Fahrenheit literally meant to base the scale with 100 being human body temp.
It was later rescaled by Cavendish to put the freezing point of water at exactly 32 and boiling point at exactly 212, giving a nicely-divisible 180-degree separation between freezing and boiling. That shift is why body temperature is 98.6.
The Report of the Committee Appointed by the Royal Society to Consider of the Best Method of Adjusting the Fixed Points of Thermometers; And of the Precautions Necessary to Be Used in Making Experiments with Those Instruments
Seems fancy and legit, I see no reason to actually read it and confirm the info.
I’m pretty sure that wasn’t actually Fahrenheit’s intention, more a happy accident. Also if your body temp is 100°F then you’re running a mild/moderate fever.
The scale was adjusted later to make freezing and boiling points land on exact numbers with an easily-divisible 180-dregrees between them (180 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 20, 36, 45, 60, and 90).
When you’re a child having a sick-day, you get to stay home from school and watch TV, which is absolutely 💯. What temperature do you need to have to get a sick-day? 100°
In foreign units, 100° is the temperature at which water boils. What has boiling water ever done for anyone? Literally nothing. But in freedom units, water boils at 212°. 212 is a palindrome and palindromes are so cool, they could be classified as 💯. As we all know, 100 is the coolest number, which is why that’s how high grades go.
Finally, using USA standards, calculating calories in food merely requires measuring how much energy is required to raise 3.5 oz water 1.8° F by burning the food and then dividing by 1000. Using your weird unpatriotic methods, you’d have to measure how much energy is required to raise 100 grams of water 1° C by burning the food and then not dividing by anything??? Sounds lame!
Someone give me a Gatorade, those mental gymnastics were a hell of a workout
riddle me this then mr european man (i assume for the context of shitposting)
would you feel ok with getting half of everything you did being completely wrong, or would you feel ok with only three of those 10 things being completely wrong.
half is formidable, like you tried, probably. 7/10 is on the way to being good at it though.
it’s a question surrounding human bias on the subject of correctness. Most people would argue that 7/10 is “ok or good” where as most people would argue that 5/10 is “not the worst, but not good”
we’re not fundamentally biased to the midpoint of something, we’re fundamentally biased to the perceived average of something.
I love it when it’s 50ish out and sunny. You don’t get all sweaty, plus you can wear cozy socks and sweaters or just go out in short sleeves and both are perfectly fine. The bugs all start going into hiding at that temperature but the grass and leaves are still green
As a European I can perfectly feel the 0 degree. I step outside and 5 seconds later I can tell you if it’s below zero or not.
For me “it’s now really hot” in summer is exactly when it’s over 30C. It being 86F doesn’t make any more sense. Approximately above 35C I will avoid going outside. Which would be 95F, not 100.
From here, the temps in summer in the south of Europe are often around 100F at peak. Above or below doesn’t matter.
All that Fahrenheit scale is good for is if you live in a continental climate, more to the south, e.g. some useless place like Oklahoma, where 0F is approximately year low, and 100F is approximately year high.
For all other places, where the temperature delta over the course of the year is not as extreme, this Fahrenheit scale is as unintuitive as celcius, e.g. you just get used to it.
For me “it’s now really hot” in summer is exactly when it’s over 30C. It being 86F doesn’t make any more sense. Approximately above 35C I will avoid going outside. Which would be 95F, not 100. From here, the temps in summer in the south of Europe are often around 100F at peak. Above or below doesn’t matter.
you guys need to stop converting directly between temperatures, you’re right at 86f, bump it up to 90f and woah, suddenly it’s actually a nice round number.
You’re too conversion pilled to realize that the human experience isn’t fundamentally and objectively representative. 1 degree celsius isn’t super noticeable, just like 5 degrees fahrenheit isn’t super noticeable either.
As is typically responded to this ‘response’: there are a large number of people-many European-who would unironically say that 50°F (10°C) is, in fact, the ideal temperature.
They’re wrong, of course, but they exist.
But you’re also assuming that the exact middle of the range is where the ideal sweet spot should be. That’s wrong. People generally can better handle larger temperature deviations that are colder than their ideal than hotter deviations.
The difference is that humans emit their own heat. Combined with our funny tendency to wear insulative clothing that can asymptotically approach zero net heat exchange with the atmosphere, acceptable temperatures skew wildly towards and beyond freezing.
Meanwhile, without some kind of acting cooling mechanism, any temp even slightly above fever temp is inevitably fatal. You can only take off so many layers. What are you going to do, take off your skin? Sweating helps us humans a lot, but evaporative cooling can only do so much to reverse the heat gradient.
