The bottom end is much harder to justify but I believe the idea was that you wouldn't have to regularly deal with negative numbers.
But both F and C are completely arbitrary. That's the least messed up part of the non-SI unit system.
0°C: cold, 100°C: dead
0°K: dead, 100°K: dead
< 300 K: cold
> 300 K: hot
Let's switch to Kelvins
The original idea of Farenheit was that 0-100 was the range between the freezing point of salt water and human body temperature, and it was designed to be convenient for use in labs. At the time, 0F was the coldest temperature you could reliably make in a lab environment (using a saltwater ice bath). 100F was when the thing started to be uncomfortable to touch, I guess?
Sure, as an American living in the northeast, it is pretty convenient for my current use - temperatures vary from 0 (sometimes below) to a little less than 100 over the year and I know what "jacket weather" is - but that doesn't really mean anything if you don't live in this exact climate. I imagine that if we switched to Celsius tomorrow, after re-learning the numbers for "put on a sweater" and "put on a jacket," it would be about the same.
“Uncomfortable to touch” heavily depends on thermal capacity (how much heat there is in the object to touch) and thermal conductivity (how fast the object can get that heat into your skin), so I would think defining that exact point to be quite the challenge.
As to the Fahrenheit scale, it’s worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit:
“The other limit established was his best estimate of the average human body temperature, originally set at 90 °F, then 96 °F (about 2.6 °F less than the modern value due to a later redefinition of the scale)”
So, Fahrenheit arbitrarily picked 100 °F as some distance above the point for average human body temperature, changed it to 96 °F, and the scale was later redefined.
And still people claim that scale is less arbitrary than Celsius, Kelvin, Réaumur, etc.
Sorry to break it to you, but in the UK, Australia or India you wouldn't say March 25, you would say 25 March or 25th March. Just as you would in Spanish, French or German. The fact that you say March 25 reflects the atypical American date standard. They do say March 25 in Chinese, but that's because they use YMD order (and when saying a full date, they will say "2023 year, 3 month, 25 day") which also makes sense.
There's nothing more "human-friendly" about saying March 25. It's a purely American thing. There's also nothing more "human-friendly" about Fahrenheit. If you grow with Celsius, 20-25 is optimal, 10-20 cool, below 10 cold, below 0 freezing, over 30 very hot, nothing difficult about it.
Sorry if this sounds harsh but your comment is pure distilled bias.
March 5th is more commonly heard in USA than 5th of March, but nobody would look at you funny either way.
It’s less of an inherent part of the system, and more of a fact I just grew up with it and it’s what I’m used to.
Secondly this is 1000% purely what you're used too. After a month in California Fahrenheit felt very natural to me despite being used to Celcius.
That’s very obviously cherry-picked though. The opposite is true for the names of numbered streets (“9th Street”) and house numbers (“1600 Pennsylvania Avenue”). You picked the only component of an address where the number comes after the label.
Also isn't it better to just say 25th March rather than March 25? Because most people will be aware of the month we're talking abt and date is the most important thing there which should come first.
You could say the exact same with Celsius. Also, how is 50 the middle in Africa and also Northern Europe? Average temperature is very different.
>Here we are on March 25. The year comes last because it's least important.
So 25 is clearly the most important by your own logic hence day/month/year is the logic choice. If someone asked the date do you say “the 25th” more or less often than “March 25th”? Most people know the year so that can be skipped. Many know the month so that can frequently also be skipped. Hardley anyone that ask for the date know the day of the month though so why is that not the first part of information you reply with?
Seems you are just stating what you are used to.
and you say 3rd street, not Street 3. and 4th of july
i do prefer the american decimal point 1,000.00 , it makes more sense. But it's time for humans to quit our nonsense and give way to machines , which require universal standards.
This is a stretch. How is being 70% water relevant? It’s not like I’m routinely measuring the water in my body to make sure I don’t let it boil or freeze.
I think we should arrange our society to favor humans and program computers in such a way to accommodate humans rather than the other way around.
Of course kilogram is a mess in itself, being base unit with a prefix. While SI is mostly okay system, lets not forget that it has its own warts.
If I’m giving or getting a response with the month I expect “25th of March”.
If I ask for the time and it’s the evening I expect someone to say “3:30” without the PM. It’s expected that I know it’s PM. In continental Europe I would expect “15 hours 30”.
Going to your address analogy, don’t you typically give the building number first? “1220 Something Street”. Again, with numbered streets in North America they tend to write and say “122nd Street” or “5th Avenue”. It’s the number that comes first. Not “Street 122” or “Avenue 5” or “Something Street 1220”. I don’t think your analogy holds well.
I don’t think there’s a strong preference for 25 March over March 25 in Europe or elsewhere. I think I might write either one of those.
Depending on where you live, 50F could be considered cold. It's certainly not warm enough to be comfortable when lightly dressed.
There's nothing special about Fahrenheit in this respect. 20C is really what I'd call "not cold, not hot". 0 is freezing, 5 is cold, 10 is chilly, 15 is cool, 20 is comfortable, 25 is warm, 30 is high warm, 35 is hot, 37 is body temperature, and 40 is really hot.
> You don't say "25th Apartment", you say "Apartment 25",
We say 25th March in German.
Saying the whole date follows the importance: day, month, year: fünfundzwanzigster märz zweitausenddreiundzwanzig.
Many traditions have their quirks. But at least very few German-speakers will try to defend this format.
Interestingly, I've rarely seen it being an issue with dates. Maybe because the amount is too small and people got used to it.
What I’m impressed with is the duration of time it takes to say todays date in Germany. I guess it’s rather “German-friendly” though. ;-)
It looks scary too btw. Had to double-check it too because you rarely write it as words in German (I'm not German too).
The English equivalent for 1125 would be onethousand-onehundred-five-and-twenty.
I think this is the cognitive bias from having grown up with the system.
The year is typically implied, so it's not needed. The actual day of month gives you more specificity, but the month is an easier "chunk" to keep in my head when thinking about a date. If I think about my next dentist appointment, just knowing that it's in September is more useful to me than just knowing the actual day of the month.
The great way to imply that non-Americans are not "like a human".
> Similarly for our date system, we lead with names and important information rather than numbers.
If I say March 30, the year number is implied (probably this year) and I probably have omitted it because it is not as important enough to say again.
If I say 2023-03-30, the year number is probably important. Might not that important, but at the least I'm looking for future readers who might not realize that I've made this comment in 2023. The year number is thus as important as month and day of month here, so consistency matters more. And the American mixed endian date format is as inconsistent as mixed byte endianness (which is thankfully gone by now).
Well this takes the cake for the most bad faith reading I’ve ever seen on HN.
Maybe if you are an American. But non-Americans are puzzled when they see 10/03/08 and are told that that's October 3rd, 2008.
I guess it's fitting that the tech world gets particularly up in arms about this; we're certainly a group who enjoys demanding standardization while refusing to change our own practices.
(But also, if you're not using ISO 8601 in a code context, what are you doing?)
Our date system is like the Fahrenheit system; it works well when thinking like a human.
in Fahrenheit, you just think of it in terms of 50 being the middle, "not cold and not hot". Then you understand 80 is high warm, closing in on hot, etc.
Similarly for our date system, we lead with names and important information rather than numbers. We're not feeding a number into a machine, we're speaking to humans.
Consider any other Label. You don't say "25th Apartment", you say "Apartment 25", "Unit 25", "P.O. Box 25"
Here we are on March 25. The year comes last because it's least important.