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[–] 7 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Norms may be dumb but they make everybody's lives easier when everybody follows them.

As for temperature specifically, there's nothing inherently better in Celsius or Fahrenheit. It's just a choice. The only unit that is superior to all of them is the Kelvin because it has a true zero, but it's not commonly used in everyday settings.

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  • [+] -15 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    But there is something inherently better in Fahrenheit! 0 is fucking cold. 100 is goddamn hot. It’s a measure that makes sense to the perception of us, human beings.

    0 in Celsius is a little cooler than brisk, and 100 means you’ve been dead for a while. It’s a dumb system for humans to use.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    0 means water freezing, 100 means water boiling. This is actually quite helpful to know instinctively.

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  • [+] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    You do realise water can fall from the sky, right? 100Β°C might not be too useful for outside temperatures, but knowing if there might be ice on the road or not seems like a useful thing to know.

    Also, as a maths teacher, having frequent negative temperatures makes working with negative numbers a lot more intuitive for students. The fact that Americans apparently use 1 for the ground floor means I’d lose out on both of my simple real-world examples of negative numbers.

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