LogFAQs > #973151209

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Extra granularity isn't necessary, but it's still an improvement on the alternative.

How so? What value does it add? Especially considering that adding half-degree increments to thermostats is very easy for those that are so picky about room temperature (not that you can even tell on an analog thermostat), and you definitely can't tell the difference between an adjustment of 0.5C and an adjustment of 1F.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Celsius is based on scientific applications (more specifically, the temperature of water), which is why it tends to work better for scientific contexts. But it doesn't scale to real world temperatures as well, because you're basically locked into to a scale between -18 and 38 (give or take).

That's largely arbitrary, though. Whatever the scale, people will come to develop their own understandings about what feels comfortable, what doesn't, and what they need to do to become comfortable when outside of their comfort zone. It's pretty much never going to be "I feel comfortable between 0 and 100F," it's going to be "I feel comfortable in the temperatures to which I'm exposed most often, with a few degrees of personal preference." Whether room temperature is 70 or 20, that's going to be the temperature most people want to keep their rooms.

I'd argue that the only non-arbitrary point is 0C, since the freezing point of water has practical applications for understanding what a given weather report means: If it's below 0, you need to be concerned about ice and it's possible that any forecast rain will end up being snow. Of course, in practice, it's usually anywhere under about 3-4 that you need to start watching out for ice, and there's pretty much no functional difference between remembering that threshold as 0 and remembering it as 32, but it's still a matter of using an important threshold with real-world significance as 0. That said, 0F is also useful because it's the rough point below which you shouldn't expect salt to help with ice, since it's the freezing point of a saturated solution of ammonium chloride, but that's not exactly common knowledge.