lowering the goal post make the test easier to pass?
Not if the questions simultaneously increase in difficulty
💯
In Phoenix, can confirm, 100°F dry heat is pretty awesome
Don't impose your imperialistic temperature views on the rest of us! Leave us cold lovers alone!
50 degrees Fahrenheit
Unless you are literally a demon
Dont kink shame
50 is indeed perfect.
And you get the throphy my man 👍👍👍.
Indoor temp? No. Outdoor temp? Yes!
No and no.
69°F
Nice!
69 °C
A perfect temperature to slow cook beef ragu!
Fahrenheit is the best human-focused temperature scale. 0 is super cold, 100 is super hot, 50 is the line between short sleeve and long sleeve weather (assuming no wind). Anything outside these bounds, it simply isn't worth going outside. But then everyone at a latitude <|37|° will say "that's not that hot" and everyone at a latitude >|40|° will say "that's not that cold," so really it's the best Kansas-focused temperature scale
Because weather is simple, right?
“It’s snowing so climate change can’t be real!”
Look, you're entitled to your opinion but I think it's a bit Kansocentric.
"the perfect scale"
Proceeds to list completely arbitrary temperatures and link them to completely subjective opinions
I can make all the same points about celsius with the added bonus of 0 and 100 being universally applicable and objectively measured
Yeah I guess I agree, 0 to 40 makes much more sense in the context of temperatures humans typically exist in than 0 to 100
"It's the best scale if you happen to live in the perfect conditions for it"
That last sentence was a largely facetious, poking fun at people who live in areas where it can get colder than 0° in winter or hotter than 100° in summer, who have a habit of telling other people that the extremes aren't that extreme. In reality the fahrenheit scale is pretty useful the world around, barring deserts
I'm sure it's useful, but it's not really any better is what I mean
Most useful, or as some would say, best
It's neither though. It's not any more useful than Celsius, I'm sorry to say
Inb4 nonlinear temperature scale
It's the only way this meme makes sense. It's a complaint that humans don't like the average of the temperates that produce the feelings of extreme hot and extreme cold. You'd have to change math, change physiology, or lose linearity.
Nonlinear measures are used for
Why not temperature?
None of those scales have negative scalars.
Actually, earthquake magnitude can be projected to negative numbers. It's well defined but it stops describing earthquakes. For instance, a -3 magnitude earthquake is the energy released by a cat knocking your cell phone off of a nightstand. (see page 290 of this book). Pretty sure the others are also logarithmic scales which are well-defined for any negative number. It just so happens that those negative numbers don't describe anything we care to describe with those scales.
That negative number comes from taking a logarithm of a number less than one. Not from a negative scalar.
Hell yeah, 50 degrees is tee shirt and shorts weather IMHO.
after i moved from the southwest to the pacific northwest and got baptized by the snow for nearly half the year.. i very much agree
We could make it work like that. Just have the thermometer be narrower at the bottom.
That's going to add a lot to simplicity and ease of understanding, for sure. And don't change the name of the scale or it will be too easy to distinguish them
As a person from the north, it really is.
50f is pretty comfy unless you hate long sleeves or are super sensitive to it being slightly cold.
Shivers in Texan
Same for c, but at half the scale tbh. (with a bit of a stretch to the imagination)
50 is very hot. 0 is cold. 25c is perfect.
25c is literally cock and ball torture what are ya on about. Then again I'm an Irish guy who hasn't left my country in nearly a decade so I don't even know what more than 25c feels like
25°C is 77°F; context for any Americans here.
I love how half this thread is solely comments making unit conversions.
Also 77°F/25°C is pretty mild. A crisp mid-spring day. -American Southerner
Yeah 25°C is nothing. A bit on the cool side tbh.
It was 30c at midnight here last night
Same here in QLD, Australia
I'm Brazilian and, although I'm not in the hottest area, summer easily hits 40°C, so yeah, 25°C is not perfect, that would be 20°C, but is pretty good still
As an Australian enjoying summer right now I honestly think it's a bit chilly on days we don't get to 25C.
I'm Canadian and I agree. 25 c is the edge of what's bearable but closer to 20 c is better.
