alt textComic strip of a ghost and a person with the American flag pasted on the head. The ghost repeats “Boo!” in the first three panels without getting any reaction, but when it in the fourth panel says “kg, cm, km, °C” the American gets scared and screams “AHHHH!!!”.
Least important it may be. But it is the most significant. This scheme follows the conventional scheme we follow while writing numbers - the most significant digit to the left and significance reducing as we move right.
The advantage of YYYY-MM-DD becomes when you add time to it in ISO-8601 or RFC 3339 format: YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss. All the digits are uniformly decreasing in significance from left to right.
This becomes even more apparent if you are trying to sort by time - say, a stack of files, or datetime in a computer. Try doing this with any other scheme.
Depends on context, IMO did/mm/yyyy is the most natural when writing some text, but partial ISO yyyy-mm-dd is ideal for when naming files and directories, makes lexicographical ordering follow chronological order.
Lots of stuff is written differently, than it is spoken. In case of the date it is weird, not to go from biggest to smallest or vice versa. I guess you are used to it now, but for me it would be the same as putting seconds before minutes or inches before feet.
Europeans acting smug like knowing how close to boiling the temperature is is more important than knowing how close to 100% hot out the temperature is.
100°F is roughly (like really roughly) the hottest temp your likely to see in most temperate climates throughout a year. 0°F is(again really roughly) the lowest. The result is you can use Fahrenheit basically as a percentage, or a 0 to 100 temperature score to help you decide how to dress/prepare for the day. If the temperature is above or below 100 or 0 then you need to consider fairly serious precautions before going outside for any length of time.
It’s not a very precise system at all, and it obviously has no place in a laboratory or similar situation. But it does work quite well for communicating the weather to common people. There is very little desire among Americans to change to Celsius not because they don’t understand it (we’re all taught Celsius in grade school) but because Fahrenheit serves most people’s needs perfectly adequately.
OP is also arguing that easily recalling the boiling temperature of water (one of the big purported advantages of Celsius) is useless for most people as nobody actually measures the temperature of water while boiling it. Except, maybe, in a classroom, probably while demonstrating to children how the Celsius scale works.
If it’s 0 F, it’s 0% hot out. If it’s 50 F, it’s 50% hot out, if it’s 100F, it’s 100% hot out.
It’s a more human measurement. Who the hell knows how long a kilometer or meter is? Everyone knows what a football field looks like and a yard is 1/100th of it.
It’s based on how humans react to the heat, you need active cooling such as sweat, moving air isn’t enough above 100 degrees. 100% hot out is just a silly way of putting it.
I found it on Wikipedia. At first, he fixed zero at the stable temperature of a “mixture of ice, water, and salis Armoniaci [transl. ammonium chloride]” and 96 at the human body temperature, but later he would change the lower reference point to water’s freezing point at 32 and still later the upper one to the boiling point of water at 212. So it has always been pretty arbitrary.
Edit: But I will agree that the scale of zero to one hundred does correspond more closely to how warm humans feel.
100°C is an acceptable sauna temperature. You won’t last much longer naked in 0°C!
Edit: To make my point more clear, I know some crazy people who go directly from a close to 100 degree sauna to a close to 0 degree ice bath. I think that could be described quite well as going from 100 to 0 % within the human temperature tolerance.
Also, that’s not my initial point. My initial point was that “percent hot outside” means nothing in Fahrenheit or Celsius.
Who the hell knows how long a kilometer or meter is?
Everyone outside of America.
Everyone knows what a football field looks like
You’re either trolling or a living embodiment of the ‘Americans think the USA is the whole world’ meme. Nobody outside of the USA knows how long a football field is.
No it’s not, as i live in the equator, and that’s the issue i have with fahrenheit. The whole thing is devoid of context and people think it makes sense naturally.
As a celsius user I have absolutely no need for fahrenheit. It needs more numbers when there is no need for more precision. Half a degree C is barely even noticable.
It’s one of those things that truly and honestly just doesn’t matter. Celsius makes more sense if you think about water freezing at 0 and boiling at 100, but beyond that it really doesn’t make a big difference.
The lower point of Fahrenheight is near the freezing point of brine (salt water) which freezes at -6 F (-21 C).
It was designed around what the coldest day at the time of its invention could get and the 100F was marked around how hot the hottest day of the year at the timr would get. Hence its choice to scale 0-100 to local weather vs celcius’ choice to use kelvin and offset it to standardize it to pure water.
Nothing in particular, it’s an arbitrary starting point. But that’s really not a good reason to knock it.
Does water actually freeze at 0 celsius? It depends on the air pressure, right? I guess 0 celsius is the freezing point of water at sea level, but air pressure’s not consistent at all. I guess maybe it’s the temperature water freezes at the average air pressure at sea level? I assume that’s the case.
The point I’m trying to make is the Celsius isn’t super rock solid either, and it really doesn’t affect anything if water freezes at 0 or 32 degrees. The best argument for celsius is that it’s standard, but that doesn’t make necessarily make it better.
If we really cared about having a rock-solid starting point, we’d use Kelvin because you literally cannot go below 0.
yeah I was looking for something like “at 0 F something happens” as in Centigrades you can be sure that at 0C and with 1atm the water will freeze, instead of something arbitrary, so you can compare calibrate instruments
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