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Comment by jeffreyrogers | Hacker News Reader

I always heard it was the rectal temperature of a cow, but that's not what wikipedia tells me, so someone probably made that up. One advantage of the Fahrenheit scale is that the range from 0 to 100 roughly corresponds to temperatures people normally deal with.

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After moving to Europe I am completely on board with the simplicity of the metric system, however I do prefer the Fahrenheit scale for exactly the reason you described above.

A human will face winter weather conditions from 0-32F which converts to negative values on the Celsius scale (not practical).

On the other end of the spectrum for summer time conditions, there is a wider range of values to ascribe to changes in temperature from 60F-100F or approx 16-38C.

Negative numbers may be less practical in your eyes but they sound more dramatic and thus make complaining about the cold much more satisfying. ;)

Why is it not practical? We're taught in schools that water freezes below 0C and boils above 100C thus more than 0 = hotter, less than 0 = colder, more than 100 = you're melting. If you wake up and see less than 0 on thermometer you know it's freezing time.

> there is a wider range of values to ascribe to changes in temperature from 60F-100F or approx 16-38C

And why is that important? Are our bodies so finely tuned that it's important to know the difference between 104 and 105 F?

Even in the less granular celsius, unless it's just about bragging rights everything is about brackets anyway.

30+: wear shorts and hydrate

20-30: comfortable in short sleeves

10-20: bring a light jacket

0-10: wear a sweater

n10-0: wear a winter coat

n20-n10: wear gloves and a hat

n40-n20: no exposed skin

Am I missing something, or are we just adapted for very different climates? Freezing is "wear a sweater" to you? I don't own a winter coat, but if I did it would come out of the closet somewhere in the 5-10C range.

Yeah I mean it's certainly subjective and I aligned the numbers to fall at 10 degree boundaries. But that's roughly where I fall. Anything above freezing and I'll usually prefer a sweater with a light jacket to a full winter coat.

I'm also willing to admit that this is probably a case in which whatever system you grew up with, that's what you will prefer and no argument will sway your opinion in the other direction. (Although the metric system does have clear advantages)

The second point is 96, human body temperature.

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