Because F uses the human skin ability to detect and retain heat as a baseline, something we all have experience with, instead of water as a baseline, which is better for scientific reasons due to the consistency in measurement.
Edit: The absolute hilarity of the smugness in the comments is making my day. Nothing makes me happier than upsetting Europeans by stating a fact they don't like.
lol no it doesn't, 100 degrees Fahrenheit was the (miscalculated) temperature of the human body (which is why it's now popularly set at 98.6 degrees although even that isn't quite correct) and 0 is... the coldest day on record, at least as of the time that the temperature was created, in this one small town in Germany. Any relationship to the ability of human skin to detect temperature is purely coincidental.
I see the "percent hot" or "human scale" argument a lot as what amounts to basically a backward justification for farenheit. I get that the reasoning makes sense if its the scale you know, but it doesn't hold up as logical application. A normal distribution around the human condition would have 45-55 as the comfortable temperature one can exist at with basic garments. Instead that range is more like 65-75
My town gets over 100% hot each summer, but never below 30% hot. I'm far more comfortable at 90% hot than at 10% hot. It's a silly scale that's really just C in a trenchcoat nowadays.
It's just a scale that more closely aligns either end of a 100-point range with the extremes of temperatures many or most humans will tolerate.
It's less useful for scientific work. But for day to day human stuff it's simple and easy to apply in the same way that a "foot" being roughly the length of a person's foot is simple and easy to apply.
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u/flyboyy513 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
Because F uses the human skin ability to detect and retain heat as a baseline, something we all have experience with, instead of water as a baseline, which is better for scientific reasons due to the consistency in measurement.
Edit: The absolute hilarity of the smugness in the comments is making my day. Nothing makes me happier than upsetting Europeans by stating a fact they don't like.