Mainly I'm going to rant about how ridiculous I find the Fahrenheit scale. This is what Wikipedia has to say about it:
Fahrenheit is a temperature scale named after the Polish-German physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686-1736), who proposed it in 1724.
In this scale, the freezing point of water is 32 degrees Fahrenheit (written "32 F"), and the boiling point is 212 degrees, placing the boiling and freezing points of water exactly 180 degrees apart. On the Celsius scale, the freezing and boiling points of water are exactly 100 degrees apart, thus the unit of this scale, a degree Fahrenheit, is 5⁄9 of a degree Celsius. Negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit (-40 F) is equal to negative 40 degrees Celsius (-40 C).
I think that the Fahrenheit scale lacks ANY logical reference points as to why it exists or where does it come from. It's all fine and dandy that the boiling and freezing points of water are EXACTLY 180 degrees apart, but it seems more a coincidence.. since it's 180 degrees from 32 to 212, which are no kind of logical numbers. There are several very interesting stories about how Fahrenheit created his scale here (Wikipedia again, look in the "history" part of the article), but none of them seem any less absurd than others. If I invented a temperature scale that had the zero point set to the coldest temperature I've been able to measure inside my refridgerator's ice box and 100 degrees se to the temperature of my computer's hard drive on the verge of a breakdown, I would be called nuts and possibly get locked away somewhere where I can't harm myself or anyone else. But then again.. I'm not a famous Polish-German physicist.
Anyway, if a Polish-German guy thinks up a seemingly randomly selected temperature scale in 1724 and only 20 years later Anders Celsius comes up with a reasonable scale with 0 and 100 degree points fixed to such an easily measured and reproduced things as the freezing and boiling of water, why almost 300 years later a huge part of the world's populace (the U.S.) still use the Fahrenheit scale?
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As a side note concerning temperatures, it finally seems like winter really has arrived. For about a week now it's been below -10 and most mornings when I walk to school the air could be called "crispy". I hate the feeling when every time I breathe in through my nose I feel the little hairs inside it freeze.
Furthermore, I think Fahrenheit was a pushover, if he set the zero point of his scale to the coldest outdoor temperature he could measure, the "harsh" winter of 1708-1709 in Gdansk, with temperature extremes such as -17,3 degrees Celsius. HAH! Just this week there were temperatures ranging from -15 to -21 here in Ikaalinen and below -26 in Oulu, a few hundred km north from here. In Sodankyl it was colder than -30 and it still isn't a very "harsh" winter. This is normal. OK, this isn't Poland, but it's not so far away.
Had to wake up at 6.15, it's still dark (I'm already at school) and -15 degrees. It's cold. Mornings like this make me wish I could sleep throuhg the winter.
I think the beautiful sunny winterdays are in february and march?