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Okay so fahrenheit has a well-defined high and low, but an arbitrary freezing point of one certain chemical. All other chemical freezing points are arbitrary.

Celsius has an arbitrary high and low, but a well-defined freezing point of that same chemical. All other freezing points are arbitrary.

If your motivation is to minimize the amount of arbitrary values you have to memorize, fahrenheit is the clear winner.

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criticon@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
The 0 in Fahrenheit was based on nothing and the 100F was supposed to be human temperature but it is off by some degrees

The water is not an arbitrary temperature, the weather is water dependant, at 0C the water will freeze and you get snow/ice instead of rain

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- actually@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  0°F is when the ocean freezes
  
  100° F was human body temperature, later revised somewhat with better measurements and a decrease of parasites . The average person in those days in London had a slightly higher body temperature than today
  
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  - criticon@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    0F is not ocean freezing, is the freezing temp of a brine mix that he chose arbitrarily (some think that he chose that temp because it was close to the coldest his town had ever been and he used it to calibrate the scales of his thermometers)
    
    FYI, the ocean freezes at around 28F
    
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ayyy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
It’s not like the weather depends on the boiling point of formaldehyde…

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AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
The zero C is freezing and 100 C is boiling, so not really arbitrary.

But it’s pretty hard to define a scale that has intuitive, round numbers for everything we might care about.

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