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cucumber3732842today at 2:10 PM1 replyview on HN

What you're ignoring is that a hundred plus or minus is a good range for average humans to grapple with and Fahrenheit splits the temperature swings in a given region across an approximately 100deg range.

So using Fahrenheit results in a pretty decent "as high as it can be without being clumsy" measurement system that covers just about all earthly temperatures.

If we only cared about increments of five or so degrees you could go higher resolution and it'd be fine because rounding would occur like we do with vehicle speeds. Or we could go lower resolution and just make the degrees bigger, which is basically what celsius is.


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Kim_Bruningtoday at 2:28 PM

Eh, all the degrees (Celsius, Fahrenheit, Réaumur, etc) are all about equally bad. Nicest thing that can be said about Celsius is that it's decimal, connected to water (0=freezing, 100=boiling) so it plays well with the rest of metric.

Kelvin is actually the most practical of the lot, FSVO [1]. It's not a 'degree', because it's anchored at absolute zero. It's just a bit unwieldy for our day-to-day, with room temperature at 293K. But I can imagine if people were to grow up with it, it wouldn't be too bad even then.

[1] eg. "Why can an aircon still heat the house at ten degrees below zero?"- "Well akshually, you still have 263K of heat energy to pump, not an actual problem"

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