• bjorney@lemmy.ca
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    4 days ago

    It’s not any better than Celsius though - you are only saying that because you are familiar with Fahrenheit.

    Celsius

    • 0 - freezing
    • 10 - cold
    • 20 - room temp
    • 30 - hot
    • 40 - miserably hot
    • 100 - boiling
      • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus
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        3 days ago

        The higher resolution of Fahrenheit is wasted on the absolutely subjective experience of ambient temperatures, especially when taking humidity into the equation. At least there is a feelable difference between 20 and 22 °C.

          • Rothe@piefed.social
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            3 days ago

            No, Americans are so dead scared of decimals that they don’t even know what they are.

          • aberrate_junior_beatnik (he/him)@midwest.social
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            3 days ago

            Given the same number of decimals, Fahrenheit is higher resolution. It can communicate ambient temperatures slightly more efficiently than Celsius, because it is designed to do that and Celsius is not. I can definitely tell the difference between, say, a climate control setting of 70F and 71F. If I wanted that level of control with Celsius, I’d have to communicate/have displayed 3 digits and a decimal point. That is less efficient. Is that a big deal? No. Does it mean Celsius is bad? Also no. I think we here in the US should switch to metric for a number of reasons, but this would be a slight downside to switching. Sorry if that hurts your feelings of superiority but it’s the truth.

    • djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      4 days ago

      I think the larger granularity is better when talking about specifically the feeling of air temperature, if for no other reason than it keeps it to whole numbers for the sake of conversation. 76f is a pretty common temperature where I live for a lot of the year. Saying 24c is technically inaccurate, that’s noticeably colder at 75f. Saying 24.4c in a regular conversation is psychotic.

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        You say 24½°C, if you really need to be that accurate, but I’ve never seen anyone care about that precision in normal conversation, so we just say whole centigrade numbers…

          • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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            3 days ago

            Hmm, didn’t think of that, but is there no simpler way to say that than “and a half”?

            Here in German, “…und ein halb” is also technically correct, but everyone just says “…ein halb” and in my regional dialect that further deteriorates to “…a-halb”.

            I guess, “point five” is sufficiently short that you might just go for that, though. In German, it’s one syllable more with “Komma Fünf”… 🫠

            • boonhet@lemmy.zip
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              3 days ago

              In Estonian we don’t have articles AND we usually skip the and in informal spoken language. We just say “27 half” (27 pool) for 27.5

            • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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              3 days ago

              “and half” makes sense. I don’t recall hearing people say that here (East coast US, somewhat southern), but I could see them swallow the “a” and say something like “and’a half.” Still, I almost always see fractions written with decimals, so people just say “point x.”

      • wyldrstallyns@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 days ago

        Saying 24.4c in a regular conversation is psychotic.

        Doing so is accurate, which many neurodivergent people lean toward, and generally don’t appreciate being called “psychotic”, FYI. Maybe tune that hyperbole —and no, “retarded” isn’t an acceptable alternative, either.

        • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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          3 days ago

          Why stop at one decimal place then? If you want to be accurate you can probably add a few more on there. Rarely do we need even the single decimal point of accuracy though, and it adds two additional characters.

      • richieadler@programming.dev
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        3 days ago

        We know that anything resembling knowledge in the mouth of an USian can result in bullying by the nearest jock. It’s reason enough to be afraid.