this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Celsius is easy, everything important is a nice and rounded number: -40°C is freezing point of vodka; -30°C is fucking cold; -20°C is cold but tolerable; -10°C is pleasant winter weather; 0°C is when roads get icy, better be careful; 10°C is pleasant autumn weather; 20°C is room temperature and pleasant spring/summer; 30°C is haaawwt; 40°C is you-must-be-shitting-me hot; 80 to 100°C is good sauna; 110°C is those-crazy-Finns sauna; 120°C is the-bloody-Russians-joined-the-sauna-party; 250°C is pizza oven; 1000°C is ceramics oven; 1500°C is steel smelting. Everything above use K instead; substract 273 to get C if you must.
Fahrenheit is a fucking mess where nothing makes sense and nothing is a rounded number.
These numbers feel arbitrary to me, while a scale of 0 to 100 feels very intuitive.
The only “arbitrary” number to remember in Fahrenheit when talking about weather is the freezing point, 32 degrees.
It’s the natural intuitiveness of 0-100 scales that also makes me prefer Celsius for non-weather applications, since the phase changes of water become more important when talking about cooking or chemistry.
Celsius makes weather so much easier; freezing point of water is the one most important temperature for weather conditions, what kind of precipitation and surface conditions you can have. Having it as the reference point for temperature just makes so much sense. With celsius, you can understand the general weather from a single glance. Negative numbers? Ice and snow. Positive numbers? Rain and mud. Plan accordingly. And the general comfort zones are all at around 10° steps wich makes everything nice and round.
Fahrenheit on the other hand has the zero at some completely nonsensical reference point that has no relation to what weather conditions are possible.