Memes

I really like Farenheit system for temperatures. 0 is really cold and 100 is really hot, but both survivable. It's a human-centric system.

I used to make this argument, that Fahrenheit made more sense for weather, but I decided to be (somewhat) scientific about it and test the hypothesis (with a sample size of 1).

So I switched everything I own over to Celsius and set about teaching myself.

This was back in 2019, and here I am still using Celsius 5 years later. I like it a lot more than Fahrenheit.

A couple of major reasons: first, you don’t actually need the precision Fahrenheit gives you for weather. The difference between 68°F and 69°F is so small that degrees Fahrenheit have very little meaning. It was startling to me how quickly I came to understand the differences between degrees Celsius because they have a lower resolution. And of course you can always use half degrees if you need to, but honestly it’s fine without.

What I realized is that, very often, the temperatures that you see on weather reports or apps are really just the Celsius degree values converted and rounded. For example, you’re far more likely to see 68°F or 70°F rather than 69°F, since 20°C=68°F and 21°C=69.8°F. This isn’t true for every weather source, but it was still interesting.

But more importantly, 0 is freezing.

This never seemed like it mattered when I was using Fahrenheit. I know 32°F is freezing, if it’s below that it’s gonna be snowing instead of raining. But the first winter I experienced in Celsius was eye-opening.

I realized that temperatures below freezing in Fahrenheit never really meant much to me. This is sort of hard to explain, but while I knew they were progressively colder there wasn’t much specific understanding. That is, 23°F doesn’t really mean anything to me.

But -5°C? That instinctively meant something to me the very first time I experienced it in Celsius. That’s going to be as far below freezing as 5°C is above freezing. No math involved. Simple. Valuable. Obviously you can do the math to figure the same thing out in Fahrenheit, but with Celsius you don’t need to.

Once you get to know the numbers, it’s just as good as an other system of measurement, and I find I like it more for the weather than I like Fahrenheit.