50 F is excellent… with a light jacket or a blanket. Not so much if you’re naked.
Why should the ideal temperature be right in the middle of the range?
It’s no surprise that the maximum end of the range is right around the body temperature, as it’s difficult for the body to keep itself cool once the environment is around or warmer than the body temperature. Sure, we can sweat, but that uses up a lot of water and people generally find that getting all sweaty to not be pleasant. Run out of water or raise the temperature too much and it gets dangerous pretty quickly.
On the other hand, if the environment is a lot cooler than the body temperature, then it is difficult for the body to keep warm. I’m sure for our distant ancestors who lived in what is now Africa, their minimum temperature was much higher, possibly putting the ideal temperature right around the middle of their range. Luckily for us, we have clothing and can put on more clothing to stay warm, which is how we can now make the minimum so low. But while we can use clothing to lower our minimum, we really don’t have anything different to raise our maximum vs. our ancestors - we’re both limited by how well we can cool ourselves by sweating. So for that reason it doesn’t really surprise me that our ideal temperature is towards the upper end of what we consider the minimum and maximum temperatures.
Fahrenheit isn’t how people feel, otherwise 50° would be perfect temperature.
it is though? It’s like perfectly comfortable because you can dress up just enough to where you’re actually wearing a decent bit of clothing, but you can also dress down to a pretty light set of clothing as well.
This is also ignoring that this is both, arbitrary, and also completely subjective to the person.
The human body might end up liking 70f more than 50f, purely because it’s 96f inside the body, so something lower to allow heat transfer, but not low enough to be physically uncomfortable would be more expected.
Actually, here’s a good question, why do you land on the 50f point? Are you expecting the middle to be the most optimal point of perfection? Or is this just a metric brain thing?
What annoys me about that phrasing, is that “how water feels” is quite relevant to how humans feel.
The obvious example is that if it’s below 0°C, it starts freezing, which causes slippery sidewalks, snow, dry air, all that stuff.
But just in general having a feeling how much water will evaporate and later precipitate at certain temperatures, and even stuff like how hot beverages and cooking temperatures are, it’s all still relevant for humans…
The obvious example is that if it’s below 0°C, it starts freezing, which causes slippery sidewalks, snow, dry air, all that stuff.
But just in general having a feeling how much water will evaporate and later precipitate at certain temperatures, and even stuff like how hot beverages and cooking temperatures are, it’s all still relevant for humans…
that’s an interesting idea, BUT, the boiling point for water also exists under f as well, it’s just 212 f, which if you want to round for convenience, is 200f. 100f is just about half the boiling point of water.
I guess you celsius folks might be more water pilled than the average US citizen, but it’s not like it’s impossible.
In Celcius water boils at exactly 100°C, and you don’t have to round, and 50°C is exactly half the boiling point of water.
Yes, Celsius users are waterpilled: the whole system is based on the temperature at which water freezes and evaporates at 1 atm pressure.
(You’re just fucking with us right? Like Celsius is has a coarser base unit, and the range applicable to human temperatures are not such pretty numbers, but you can’t be seriously thinking Fahrenheit makes more sense for when we talk about water?)
In Celcius water boils at exactly 100°C, and you don’t have to round, and 50°C is exactly half the boiling point of water.
unless you’re doing literal chemistry, the specific boiling point of the water doesn’t matter, especially for any subjective referential experiences you might have, such as, going outside.
(You’re just fucking with us right? Like Celsius is has a coarser base unit, and the range applicable to human temperatures are not such pretty numbers, but you can’t be seriously thinking Fahrenheit makes more sense for when we talk about water?)
i’m not saying it’s better, i’m just saying you’re having a failure of imagination to conceptualize the usage of the fahrenheit system if you so pleased to use it in such a specific manner, which almost nobody here does. You could still do it though.
idk man, there’s a lot of temperatures in cooking that are like, kind of close? Not that close, but like, kind of close. Even then, the one case where i consider it genuinely mattering is boiling water which like, you can just kinda know.
the celsius scale literally covers 55% of the range of the fahrenheit scale. I’d say “about half” is perfectly reasonable.
granted, it skews since you’re starting on the low end. The figure is more like 122f right in the middle, which is, not great, but i wasn’t going to calculate the half boiling point as i’ve literally never seen it be relevant anywhere lol.
Celcius degrees are quite a bit larger than Fahrenheit degrees. 0 to 100C is much larger than 0 to 100F so I don’t get what you mean by Celcius covering about half of Fahrenheit. In any case neither scale runs out of numbers high or low
my main point was that accuracy matters a lot less with fahrenheit, because it’s so much broader. a range of about 10 degrees fahrenheit is the average subjectively experienced “change” in temperature, at least on the higher end, where there’s more difference between the individual numbers. On the cold side there’s a lot less variance as it meets at about -40 in both systems.
