Well, first of all, I'm not sure why you're defining those scales as the "useful" ones. They don't even equate to each other. But why are you arbitrarily using 100 as the end of your Fahrenheit scale? Just so you can declare it 'Metric-y'? If you read his paper, Fahrenheit's scale is actually 0-96.
I'm not 100% sure of the normal upper/lower bounds in everyday life for most people on the planet for Celsius, but let's say it's 0-32. It' just feels weird to me to be operating on that scale versus 0-100 where I see in every day life from battery percentages to test scores.
> Just so you can declare it 'Metric-y'?
In part, yea. But I generally just prefer the Imperial system because of its practicality in everyday life and because it's fun and weird and historical in a way that Metric isn't.
100°F is warm to the touch, not smoking hot. 100°C is boiling hot. You sip tea at 60°C, and brew it at 80° to 100°C depending on the type. You cook chicken to an internal 74°C. A hair dryer blows air around 50°C. All of these are outside of 0-100°F.
> I generally just prefer the Imperial system because of its practicality in everyday life
Funny, most of us much prefer metric mainly for its practicality in everyday life.
Edit: I'll add that aesthetically, 0°C is a really nice zero point for weather. Above 0° is the temperature that the snow starts melting, below is when the streets and ground starts freezing. Which side of 0°C you're on is the biggest pivot point for what it's like outside of any temperature.
Well let me clarify, what I was saying is that where everybody lives the temperatures tend to be within that range, which is why I think it's a superior measurement for temperature related to the weather - again just additional clarification which was missing maybe from earlier comments.
Once you arrive at the point where you're measuring various things, I'm not sure it matters what scale you use so long as the values align as you expect. In other words, I don't really care whether I'm using 212 for the temperature at which water boils or 100 - it's just an association of values to action. You can swap between grams, ounces, pounds, milligrams, or kilos with your scale and it's not that important for day-to-day life. In terms of measuring temperature of things, like, say when chicken is cooked, I'm not really sure F or C is more practical. It's just different numbers.
You are entitled to your subjective experience, but keep in mind other subjective experiences exist.
That seems to be a quite arbitrary and insufficient criterion. As soon as I start cooking or preparing a warm drink I already step way outside these boundaries.
In defense of the relevance of the Celsius scale in daily life: its endpoints represent critical temperatures of the most important liquid to life on Earth at ~1 bar. And at temperatures of 0°C or less I stand at danger of not just hypothermia, but frostbite.
> it's [..] historical in a way that Metric isn't.
How so? Celsius was proposed merely 18 years (1742) after Fahrenheit (1724).
Sorry, I was attempting however poorly to reference the Imperial system historically, not Celsius versus Fahrenheit there which may have been confusing on my part.
> In defense of the relevance of the Celsius scale in daily life: its endpoints represent critical temperatures of the most important liquid to life on Earth at ~1 bar. And at temperatures of 0°C or less I stand at danger of not just hypothermia, but frostbite.
Right, incredibly important. I guess I would say I prefer Fahrenheit as a measurement of air temperature, if that would be more sensible to understanding my own personal preference. When I walk outside unless it's really cold I don't ever think about what temperature water freezes or boils, I want to know whether I am going to sweat, whether I'm in California, or whether I'm going to freeze my butt off when it's 14 degrees out.
• Using a uniform set of prefixes to designate multiples and divisions of the base units.
Having one unit of say, volume (the liter), and then using prefixes when we need smaller or larger units is way better than having cups, pints, quarts, gallons, pecks, and many more.
• Having those prefixes mean powers of 10. That fits in well with our use of decimal arithmetic.
It is the first one that is most important.
For temperature there's nothing actually 'Metric-y' about Celsius (or Kelvin), because in most cases people don't use multiples or divisions of the base unit. This includes in science and engineering. An astronomer would say (and write in their paper) that a star has a temperature of 7000 K, not 7 kiloK. They would say a neutron star has a core temperature of 100 trillion K, not 100 TK or 100 teraK.
At the low end there is more use of prefixes. The scientists that work near absolute 0 do often use millikelvin and microkelvin. They also often don't. Both 10^-2 Kelvin and 10 mK would usually be acceptable.
A metric system with the same meter, liter, and gram as the current one but that had picked F and R instead of C and K would work fine and be just as 'Metric-y' as the current metric system.
It's more predictable over -- some things that you don't know how they're going to scale?
Again, the general thrust of "imperial" is better -- base your units on "utility of the most people using them the most for real life things"
Do whatever you want for distances between stars, but no, walking off a room in "feet" can't be beat.
Actually, this is very problematic as well. As it stands, astronomical distances are quoted in single/thousands/millions/billions of kilometres, astronomical units (Earth-Sun distance), parsecs and kilo- and mega-, and then light-years (and thousands, millions, billions).
I would strongly prefer to use metric units: metre, kilometre, megametre, gigametre, terametre (AU is around here), petametre (parsec and light-year is around here), exametre (about a thousand light-years), zettametre (about a million light-years), yottametre (about a billion light-years). The scale ends there because the observable universe is about 886 Ym in diameter.
What is better with metric is the consistent way to name multiples and divisions of the base units.
Metric uses power of 10 prefixes but another power could work fine. Power of 2 for example actually fits well with Imperial volume measurements, where a quart is 1/4 gallon, a pint is 1/2 quart, 1 cup is 1/2 pint, a fluid ounce is 1/8 cup, and a tablespoon is 1/2 a fluid ounce.
Just make some prefixes that mean 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64, 1/128, and 1/256 and use those with gallon instead of having separate names for everything, and use the same prefixes with yards when you need a unit smaller than a yard and you'd be off to a good start. Add some prefixes that mean 2x, 4x, 8x, etc too.
Yards and gallons don't have to be the base units. Could be feet and cups or anything else. The key is prefixes to get bigger or smaller units instead of naming those others units, and using the same prefixes across unit types.
Nevertheless, there are many important quantities which are proportional to temperature, e.g. pressure, internal energy, voltage generated by a bandgap reference and so on. Because of this, there are many cases, especially in qualitative reasoning, when using temperature is more convenient than using its inverse.
This is similar to waves, where in most numeric computations wave-number and frequency are more convenient, but there are also many cases, e.g. when reasoning about resonance frequencies or stationary waves, when using wave-length and periodic time is more convenient.
Another example is in electrical circuits, where for some problems using impedance and resistance is more convenient, while for others using admittance and conductance is more convenient.
Perhaps one would need a simpler name for reciprocal temperature, to facilitate its use wherever this makes sense. However, when implementing a physical model in a program, where one should always define distinct types for each kind of physical quantity, using a short type name like "RecTemp" would not stand out among the many abbreviations typically used in programs.
