A friend just told me about the xkcd idea for the “Felcius scale” which is the arithmetic mean of the Fahrenheit and centigrade (Celsius) scales. Naturally, my first thought was that this was a funny but pointless idea since it discarded the advantages of the centigrade scale, which was renamed ‘Celsius’, but I’m using the old name to emphasize the 0-to-100 advantage. (A better discussion is found here: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1923:_Felsius)

My friend, however, suggested that it was a step in the right direction.

If so, it isn’t enough. If this idea were to take hold, we would need another such step in the right direction, perhaps to be called the “Eelsius” which would take us another 50% of the way to Celsius, and eventually another halfway jump to “Delsius”, and (aside from running out of characters between ‘f’ and ‘c’), a nice little Zeno’s paradox of temperature-scale systems that asymptotically approach the logical centigrade scale.