In any case neither scale runs out of numbers high or low
this is very true though, hard to run out of numbers when you can just make more up, although there is an ultimate limit in either direction, due to what temperature actually measures. That’s a physics thing though.
The words you are looking for are that Fahrenheit is more precise. But it’s not as there are an infinity of numbers between any two integers.
My thermometer at work which I use for health and safety stuff reports temperature to two decimal places. Had we wanted more precision we could have gone with twenty decimal places. In too big or too small metric units we use multipliers - metres are too small for long distances so we use kilometres (thousands of metres), metres are too big for construction so we use millimetres (thousandths of metres)
Where Celcius degrees are too big, people (scientists, since whole degrees or a single decimal is enough for everyone else) use milikelvins
The words you are looking for are that Fahrenheit is more precise. But it’s not as there are an infinity of numbers between any two integers.
yeah and you could make a temperature scale call it fuckwit and make water freeze at -1, and water room temperature at 0, and then make it boil at 1. I don’t know why you would want to do that though.
My thermometer at work which I use for health and safety stuff reports temperature to two decimal places. Had we wanted more precision we could have gone with twenty decimal places. In too big or too small metric units we use multipliers - metres are too small for long distances so we use kilometres (thousands of metres), metres are too big for construction so we use millimetres (thousandths of metres)
well you wouldn’t go with twenty decimal spaces because after you get past about 4 decimals, it starts to become inconsequential, and you should really just use sci no anyway.
Where Celcius degrees are too big, people (scientists, since whole degrees or a single decimal is enough for everyone else) use milikelvins
fascinating that you propose this, because this is literally the opposite of what i said lol.
Strange, because it is bullshit.
Fahrenheit isn’t how people feel, otherwise 50° would be perfect temperature.
You Americans are just used to thinking in Fahrenheit, that is why you think it is how humans feel. As a European, I “feel” in Celsius.
Fahrenheit literally meant to base the scale with 100 being human body temp.
It was later rescaled by Cavendish to put the freezing point of water at exactly 32 and boiling point at exactly 212, giving a nicely-divisible 180-degree separation between freezing and boiling. That shift is why body temperature is 98.6.
I like this version better than “he had a fever when he measured 100 degrees” so I will choose to believe it without further research.
I hope you are correct.
https://archive.org/details/paper-doi-10_1098_rstl_1777_0038
Seems fancy and legit, I see no reason to actually read it and confirm the info.
Welcome to peer review!
Horse* body temp
I’m pretty sure that wasn’t actually Fahrenheit’s intention, more a happy accident. Also if your body temp is 100°F then you’re running a mild/moderate fever.
The scale was adjusted later to make freezing and boiling points land on exact numbers with an easily-divisible 180-dregrees between them (180 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 20, 36, 45, 60, and 90).
https://archive.org/details/paper-doi-10_1098_rstl_1777_0038
I don’t usually run, but when I do, I run a mild/moderate fever.
I heard circular thermometers were how it was done then so he lined up 180° with 180°.
It literally was not.
I cited and linked my source from the 18th century when it was redefined. What’s yours?
Rating inflation. If someone called you a 5 or 6 out of 10, you’d feel bad. 7/10 is the bottom of acceptability, just like 72° is room temperature.
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You think that’s some copium, watch this:
When you’re a child having a sick-day, you get to stay home from school and watch TV, which is absolutely 💯. What temperature do you need to have to get a sick-day? 100°
In foreign units, 100° is the temperature at which water boils. What has boiling water ever done for anyone? Literally nothing. But in freedom units, water boils at 212°. 212 is a palindrome and palindromes are so cool, they could be classified as 💯. As we all know, 100 is the coolest number, which is why that’s how high grades go.
Finally, using USA standards, calculating calories in food merely requires measuring how much energy is required to raise 3.5 oz water 1.8° F by burning the food and then dividing by 1000. Using your weird unpatriotic methods, you’d have to measure how much energy is required to raise 100 grams of water 1° C by burning the food and then not dividing by anything??? Sounds lame!
Someone give me a Gatorade, those mental gymnastics were a hell of a workout
Even better, I don’t even feel a fever until it’s 104°F. I’ve just looked it up, and that’s exactly 40°C. Even my body likes round centigrade numbers.
riddle me this then mr european man (i assume for the context of shitposting)
would you feel ok with getting half of everything you did being completely wrong, or would you feel ok with only three of those 10 things being completely wrong.
half is formidable, like you tried, probably. 7/10 is on the way to being good at it though.
