Show HN: Degrees What?

> figured people might think it was an actual compass

So you were concerned that people might get confused, yet you choose to mix angular and temperature degrees in the same interface?

An odd choice. I thought causing maximum confusion was the goal. (In a fun way, admitadly.)

They meant that the name "degree Kelvin" is obsolete (since 1967 according to Wikipedia), not that the unit of measurement itself is obsolete.

I'm British and always used to think that Fahrenheit was stupid but I've warmed up to it (pardon the pun) after spending some time in the U.S.

Celsius is obviously more useful in a scientific context, but 99% of the time when I'm talking about the temperature, I'm not doing a scientific experiment, I'm asking "how hot/cold is it outside?" In that context I actually find Fahrenheit to be a more intuitively useful scale once you get used to it.

Celsius crams the entire range of likely outdoor temperatures into a narrow range with awkwardly-sized units that don't provide enough information. If someone tells me it's 15C outside, how many layers do I need to wear? I still don't have a good feel for it from the number alone, even after spending most of my life in countries where Celsius is the norm.

But in Fahrenheit, things make more obvious sense. 0 F means "insufferably cold", 100 F means "insufferably hot", and to get a meaningful idea of what the weather feels like on my skin, I just need the range: it's "in in fifties" or "in the seventies" etc.. It takes some getting used to, but I actually quite like it. Thanks, America!

(I'd also make a similar argument that feet and inches are a much more intuitively meaningful scale than centimetres for measuring human height. But that might be my British bias.)

For those who didn't know, Kelvin is already its own measurement. Think of it like on the same level as "meters" or "miles". You wouldn't say "500 degrees Kelvin", like you would 't say "50 amounts of meters".

This is because Kelvin, like meters/miles, are already a measurement of some physical feature, in this case of kinetic energy of the particles.

The word "degrees", on the other hand, does not represent a meaningful measurement of anything. It just means a given part of some arbitrary whole, defined by convention.

e.g. the "whole" of an angular degree is just a single complete rotation. The "whole" of a Celsius degree, I believe is the range that goes between water freezing (0°C) and boiling (100°C) points, and that's why it was also known as the centigrade scale.

Extra curiosity: still as of nowadays, if you say the complete temperature unit in Spanish, you don't say "35 degrees Celsius", you say "35 centigrade degrees" (35 grados centígrados). At least in a colloquial context; not sure how they'd say it in a science-related professional environment.

Like you, I also find celsius more useful for knowing how hot some thing is while fahrenheit is more useful for knowing how hot some where is.

I also find inches, feet, miles etc. more intuitive than meters for basically everything. "so-and-so meters" or "such-and-such kilometers" doesn't describe anything to me, give it to me in inches/feet/miles so I can visualize the damn thing.

Moral I suppose is that metric is great for describing the universe, but the problem is we're dumb apes.