Do Americans understand celsius?

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I know Celsisus, to an extent, but even though I use it all the time in physics classes (or Kelvin, which is more or less the same), I don't have a feel for it. I don't know what's hot or what's cold.

In Britain, most people my age and a bit older think in both systems. We were taught metric and Celsius in school but at home and in general society imperial measures and Fahrenheit were common. The generation younger than me only use Celsius and metric because most things are labelled that way now. My parents' generation only think in 'old money' (as they call it) unless they're particularly forward-looking and logically minded individuals (like Tallyman is).

I know a 60 year old nurse who tends to think in imperial but she is so used to celsius that figures in fahrenheit are meaningless to her. She preferred celsius even before starting nurse training because of its relationship with freezing and boiling water in an era when fahrenheit was more popular but also more difficult to relate to the real world.

If you're a meteorologist in the US you generally use both. I like Fahrenheit scale only because it has double the precision of the Celsius scale. I can notice a difference of 1 degree F in air temperature, but in Celsius that difference is only 0.5 degrees.

Celsius:

-20 or colder: really really cold

-10: cold

0: freezing

10: mild

20: room temperature

25: pleasantly warm

30: a little uncomfortable

35: hot

Fahrenheit:

0 or lower: Snot freezes in nostrils. Hard to stand still for any length of time.

0-10: Even unexposed extremities start to feel numb if you don't move around.

10-20: Exposed extremities hurt. Any wind seems to cut right through you if you aren't bundled up.

20-30: Fairly tolerable if you're warmly dressed and stay moving.

30-40: Damp chill if it's cloudy or windy. Fairly comfortable when dry or sunny.

40-50: Mild and pleasant in the sun but feels chilly when damp or cloudy.

50-60: Perfect for vigorous outdoor activity. Slightly chilly when sitting still.

60-70: Perfect when sunny and dry. Can feel either slightly cool/damp or warm/muggy when its humid out depending on activity level.

70-80: A little too warm for vigorous exercise. Move around too much and I will sweat if there's any humidity in the air.

80-90: Typical summer. If there's any humidity it gets uncomfortable even sitting still.

90 or higher: Torture without AC. Good for swimming though.

celcius is ok for folks who don't appreciate fine distinctions in temperature.

Yes- Mr Fahrenhiet did a pretty good job of quantifying human comfort/discomfort when he invented his system.

Celsius is synchronized with Kelvin - the latter being the cosmic oriented (rather than human oriented) system used by scientists.

And in celsius the freezing point of water is zero,instead of the abritrary 32 (even as I child I wondered why they didnt make freezing zero) but despite those two strengths of celsius, I still prefer Farhenheit because of how its better adapted to human sensation of temperature.

That's what decimals and fractions are for

^^^
but for us lazybones, it is just easier to say 35 degrees F instead of 1.6666666666666667 degrees C. i can feel the difference between 34F and 35F.

Nobody uses decimals for reporting temperatures.

See http://www.wunderground.com/swf/Rapid_Fire.swf?units=english&station=KTXGRUVE2

Fraction temperatures are very rarely used for the ambient temperature. The dew point temperature is computed rather than measured directly.

For body temperatures fractional numbers are used both in Celsius and Fahrenheit.


ruveyn

Apparently not. The other day my science teacher gave us some data about the relationship between hot air balloon height and temperature, and assigned us to make a graph and answer a few questions. One of the questions was this: "If you extrapolate the graph, how high will the balloon fly at 70 degrees Celsius?". No one noticed that you wouldn't find that sort of weather on earth, let alone fly a hot air balloon in it. (70 degrees Celsius is 158 degrees Fahrenheit)

I actually prefer Celsius. All of my classes have dealt with Celsius, and it's so much neater.

My dad worked for an electric utility and was given an early course on heating. I don't know why they used Celcius, but he was taught to set the thermostat to 20 degrees in the winter and probably to 25 in the summer.

Are you a decimal fanatic?

It might be helpful to look at this from the opposite perspective. If fahrenheit really has all the advantages that its American supporters claim it has, then why are so few people outside of the US in favour of using it as the everyday temperature scale in their country?