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Comment by cubix | Hacker News Reader

He might have a point with other units, but when it comes to temperature, Celsius strikes me as more humanistic and intuitive. Zero as the freezing point of water, and 100 as the boiling point is easy for any human to relate to since we interact with water every day.

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Fahrenheit originally had the freezing point of water at 30 degrees, and body temperature at 90 degrees (can't get much more humanistic than that :-)).

Then he fudged the scale to 32 and 96, so there would be 64 intervals between the two. Probably no one here needs to have it explained why 64 equal intervals was a convenient number for the task of marking the thermometer (compass and straight edge would be enough).

Unfortunately it turned out that his number for the average body temperature was a little bit off. So it goes...

Fahrenheit is fairly humanistic as well: 0 is very roughly as cold as you'll ever see, and 100 is about as hot as you'll ever see.

I'm not generally interested in the temperature when it is 'normal'. However when it is unusually hot or cold I might check.

That may be true where you live. Try explaining it to somebody from Kuwait or Yakutsk, though.

0 is about as cold as you'll ever see? Except in half of the world?

One the one hand, yes, (freezing and boiling) but on the other hand, 1 degree C is not always fine enough to describe a temperature. I know, one could use fractions.

Basically, the jump from 37C to 38C is noticeable, whereas something similar like a jump from 98F to 99F, feels more graduated.

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