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it’s a question surrounding human bias on the subject of correctness. Most people would argue that 7/10 is “ok or good” where as most people would argue that 5/10 is “not the worst, but not good”
we’re not fundamentally biased to the midpoint of something, we’re fundamentally biased to the perceived average of something.
I love it when it’s 50ish out and sunny. You don’t get all sweaty, plus you can wear cozy socks and sweaters or just go out in short sleeves and both are perfectly fine. The bugs all start going into hiding at that temperature but the grass and leaves are still green
As a European I can perfectly feel the 0 degree. I step outside and 5 seconds later I can tell you if it’s below zero or not.
For me “it’s now really hot” in summer is exactly when it’s over 30C. It being 86F doesn’t make any more sense. Approximately above 35C I will avoid going outside. Which would be 95F, not 100. From here, the temps in summer in the south of Europe are often around 100F at peak. Above or below doesn’t matter.
All that Fahrenheit scale is good for is if you live in a continental climate, more to the south, e.g. some useless place like Oklahoma, where 0F is approximately year low, and 100F is approximately year high.
For all other places, where the temperature delta over the course of the year is not as extreme, this Fahrenheit scale is as unintuitive as celcius, e.g. you just get used to it.
you guys need to stop converting directly between temperatures, you’re right at 86f, bump it up to 90f and woah, suddenly it’s actually a nice round number.
You’re too conversion pilled to realize that the human experience isn’t fundamentally and objectively representative. 1 degree celsius isn’t super noticeable, just like 5 degrees fahrenheit isn’t super noticeable either.
50 degrees is a damn good temperature. I won’t stand here and let you besmirch 50 degrees.
Its not the “perfect” temperature but what temp in celcius is “perfect”? What a ridiculously proposition that there’s a perfect temperature.
20 is perfect.
that’s pretty comfortable, but between 50 and 70f which is about 10 and 20 c is the “comfortable range”
50F is the perfect temperature.
That’s 10°C for those who want to judge you. And you’re wrong, the perfect temperature is 17°C. Not too cold, not too hot.
The correct rebuttal is that 69 degrees is ideal ambient temperature.
As is typically responded to this ‘response’: there are a large number of people-many European-who would unironically say that 50°F (10°C) is, in fact, the ideal temperature.
They’re wrong, of course, but they exist.
But you’re also assuming that the exact middle of the range is where the ideal sweet spot should be. That’s wrong. People generally can better handle larger temperature deviations that are colder than their ideal than hotter deviations.
The difference is that humans emit their own heat. Combined with our funny tendency to wear insulative clothing that can asymptotically approach zero net heat exchange with the atmosphere, acceptable temperatures skew wildly towards and beyond freezing.
Meanwhile, without some kind of acting cooling mechanism, any temp even slightly above fever temp is inevitably fatal. You can only take off so many layers. What are you going to do, take off your skin? Sweating helps us humans a lot, but evaporative cooling can only do so much to reverse the heat gradient.
50 F is excellent… with a light jacket or a blanket. Not so much if you’re naked.
Why would you pick 50 for the perfect temp? Genuinely curious why land on that number.
Because 0° is the minimum a body is supposed to endure according to the tweet, and 100° is the maximum a body should endure.
So the ideal temperature should be right in the middle.
But it isn’t, so Fahrenheit isn’t “how people feel”.
Why should the ideal temperature be right in the middle of the range?
It’s no surprise that the maximum end of the range is right around the body temperature, as it’s difficult for the body to keep itself cool once the environment is around or warmer than the body temperature. Sure, we can sweat, but that uses up a lot of water and people generally find that getting all sweaty to not be pleasant. Run out of water or raise the temperature too much and it gets dangerous pretty quickly.
On the other hand, if the environment is a lot cooler than the body temperature, then it is difficult for the body to keep warm. I’m sure for our distant ancestors who lived in what is now Africa, their minimum temperature was much higher, possibly putting the ideal temperature right around the middle of their range. Luckily for us, we have clothing and can put on more clothing to stay warm, which is how we can now make the minimum so low. But while we can use clothing to lower our minimum, we really don’t have anything different to raise our maximum vs. our ancestors - we’re both limited by how well we can cool ourselves by sweating. So for that reason it doesn’t really surprise me that our ideal temperature is towards the upper end of what we consider the minimum and maximum temperatures.
Because it is in the middle of that “0 is really really cold, 100 is really really hot” “human feeling” fahrenheit scale you guys keep going on about.
This is the first time I’ve heard about a “human feeling” scale so sure, 50 must be perfect.
it is though? It’s like perfectly comfortable because you can dress up just enough to where you’re actually wearing a decent bit of clothing, but you can also dress down to a pretty light set of clothing as well.
