"Pheww it's 90 today" or "Pheww it's 32 today"?

[westv]

Which are you more likely to say if you were to make any comment on hot weather and it was 90f/32c?

 

[eMeS]

I was trained as a physicist and electrical engineer, so I hope that it would be "32" today. If I was trying to sell my tabloid, it would be "90".

 

[thejuggler]

We have a strange approach in the UK. When its hot its farenheit 80, 85, 90. when it's cold its centigrade. -5, -20 etc. As mentioned largely tabloid led.

Centigrade for me.

 

[swt_passenger]

Celsius nowadays...

 

[43096]

Celsius. Fahrenheit is a very, very odd system.

In any case on days like yesterday and today I tend not to use a temperature, as one word will do: scorchio!

 

[Bletchleyite]

Celsius. Maybe we should use Kelvin, that's the logical one where 0 is actually 0 and not an arbitrary midpoint! (Both Celsius and Fahrenheit have borderline-sensible midpoints, though I forget what 0 Fahrenheit is meant to represent)

Celsius. Fahrenheit is a very, very odd system.

In any case on days like yesterday and today I tend not to use a temperature, as one word will do: scorchio!

I've long concluded that there is only one type of weather in the UK - "too". It can be too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet, too windy, too still.....

 

[eMeS]

Celsius. Fahrenheit is a very, very odd system. ...

For its time, I think Fahrenheit was probably quite logical. The "0" point was that of a freezing mixture, and the nominal "100" was human blood temperature, albeit a little in error unless the subject had a fever.

 

[43096]

Celsius. Maybe we should use Kelvin, that's the logical one where 0 is actually 0 and not an arbitrary midpoint! (Both Celsius and Fahrenheit have borderline-sensible midpoints, though I forget what 0 Fahrenheit is meant to represent)



I've long concluded that there is only one type of weather in the UK - "too". It can be too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet, too windy, too still.....

Celsius at least has 0 and 100 as something people can relate to.

Fair point on ‘too’. Mind you I like a nice cold, sunny winter’s day and I was thinking at the start of the week it was just right: sunny, but of breeze, temperature perfect.

 

[ainsworth74]

Celsius as, ya know, it's a system that actually makes sense.

 

[Mojo]

I don't know anyone who uses Fs, apart from Americans. Even when I have been there on holiday in the past and get speaking to locals, they always laugh when talking about the temperature, as they know even admit that it is nonsensical and that nobody really understands it.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Celsius at least has 0 and 100 as something people can relate to.

Agreed, I think in a human sense it's the most practical one, as the effect on water (an essential to life, a huge proportion of our bodies and something that can kill us at either end of that scale) is very relatable. Kelvin is scientifically better but you have to remember those points.

 

[swt_passenger]

Celsius. Maybe we should use Kelvin, that's the logical one where 0 is actually 0 and not an arbitrary midpoint! (Both Celsius and Fahrenheit have borderline-sensible midpoints, though I forget what 0 Fahrenheit is meant to represent).

From memory of school days, it was the freezing point of a particular mixture of brine that he made up for his repeated experiments. Something about equal parts solid salt and fresh water?

 

[Trackman]

I use both, but nowadays C.
When did it come in i.e. weather forecasts on TV?
I think it was when lbs and oz's went.

 

[WelshBluebird]

Celsius.
I don't know anyone who uses Fahrenheit, not even my parents who are in their 60's.
Hell I wouldn't have a clue what any number in Fahrenheit actually relates to in Celsius.

 

[gg1]

We have a strange approach in the UK. When its hot its farenheit 80, 85, 90. when it's cold its centigrade. -5, -20 etc. As mentioned largely tabloid led.

You say tabloid led, I'd go a stage further and say this ONLY exists in the world of tabloid headlines.

IME people use either celsius or fahrenheit consistently, I've never known anyone who switches between the two depending on whether it's hot or cold.

I use celsius, or sometimes Kelvin if I'm in a facetious mood

 

[Huntergreed]

Celsius seems to me to be the logical one to use.

It follows the same scale as the kelvin system (albeit -273), but the scale is logical and the '0' is based around a practical temperature which is encountered in normal life.

If we were to say 'it's 300 degrees outside!' or 'ice melts at 273, water boils at 373' then it would be logical, but to me celsius seems to simply be easier to remember and more practical as the '0' is based around a practical temperature rather than a mostly theoretical one which is rarely encountered in daily life.

Farenheit is very odd and unnecessarily complex.

 

[nlogax]

Both. Living in the US has enabled me to speak both imperial and metric

 

[Huntergreed]

Both. Living in the US has enabled me to speak both imperial and metric

Can I ask, do you understand how fahrenheit works and where it comes from or just use it as a scale?

For instance most people know here that water boils at 100 and freezes at 0 on the celsius scale, do people understand how the fahrenheit system works or just use it without considering this?

 

[nlogax]

Can I ask, do you understand how fahrenheit works and where it comes from or just use it as a scale?