Hello, you, who walks the fiery path. I much prefer my 18, thanks.
Move to Saskatchewan if you want hell both ways, summers in the 40s and winters in the -50s. YAY
25C is the point where I start feeling sleepy because it's so warm.
If you think 25C is optimal then I'm curious as to what your "comfy sleeping temperature" is?
Tbh, in summer I sleep with the airco on 27c. Where I live summer gets a nice and toasty 30c+ 24/7 @ 80%+ humidity. 25c feels amazing compared to that.
Before I moved here, I'd also have said 20c was ideal though :)
15-20 °C is ideal for me. Above 22-23 it starts being too warm. Below 10 I have to start wearing a sweater, which I dislike.
I've lived in 3 different countries in like 5 different climate zones and none of them had temperatures that fit nicely in the 0-100⁰F range.
I'm similar, but two of the countries I've lived in are Australia (Victoria, central QLD and NorthWest WA) and the USA (Texas and Pennsylvania), so I've lived in 6 very different climates (also lived in the UAE)
The only one of these that got even close to 0°f was Pennsylvania, which over a few years has a few nights that dropped below 20°f, which was slightly less common as Victoria and central QLD seeing 120°f. WA and UAE frequently saw 120°f in the summer, a similar rate to Texas seeing 100°f (where I was) this last summer.
I doubt there are very many places where you'd reasonably expect to see 0°f and 100°f in the same year.
Where I live now stays between 30 and 90F. I lived in Saskatchewan and it would go between -40 and 100F. Crazy weather. Closest was maybe Denver but even Denver gets into the -20s F regularly.
I grew up in Iowa which would see 0f and 100f every year easily. Now I live in Bangkok which is basically just 90-100 year round. I'm not sure Celsius helps either that much. But outside Iowa I haven't cared much about the temp outside ever either.
But Iowa gets well below 0f which is my point, people who say 0-100 encompasses outdoors temperatures well live in a very specific area.
I dunno, here in the Rockies that doesn't sound that weird. High altitude, low humidity. We'll get at least one or two 100+ heat waves in the summer (106 is the hottest I've seen here), and in the winter it can drop below zero at night. Granted, the last couple decades has made the former more common and the latter less, so I don't know if we'll see sub 0 this year. It used to be pretty common though
It works pretty well for Minnesota. In a normal year we'll have a few days that fall out of each side of that range.
that's what you get for not living in the US.
Yeah the US never gets -1 or 101
I have lived in Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Iowa. We get the northern winds from Alberta. It sometimes gets kinda cold, Aay
One of those places was in the US haha
North Carolina spends its summers in the high 90's and its winters in the high 20's. We nearly never hit 0°F.
Interestingly if you take the middle of the freezing point (32F) and 100F, you do get a mildly warm 71. No this does not prove anything, yes I'll still say it.
Then if you average THAT with 50, you get 60.5... and you see all three numbers make a triangle. Illuminati confirmed.Then you map it onto Celsius and see 32°F is 0°C, 71°F is 21,7°C and 100°F is 37,8°C.
Which coincides almost perfectly with the 0-20-40 framework we intuitively use in Celsius. 0 is deadly cold without warm clothes, 20 is warm, and 40 is deadly hot.
Turns out Celsius is good for weather, too.
or it's illuminatiWhat happens when you add Kurt Angle into the mix?
that's when you get a 133% chance of rain
As a Wisconsinite, 50° IS perfect!
as a minnesotan 50° is pretty fuckin warm in this months
50 is great for just a light jacket and jeans. You'll never get too hot, you won't get too cold. So, yeah, as long as you've got clothes on it's pretty perfect.
If I want to wear less clothes then 70 is a good bit better, but 50 is damn comfortable.
50 degrees is perfect for me, t shirt and shorts weather.
Yes
Why would 50 be perfect? 50 is fully dressed in regular clothes. You can wear a jacket. You can wear a heavy sweater or a blazer.
If you're lounging around, 60 is perfect.
If you're doing work outside, 50 is perfect.
If you're doing heavy exercise, 40 is perfect.
