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Comment by InCityDreams | Hacker News Reader

>tradition is to brave subzero air temperatures and water temperatures of 34 degrees

Good read, but: all that detail and couldn't be bothered providing a (bracketed) degree-centigrade comparison.

If you don't know that 34F is approximately 1C, that's a you problem. It doesn’t require any mental math to observe that 34 is marginally greater than 32, which is the freezing point of water in Fahrenheit.

Why would I know that the freezing point of water is 32°F? Pretty much nothing in this country is measured in Fahrenheit.

I've definitely seen the comparison made, on random US articles which almost invariably show °C as well as °F, but I'm not sure that if someone asked me if I would recall the answer.

If you're even aware that Fahrenheit exists, this might be a thing you know. For example, my country mostly uses Fahrenheit but I know that freezing in Celsius is zero, because I attended school as a child.

Nope, fairly sure it was never mentioned in school. But in any case, that's a while ago now and I don't think I've ever had a need to use Fahrenheit except for reading US articles where they almost invariably also put Celsius.

I know that 100°F is something close to 37°C, and I'll probably not forget 32°F for a while now. But it's fairly useless trivia as far as every day life goes.

Yeah ignore that guy, I'm from Australia and we never learnt squat about Fahrenheit in school. The only things I know are from trying to google conversions when they're mentioned in movies.

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