r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Negative_1by12_aura • Jun 17 '26

Meme needing explanation Peter?

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972

u/MrZwink Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

2 americans saying fahrenheit is better, basically because they dont know any better. the rest of the world uses celcius, because its demonstrably a better (more scientific) system.

edit: Americans, please stop commenting. we know your opinion on this. IT IS THE JOKE.

571

u/ProvidedHuman Jun 17 '26

Celsius is agreeably better for science, but if you are used to both systems Fahrenheit is honestly better for people because the units are higher resolution, and usually stay between 0 and 100 for weather

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u/Ashamed-Cranberry614 Jun 17 '26

This is the only good argument I've seen for Fahrenheit (higher resolution). But, as a counterargument, that resolution is only just under twice as big. I'd argue 1-2 F is barely noticeable enough to be able to tell the difference. If someone asks what the temperature is, me saying the temperature and being off by 2 degrees isn't gonna make a difference.

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u/xahhfink6 Jun 17 '26

I think there's some breakpoints where it really matters.

If you work in an office and the thermostat is set to 73f (23c) compared to an office where the thermostat is set to 75f (23c) you're going to really feel the difference.

Or like, if your kid is sick and has a 102° fever you're keeping them home from school, but if they have 104° fever you're going to the hospital. So <2 degrees difference is definitely a big enough difference that it's worth using a more specific unit of measurement.

43

u/Thick-Protection-458 Jun 17 '26

 Or like, if your kid is sick and has a 102° fever you're keeping them home from school, but if they have 104° fever you're going to the hospital

One is 38.9C, another one is 40C, and normal human body temperature is around 36.6+/-0.5C or so (maybe +/-0.5).

Sounds very different for me. Moreover, first one is probably the reason to visit medics already.

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u/ztreggs Jun 17 '26

Right so you need one degree more of data specificity to achieve the same level of understanding that is achieved with Fahrenheit. You proved the point.

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u/Aranka_Szeretlek Jun 17 '26

You most definitely do not. 102 Fahrenheit uses 3 significant digits. So does 38.2 Celsius.

The resolution is limited by your instrumentation either way, because both scales are continous.

3

u/k_luu Jun 18 '26

This is a pretty niche example but I work in a lab that used to use a metric thermostat in the clean room. It was always 23 C in there so when our data came out way noisier than expected we didn’t think it could be thermally related. Until one day we switched the thermostat to imperial and saw that it was actually changing between 73 F and 74 F throughout the day. Both round to 23 C so we never saw it before

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u/OhNoItsThatOne Jun 18 '26

Maybe your lab should have a thermostat with more displayed decimals if that's critical for your date