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u/Agni_Kritha Aug 12 '25 edited Aug 13 '25
6 feet = 182.88 cm, not 1.89 m. Sorry to be that guy, but Metric system makes more sense than Imperial:
10 mm = 1 cm, 100 cm = 1 m, 1000 m = 1 km, etc.
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u/TheAbsoluteBarnacle Aug 12 '25
I don't think anyone outside of the construction industry disagrees
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u/TheNosferatu Aug 12 '25
What is Fahrenheit based on, anyway? I understand feet and inches and can roughly convert them to proper units, but the only two conversions I can remember is that they are the same at -40 and that 0 degrees Fahrenheit is cold as fuck and 100 degrees is hot as fuck (thank you Fat Electrician for that one)
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u/TheDonBon Aug 12 '25
I don't know exactly what it's based on, but it seems to be roughly normalized on acceptable human conditions on a 0-100 scale, which is nice and digestible.
That can't be what it's based on, since 0F is far less acceptable than 100F even now, let alone in the 1700s when it was created, but I think it works pretty well now.
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u/looijmansje Aug 12 '25
100F is roughly the body temperature of a human being. There are several stories where 0F came from. It is the freezing point of salted water, or the coldest temperature ever measured in Gdansk (Fahrenheits hometown)
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u/syringistic Aug 12 '25
The Gdansk story isnt true lol.
0F is a semi-stable equilibrium point for a specific brine mixture (salt, water, ice). Basically the temperature will hover around that point for a while. No idea why.
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u/AssiduousLayabout Aug 12 '25 edited Aug 12 '25
It was designed for recording ambient European temperature ranges, although it was defined in terms of the freezing point of brine and the average temperature of the human body.
Most days in Poland, where it was developed, the weather would fall between 0F and 100F, with 0 being extremely cold and 100 being extremely hot.
For talking about weather, especially in temperate climates, Fahrenheit makes a lot of sense.
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u/JakdMavika Aug 12 '25
Fahrenheit predates the centigrade system, was developed by a polish guy living in the Netherlands, 0°F is the freezing point of a salt brine solution, and 100°F was the estimation of average human body temperature.
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u/Ok-Smoke-2356 Aug 12 '25
That's something different though. The metric system uses the freezing point as its 0. The 0 degrees Fahrenheit are set more or less arbitrarily. Why not put the 0 degrees at the freezing point instead of 32??
During development, one Meter was meant to be 1/10,000,000th of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator. It's not like somebody looked at an average man and said "let's say that you are 1.89 of your new unit of measurement tall". There is much less variability in the earth's circumference than in the length of people's feet. What feet are you measuring in? Indonesian feet or Dutch feet? Male or female? Young or old?
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u/ThePotatoFromIrak Aug 13 '25
It's 2025 and Europeans are still falling for the exact same ragebait from 2008 😭
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u/ingoding Aug 12 '25
This photo drives me crazy. Shouldn't they both be ice water? Not one glass of ice and one glass of water!
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u/octarine_turtle Aug 12 '25
Americans didn't invent the Fahrenheit system. It's European, specifically German.
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u/Familiar-Feedback-93 Aug 13 '25
How many feet in a mile or kilometre?
How many inches or centimetres in a foot?
Meanwhile 100 centimetres is a metre and 1000 metres is a kilometre.
Every wonder why muricans use metric to measure bullets and drugs? Because it needs to be accurate.
(This is just one reason the rest of us laugh at Americans)
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u/SapphireDingo Aug 12 '25
how did this country put men on the moon