I have a vague understanding of the history and mechanics behind the Fahrenheit scale, but in all honesty from how I and other US-familiar folks use it, it's just that - a relative scale.

In the UK we're far less likely to come up against zero degrees F. and a hundred degrees F., but these extremes are far more commonplace across the US and I can understand why it makes perfect sense there.

 

[High Dyke]

Unbearable!

 

[si404]

For its time, I think Fahrenheit was probably quite logical. The "0" point was that of a freezing mixture, and the nominal "100" was human blood temperature, albeit a little in error unless the subject had a fever.

I was going to suggest it was a centigrade earlier, when someone referred to Celsius that way. However it was 96 as it was easier to make a scale by dividing stuff into equal halves multiple times (32 below ice melting/water freezing, 64 above it) than making tenths. The freezing mixture (or the coldest temperature one winter in Danzig where Herr Fahrenheit lived) at 0, 96 as blood temperature, and it just happened to work that water freezing was a third of the way along.

As for "for its time", Celsius was in its present form in 1744 (the original 1742 scale that Celsius himself made had 0 as boiling and 100 as freezing - influenced by Delisle's 1732 scheme but using 100 for freezing, not Delisle's 150. Christin's 1743 scheme, independently came up with, had it the other way around. Linnaeus flipped Celsius' scale (independently of Christin) when Celsius died in 1744). Réaumur had 0-80 with the same anchor points in 1730. Fahrenheit was 1724 - not much earlier.

Rømer, whom Fahrenheit was influenced by, used the boiling point of water and freezing point of brine (so water froze at 7.5 and boiled at 60). Newton's slightly earlier scale had the freezing point of water (0 degrees) and body temperature (12 degrees) as scale definers. Effectively, Fahrenheit had two existing scales to work off of - one where brine freezing (roughly - it was recalabrated so that water freezing was exactly 7.5) was the zero point with water boiling the top anchor (at 60), and the other where water freezing was zero and body temperature the top anchor. He went with a mix - and chose the brine and body, rather than the water freezing and boiling!

Of course, most of the metric system is based off a billionth (10^-9) of the distance between the North Pole and Equator through Paris (the centimetre), and that (deliberately) rather arbitrary and unuseful (it took them a while to calculate the quarter-circumference properly) definition of a centimetre - at least some guy's foot can be roughly visualised quite handily! - is much more random and obscure than body temperature or the freezing point of a sea-esque brine solution.

In the UK we're far less likely to come up against zero degrees F. and a hundred degrees F., but these extremes are far more commonplace across the US and I can understand why it makes perfect sense there.

Even with our weather, Fahrenheit makes sense - in fact more so as 0 and 100 are rare outliers (if not quite actual extremes) here and so everything fits like its a "percentage hot" scheme. There's good reason why we picked it up and carried on using it long after most places had decided on Celsius (Réaumur was popular in France and Russia, but fell in favour of Celsius in the 19th century).

IME people use either celsius or fahrenheit consistently, I've never known anyone who switches between the two depending on whether it's hot or cold.

I guess you weren't in the UK in the 80s or 90s.

The topic of this thread is ""Pheww it's 90 today" or "Pheww it's 32 today"?" The lukewarm-sound of 32 is the reason we switched to Celsius - the media needed to more extremely convey freezing weather to sensationalise it and so in winter we started using Celsius in the same way that tabloids use Fahrenheit today. And it took time to do so fully because of days like today - 90 conveys the heat better than 32, just as 0 conveys the cold better than 32!

We, as a nation, switched organically from pretty much entirely working in Fahrenheit and not understanding Celsius, through pretty much being able to cope with either but preferring Celsius in winter and Fahrenheit in summer, to pretty much entirely working in Celsius and not understanding Fahrenheit (I can just about do it - and my parents, who taught me Fahrenheit, have fully lost it).

Maybe we should use Kelvin, that's the logical one where 0 is actually 0 and not an arbitrary midpoint!

Rankine has that too - only with the finer gradient of Fahrenheit's scale. Both named after Scots who must have worked together in Glasgow (Kelvin made his in 1848, Rankine his in 1859) :P

 

[mmh]

You say tabloid led, I'd go a stage further and say this ONLY exists in the world of tabloid headlines.

IME people use either celsius or fahrenheit consistently, I've never known anyone who switches between the two depending on whether it's hot or cold.

I use celsius, or sometimes Kelvin if I'm in a facetious mood

I use both Celsius and Fahrenheit in the tabloid manner. For example, it feels like it must be in the 80s right now, but thankfully it'll be cooler tomorrow. Still in double digits though. Other than the logic of freezing being zero, I don't think Celsius actually has much going for it when it comes to general weather forecasts.

 

[mmh]

I was going to suggest it was a centigrade earlier, when someone referred to Celsius that way. However it was 96 as it was easier to make a scale by dividing stuff into equal halves multiple times (32 below ice melting/water freezing, 64 above it) than making tenths. The freezing mixture (or the coldest temperature one winter in Danzig where Herr Fahrenheit lived) at 0, 96 as blood temperature, and it just happened to work that water freezing was a third of the way along.

