As someone who moved to the US later in life, I learned to use fahrenheit because there’s no way to talk to anyone about the weather or cooking otherwise.
If you need to do the same one day, don’t bother trying to convert in your head. Just learn the numbers conversationally. Familiarize yourself with how the weather feels with the number the weather app shows.
I can’t convert at all but I can use both C and F in conversation because one rarely needs exact numbers anyway. You learn the ballparks pretty quick.
See, that’s the problem with these “Fahrenheit is more intuitive” arguments. They are catered to a very specific country with a very specific climate. For me, 25-30 ºC is an average late spring day.
It’s intuitive to those who grew up using it. For me, Celsius is much more intuitive because people around me used it all my life and refer to common temperatures in Celsius.
So I think intuitiveness is very subjective and not a good criterion to judge a unit by.
FWIW Fahrenheit has more precision for the temperatures you most commonly feel. Day-to-day you’re likely to feel temps between 10-32°C (range of 22°), which is 50-90°F (range of 40°). It might not seem like a big deal, but I can tell a difference in my house when setting my thermostat from 68°F to 69°F; conversely, if I turn my thermostat to C mode both values get rounded to 20.
But yes, as an American, I think of CPU temps in terms of C, I know water freezes at 0°C/32°F, I know water boils at 100°C but have never committed to memory what it is in F, and in chem classes we always use C/K.
As someone who moved to the US later in life, I learned to use fahrenheit because there’s no way to talk to anyone about the weather or cooking otherwise.
If you need to do the same one day, don’t bother trying to convert in your head. Just learn the numbers conversationally. Familiarize yourself with how the weather feels with the number the weather app shows.
I can’t convert at all but I can use both C and F in conversation because one rarely needs exact numbers anyway. You learn the ballparks pretty quick.
Thank you, this is a a great idea! I’ve found these common temperatures online, in case anyone wants to learn them:
See, that’s the problem with these “Fahrenheit is more intuitive” arguments. They are catered to a very specific country with a very specific climate. For me, 25-30 ºC is an average late spring day.
It’s intuitive to those who grew up using it. For me, Celsius is much more intuitive because people around me used it all my life and refer to common temperatures in Celsius.
So I think intuitiveness is very subjective and not a good criterion to judge a unit by.
Isn’t Fahrenheit a “feel” temperature unit anyway? Once you need precision (science), even Americans switch to Celsius/Kelvin.
FWIW Fahrenheit has more precision for the temperatures you most commonly feel. Day-to-day you’re likely to feel temps between 10-32°C (range of 22°), which is 50-90°F (range of 40°). It might not seem like a big deal, but I can tell a difference in my house when setting my thermostat from 68°F to 69°F; conversely, if I turn my thermostat to C mode both values get rounded to 20.
But yes, as an American, I think of CPU temps in terms of C, I know water freezes at 0°C/32°F, I know water boils at 100°C but have never committed to memory what it is in F, and in chem classes we always use C/K.
Can you set your thermostat to 68.5°F? I can set mine to 21.5°C, does that mean I have more precision? This precision argument is nonsense.