I'm going to try to convince you that temperature is a language. I promise this goes somewhere.
If I say 95° and you're American, you picture summer. Sunburn. Shorts you regret by 2pm. If I say 95° and you're in Europe, you picture a kettle five degrees off doing its thing. Same three symbols, two completely different meanings. Those are different languages. Or close enough that I'm going to call them that and hope nobody writes in.
The trouble is I don't speak Celsius.
I work with people all over the world, and weather is the thing you reach for when you don't yet know each other well enough to talk about anything else. So it comes up constantly. And every single time someone tells me it's 40° where they are, my brain, raised on Fahrenheit, says: oh, that sounds chilly, poor them, hope they brought a sweater. It is, of course, 104°. They are dying. I am the idiot expressing sympathy for their imagined coolness.
Fahrenheit is my mother tongue and Celsius is the second language I keep meaning to learn.
I have had this realization, I would estimate, four hundred times. It does not stick. The instinct is too deep. Fahrenheit is my mother tongue and Celsius is the second language I keep meaning to learn and never quite do.
So I built something. (Built is generous. I asked AI to help me build something, which is the 2026 version of building something, and we are all going to have to make peace with that verb at some point.) It is a small web app. You type in Celsius, you get Fahrenheit. You type in Fahrenheit, you get Celsius. There's a button that grabs your local temperature so when someone asks "what's it like where you are, old boy?" you can answer in their language instead of yours.
The theory is that if I keep this thing on my phone and look at it often enough, the conversion will stop feeling like a conversion and start feeling like an understanding. Exposure therapy for temperature. Duolingo for Celsius beginners. The number 22 will eventually mean nice day, light jacket maybe instead of do the math, do the math, do the math.
And yes, before anyone writes in: I know Google does this. I know my phone does this. I know my watch probably does this if I asked it nicely. But where's the fun in that. I wanted an excuse to make something with the Nomad District name on it, and a temperature converter turned out to be a perfectly silly excuse.
If you see me in a few months confidently announcing that it's a lovely 18° outside, you'll know it worked.