As for "for its time", Celsius was in its present form in 1744 (the original 1742 scale that Celsius himself made had 0 as boiling and 100 as freezing - influenced by Delisle's 1732 scheme but using 100 for freezing, not Delisle's 150. Christin's 1743 scheme, independently came up with, had it the other way around. Linnaeus flipped Celsius' scale (independently of Christin) when Celsius died in 1744). Réaumur had 0-80 with the same anchor points in 1730. Fahrenheit was 1724 - not much earlier.

Rømer, whom Fahrenheit was influenced by, used the boiling point of water and freezing point of brine (so water froze at 7.5 and boiled at 60). Newton's slightly earlier scale had the freezing point of water (0 degrees) and body temperature (12 degrees) as scale definers. Effectively, Fahrenheit had two existing scales to work off of - one where brine freezing (roughly - it was recalabrated so that water freezing was exactly 7.5) was the zero point with water boiling the top anchor (at 60), and the other where water freezing was zero and body temperature the top anchor. He went with a mix - and chose the brine and body, rather than the water freezing and boiling!

Of course, most of the metric system is based off a billionth (10^-9) of the distance between the North Pole and Equator through Paris (the centimetre), and that (deliberately) rather arbitrary and unuseful (it took them a while to calculate the quarter-circumference properly) definition of a centimetre - at least some guy's foot can be roughly visualised quite handily! - is much more random and obscure than body temperature or the freezing point of a sea-esque brine solution.
Even with our weather, Fahrenheit makes sense - in fact more so as 0 and 100 are rare outliers (if not quite actual extremes) here and so everything fits like its a "percentage hot" scheme. There's good reason why we picked it up and carried on using it long after most places had decided on Celsius (Réaumur was popular in France and Russia, but fell in favour of Celsius in the 19th century).

I guess you weren't in the UK in the 80s or 90s.

The topic of this thread is ""Pheww it's 90 today" or "Pheww it's 32 today"?" The lukewarm-sound of 32 is the reason we switched to Celsius - the media needed to more extremely convey freezing weather to sensationalise it and so in winter we started using Celsius in the same way that tabloids use Fahrenheit today. And it took time to do so fully because of days like today - 90 conveys the heat better than 32, just as 0 conveys the cold better than 32!

We, as a nation, switched organically from pretty much entirely working in Fahrenheit and not understanding Celsius, through pretty much being able to cope with either but preferring Celsius in winter and Fahrenheit in summer, to pretty much entirely working in Celsius and not understanding Fahrenheit (I can just about do it - and my parents, who taught me Fahrenheit, have fully lost it).

Rankine has that too - only with the finer gradient of Fahrenheit's scale. Both named after Scots who must have worked together in Glasgow (Kelvin made his in 1848, Rankine his in 1859) :P

Superb post. Thank you, it explains what I think far more eloquently than I could!

 

[mikeg]

Celsius all the way. I never understand why they say fahrenheit quieter after celsius on the weather. It should be '32 celsius. That's 90 FAHRENHEIT. DID YOU HEAR THAT LOVE?'.... I mean unless you're incredibly old or German, who uses Fahrenheit nowadays?

 

[si404]

Other than the logic of freezing being zero, I don't think Celsius actually has much going for it when it comes to general weather forecasts.

Pretty much, but it's a useful logic to have, and the only real thing wrong with Fahrenheit was to set water freezing at 32 rather than a round number. If water boiled at 180 and froze at 0, we'd still be using the system designed in Danzig, rather than the one designed in Uppsala. Body temperature at 64, brine freezing at -32: same ease of drawing the scale on thermometers, but alas, avoiding negative numbers was more important to Fahrenheit than making the number where water freezes an obvious and important one!

 

[Devonian]

Phew, it's 72 indoors here today. Despite being neither very old nor German, and having been schooled almost entirely in SI-derived measurements, I actively switch to Fahrenheit above 70 degrees F for weather, body temperature and swimming water, probably because that's what my parents and teachers did informally and, having got used to it, I've never changed. At least it's a good mental exercise to convert between the scales. I also have the fun of two ovens at home, one of which is calibrated in deg. C, the other in deg. F...

I did have to correct a British water park once, who were advertising that their water was 'heated to 80C'. Now that's scorchio!

 

[185143]

I'd be more likely to use or hear one of the following:

"IT'S TOO *** HOT"
"It's *** BOILING out there"
"It's great beer garden weather"
"I'm sweating me tits off!"

 

[hexagon789]

I understand and can use either system, but Celsius would be my default

 

[hexagon789]

I'd be more likely to use or hear one of the following:

"IT'S TOO *** HOT"
"It's *** BOILING out there"
"It's great beer garden weather"
"I'm sweating me tits off!"

Or in Scotland - "taps aff"!

 

[gg1]

I guess you weren't in the UK in the 80s or 90s.

I was and I remember people either using one or the other exclusively, not flitting between the two depending on whether it's hot or cold.