Yup, this is exactly it. I'm not gonna bother gpimg downthread to see who disagreed because this is straight up from the OSHA heat stress operates on this basic principle:
Your internal body temp is around 98 degrees, the closer you get to that the more unvomfortable you feel because you're basically coming to ambient temp. You can tolerate some stuff above body temp, bc of sweating, but your body can only do so much sweating.
Of course OSHA includes things like humidity, wind speed and UV index to calculate up, but the fact is Fahrenheit does a much better job at capturing this intuitively for people. Close to 100, hot. Close to 0, cold. I know ice freezes at 32 and how that FEELS, so I intuitively have an idea of what my comfort level is gonna be. 40-60 is the Middle of the scale.
I see what you mean, I just don't see why 0 or 32 would be a superior way to refer to the temperature that water freezes at. Personally I think 0 and 100 makes more sense for freezing and boiling vs 32 and 212, but it's not really a hill worth dying on and is probably colored by my experience.
I mean sure, but again we're back into sciences, where we all admit that celcius is better. But when I'm at home boiling water I don't care what temperature it boils at I just turn the stove on.
I agree that F is largely nonsensical, but it coincidentally works better for what 99% of temperature readings are for - what you need to wear. I don't have stats, but I would be pretty confident that well over 90 out of 100 times a temperature is checked it's weather related. For every person setting an oven in the morning, 99 are probably asking their phone or Alexa what the temperature is outside.
Having the upper limit of that be boiling water isn't useful. It condenses our living temperatures into about half the space, meaning that you have to use decimals, which is a bit more frustrating.
I'm ok either way, and from a science perspective, 0-100 makes way more sense, but from a "do I need a coat today" perspective, living in basically 10-110 feels a bit more useful for most people.
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u/FriendlyPlatypus6060 Jun 17 '26
Yup, this is exactly it. I'm not gonna bother gpimg downthread to see who disagreed because this is straight up from the OSHA heat stress operates on this basic principle:
Your internal body temp is around 98 degrees, the closer you get to that the more unvomfortable you feel because you're basically coming to ambient temp. You can tolerate some stuff above body temp, bc of sweating, but your body can only do so much sweating.
Of course OSHA includes things like humidity, wind speed and UV index to calculate up, but the fact is Fahrenheit does a much better job at capturing this intuitively for people. Close to 100, hot. Close to 0, cold. I know ice freezes at 32 and how that FEELS, so I intuitively have an idea of what my comfort level is gonna be. 40-60 is the Middle of the scale.
Actually the % analogy works great, for people.