• gazter@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    It’s almost like being ‘fairly cold for humans’ is a wide range, and subjective, therefore useless as a baseline.

    • Smatt@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Well I’d say that’s why op chose the adverb “fairly”, it gets across that it’s a wide range and lacks specificity.

      Not completely useless as a baseline, but fairly general.

      • gazter@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        Obviously the freezing point of water is also a range (depending on purity, altitude, etc) but would you say it’s less, or more specific?

        • Smatt@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Compared with the human experience of “cold”? More specific, even when talking about ocean water and water on mountains or whatever altitude water you’re talking about.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      True, but that’s also not super relevant to the merits of a temperature scale. Fahrenheit isn’t actually based off of human subjective temperature perception, it just coincidentally lines up a bit closer with the comfortable range for people in northern temperate climates.

      Before it’s redefinition in terms of Celsius, fahrenheit was defined by a particular temperature stable brine solution (easy to replicate for calibration), and with the freezing and boiling points of water set to be 180 degrees apart, because of the relationship with a circle.

      People decided we liked base10 adherence more than trigonometry, and then everyone adopted Celsius, so we should use Celsius. Doesn’t make fahrenheit some sort of random scale, just deprecated.

      • yata@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        The most common defence of Fahrenheit are Americans saying it is the most suited for humans because 0 is “very cold” and 100 “very hot”. That is why people are referencing it with regards to the merits of a temperature scale in this thread.