Hey, Matt: Why doesn’t the temperature scale have freezing at zero and boiling at 100? Why 32 and 212? —Buddy Borgen, L.A.

Move to Europe, Buddy. Or Canada. Or Mexico. Or almost any place except the U.S. We use the Fahrenheit scale. They all use the Celsius scale, where water freezes at zero and boils at 100. In the early 1700s, German physicist Gabriel Fahrenheit decided he didn’t like any of the three dozen temperature scales then in use, so he built his own. Zero he assigned to the lowest temp anyone could then devise in a lab with a mixture of salt and ice. The top of his scale was average human body temperature. He called that 96. Then he started measuring other stuff using his own personal Fahrenheit degrees. Pure water froze at 32 of them and boiled at 212.

A few decades later, the sensible Swede Anders Celsius devised another scale using freezing water and boiling water as his anchor points of zero and 100 degrees Celsius. It’s perhaps more reasonable to you and Celsius, but it’s just as arbitrary as the Fahrenheit thermometer — or the Borgen thermometer, if you feel like making up your own. Just remember that if you tell us that it’s 50 degrees Borgen in your back yard, we won’t know whether to wear parkas or Speedos to the cookout. A temperature is useful only if we have some relative landmarks along the scale to compare it to, or if we have a formula to convert Borgen to familiar Fahrenheit.

An absolute temperature scale does exist, mostly useful to scientists. In the Kelvin scale, zero is the absolute bottom — a temperature so cold it’s only a theoretical state. Real water in the real world freezes at 273.15 Kelvins and boils at 373.15. And none of this matters at all when it’s August in El Centro or December in Minsk. Misery is misery, no matter how you measure it.