This is also ignoring that this is both, arbitrary, and also completely subjective to the person.
The human body might end up liking 70f more than 50f, purely because it’s 96f inside the body, so something lower to allow heat transfer, but not low enough to be physically uncomfortable would be more expected.
Actually, here’s a good question, why do you land on the 50f point? Are you expecting the middle to be the most optimal point of perfection? Or is this just a metric brain thing?
What annoys me about that phrasing, is that “how water feels” is quite relevant to how humans feel.
The obvious example is that if it’s below 0°C, it starts freezing, which causes slippery sidewalks, snow, dry air, all that stuff.
But just in general having a feeling how much water will evaporate and later precipitate at certain temperatures, and even stuff like how hot beverages and cooking temperatures are, it’s all still relevant for humans…
Humans are mostly water. If water boils, then humans will mostly boil too.
that’s an interesting idea, BUT, the boiling point for water also exists under f as well, it’s just 212 f, which if you want to round for convenience, is 200f. 100f is just about half the boiling point of water.
I guess you celsius folks might be more water pilled than the average US citizen, but it’s not like it’s impossible.
In Celcius water boils at exactly 100°C, and you don’t have to round, and 50°C is exactly half the boiling point of water.
Yes, Celsius users are waterpilled: the whole system is based on the temperature at which water freezes and evaporates at 1 atm pressure.
(You’re just fucking with us right? Like Celsius is has a coarser base unit, and the range applicable to human temperatures are not such pretty numbers, but you can’t be seriously thinking Fahrenheit makes more sense for when we talk about water?)
unless you’re doing literal chemistry, the specific boiling point of the water doesn’t matter, especially for any subjective referential experiences you might have, such as, going outside.
i’m not saying it’s better, i’m just saying you’re having a failure of imagination to conceptualize the usage of the fahrenheit system if you so pleased to use it in such a specific manner, which almost nobody here does. You could still do it though.
Cooking is basically water based chemistry, so it makes a lot of sense to use Celsius.
idk man, there’s a lot of temperatures in cooking that are like, kind of close? Not that close, but like, kind of close. Even then, the one case where i consider it genuinely mattering is boiling water which like, you can just kinda know.
Your scale in water terms starts at 32. 100 is nowhere near halfway between 32 and 212
the celsius scale literally covers 55% of the range of the fahrenheit scale. I’d say “about half” is perfectly reasonable.
granted, it skews since you’re starting on the low end. The figure is more like 122f right in the middle, which is, not great, but i wasn’t going to calculate the half boiling point as i’ve literally never seen it be relevant anywhere lol.
Celcius degrees are quite a bit larger than Fahrenheit degrees. 0 to 100C is much larger than 0 to 100F so I don’t get what you mean by Celcius covering about half of Fahrenheit. In any case neither scale runs out of numbers high or low
my main point was that accuracy matters a lot less with fahrenheit, because it’s so much broader. a range of about 10 degrees fahrenheit is the average subjectively experienced “change” in temperature, at least on the higher end, where there’s more difference between the individual numbers. On the cold side there’s a lot less variance as it meets at about -40 in both systems.
this is very true though, hard to run out of numbers when you can just make more up, although there is an ultimate limit in either direction, due to what temperature actually measures. That’s a physics thing though.
The words you are looking for are that Fahrenheit is more precise. But it’s not as there are an infinity of numbers between any two integers.
My thermometer at work which I use for health and safety stuff reports temperature to two decimal places. Had we wanted more precision we could have gone with twenty decimal places. In too big or too small metric units we use multipliers - metres are too small for long distances so we use kilometres (thousands of metres), metres are too big for construction so we use millimetres (thousandths of metres)
Where Celcius degrees are too big, people (scientists, since whole degrees or a single decimal is enough for everyone else) use milikelvins
yeah and you could make a temperature scale call it fuckwit and make water freeze at -1, and water room temperature at 0, and then make it boil at 1. I don’t know why you would want to do that though.
well you wouldn’t go with twenty decimal spaces because after you get past about 4 decimals, it starts to become inconsequential, and you should really just use sci no anyway.
fascinating that you propose this, because this is literally the opposite of what i said lol.
Fahrenheit is literally a German dude making a scale from, “scheiße its chilly outside” to “oh mein gott, its hot out!”
Yeah. But Celsius refers to inside room temperatures. 0°C = yay, ice skating! 100°C = yay, sauna!
Temperature doesn’t care about your feelings.
Oh, how rude.
Their friend is a dumbass though.
EDIT: replied to wrong comment