Is a 5/10 average? Or is that 7/10?
5/7 is perfect
with rice
So are we saying that Celsius isn't intuitive either? 50C isn't perfect after all.
if you're a duck
50 is perfect to me.
50 degree Fahrenheit is perfect. Fahrenheit is still retarded though
Pretty sure Fahrenheit is dead
Not in the US
Hate to break it to you, but he died in 1736
10 C sounds pretty good to me
20°C is where it’s at
16 is fine. 16 and sunny is hot, 16 and windy is acceptable shorts and short sleeve weather
20 is better. 30 is better still.
You must be from a hotter place than me
I'm from Latvia, fuck cold weather! And that fucking winter with snow can go to hell!
Ah, so you're missing summer as you head into the coldest part of the year, while I'm coming out of winter and summer is looking too hot. I can agree that 20 is great
I moved from Latvia a few years ago. Because fuck winter. I'll never see it again.
144 degrees is very hot. 0 is very cold. 72 is perfect. Fixed it.
50°C is very hot. 0°C is very cold. 25°C is perfect.
Uh.
50° is fucking perfect.
I love low to mid 50's. Yes I am white and overweight, no further follow-up questions, please.
Related, but how is it that our normal body temperature is just below the point where water boils? That's counterintuitive.
50s is my perfect outdoor temperature range tbh.
I would argue that 50 f is closer to ideal than the mid point of any other temperature scale...
I love a 50
gringo coping.
50F is perfect tho
Is 50% on the heat in the shower perfect?
It's the perfect temperature for brine though
and then they just start fucking, in the grass, presumably
Fahrenheit is based on how the human body tells temperature and I'll die on that hill.
Celsius is for water and Kelvin is for molecules.
Using Celsius or Kelvin for scientific measurement makes sense.
Using fahrenheit for the average person just checking the atmospheric temperature makes sense.
You can use different scales for different things ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No it's not.
What makes 0°F (-17,7°C) special for a human body? Is it the limit after which we don't feel any colder? No.
And what makes 100°F (37,7°C) special? Maybe we can't feel any hotter? No, we can. Is it the body temperature? No. What is it?
Maybe 50°F (10°C) is perfect? Nah, cold!
If we change 0°F to, say, 0°C and 100°F to 40°C, does it change the notion that 0°F is very cold for a human body and that 100°F is very hot? No, and as a bonus you get 50°F equaling that perfect 20°C.
Fahrenheit scale is super arbitrary and it's hilarious when it is posed as a "human-centric" scale. At the same time, the concept of Fahrenheit scale is unnecessarily complicated and the notion between Celsius is extremely clear - you can easily calibrate Celsius thermometer with nothing but kettle and freezer, right at home, right now.
Also,
Simple enough.
The Fahrenheit scale is literally based on what was thought to be the limits of human comfort though. 0° F started as the lowest measured temperature in Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit's hometown, and 100° F was his estimate of normal human body temperature.
You think it's arbitrary because you're used to a different scale. To me, having a scale go from 0C to 40C seems arbitrary, especially because I live in an area where for 3 months out of the year, it's constantly below 0C, and it's critical to know the difference between -5C and -15C, rather than just lumping them both into the same "sub-zero" category. I'm the same vein, categorizing 10C as "jacket weather" is borderline useless. The "jacket" I'm going to wear at 10C is much heavier than the one I'm going to wear at 17C (if I wear one at all), for example.
By the way, you can do the exact same breakdown of the Fahrenheit scale, except it's more than twice as granular, and it goes from 0 to 100, like a bunch of other metric measurements... It boggles my mind when metric users use the 0 to 40 Celsius scale up as an argument against Fahrenheit.
You just described the difference between -5C and -15C without any difficulty at all. The rest of the world uses Celsius. There's zero actual tangible benefit to using fahrenheit. The US doesn't have any economic, social, political, technological, artistic, or theological advantage because they use fahrenheit.
It's what you're used to. That's it. That's the only reason you would like it. It's fine to say that. "It would be a pain in the arse for a few years adjusting the nation to using Celsius" is fine as your reasoning for liking it.
The UK finally fully switched from imperial weights/volumes for goods to metric in '95. Some people kicked up a fuss for a while about it, but a recent poll showed that 98% of people don't want to bring imperial back.
All the arguments that dragged on for years about how difficult and confusing it would be to use unfamiliar units were worthless drivel. Buying a 450g package of mince instead of a 1lbs package of mince is something you get used to insanely quickly unless you're a moron. If the US decided to switch to Celsius you'd have a bunch of people kicking off, but life would go on and after a while no one would want to switch back anymore.
After converting to Fahrenheit lol.
That's kind of my whole point. It's what I'm used to, and you listing out the Celsius scale breakdown isn't going to convince me to want to use Celsius for everyday uses. Of course I could get used to it, but it would take a wholesale, nationwide switch, just like it took the UK. Until then, telling me how much better Celsius is is just pissing into the wind, and honestly, a little underinformed.
I haven't listed any scales. That was someone else. I just chipped in to point out that arguing about scales or which one is better is pointless. You like what you're used to, which as I said I'd fine, it's just dumb to be passionate about something that's arbitrary. The only reason other people are trying to convince you that Celsius is fine it's because it's pointless for humanity as a whole to have different measurement units in different countries.
At some point the people living in the middle of the North American continent will have to switch, it might be 1000 years from now but the standardisation will come eventually. There will be loads of people like you complaining, but then once the switch happens it'll be absolutely fine and nothing of value will be lost. All the arguing that will happen between then and now about which system is better will have been pointless.
Seconding this.
The reason we even care is that maintaining two systems is heavily impractical and adds to confusion all around the world - simply because 4% of world's population can't bother to make a change.
We wouldn't care what you use - perfect barbecue temperature scale, length unit of football field, weights in blue whales - if it wouldn't affect the rest 96% of the world who have to decipher your blubber.
Everyone uses Celsius and metric, make a damn switch, it's not that hard and you won't lose anything. You only use it because you've used to it, there is literally nothing else to it. Everyone switched, everyone's happy with it. Do it already.
P.S. Also, Fahrenheit is currently officially defined through Celsius, as a scale that is at 32 degrees on melting point of water (0°C), and 212 degrees on its boiling point (100°C).
Let it sink in.
Fahrenheit is modernly defined through Celsius.
Fahrenheit's hometown is certainly the metric everyone should use /s
Celsius is not arbitrary, it is based on objective physical reality, and the only arbitrary thing about it is atmospheric pressure, which is more or less equal on the sea level. The rest is us finding convenient patterns, not the other way around. 0-40 is not a scale, it's an arbitrary range and adaptation of Celsius to subjective feelings of hot and cold - one that you ironically need for Fahrenheit, too. Actual thermometers normally go -50°C to +50°C.
On sub-zero, it is the same idea: -5°C is a weather for a light winter jacket, -15°C is a weather for a heavy winter jacket, -25°C is for heavy jacket and some pullover, etc etc.
The 0-40 argument demonstrates that we don't need some arbitrary scale based on Fahrenheit's recording in his hometown in order to conveniently estimate temperature. The groups for each dozen of degrees are just for easy reference. 17 degrees is optional for your taste, to me it's light jacket weather in overcast or t-shirt weather when sunny. There are no perfect temperatures for anything and anyone, and it just doesn't make sense to get into more detail.
As per granularity, people invented decimals, but normally it's simply not necessary to tell the difference between 17°C and 18°C, let alone between 63°F and 64°F. There are so many factors influencing the temperature feeling, and one degree ain't one.
I'm the kind of person that hates it when the water's too hot while taking a shower. Friends that I am living with take their shower way hotter to a point that I cannot resist the temperature
How the fuck do you base your own temperature system on something so subjective ???
Honestly people who insist on using Celsius for their daily lives rather than just for science have way more comfort than me having to deal with fractions of a degree on a regular basis. But I guess that's the point of metric, dealing with precise decimels constantly rather than just having a unit conveniently sized for the thing you're doing.
No one cares about fractions of Celsius, in my experience
Me when my house is 20.462c instead of 20.463c: 😡🤬🥶