On Saturday, 7 May 2016 at 13:30:28 UTC, Daniel Kozak wrote:
The zero is a point when water became an ice, so anything below
zero means snow and anything above means rain :)
Except it doesn't quite work that way.... you can get snow when
it is a above freezing if the humidity is low enough. In
Fahrenheit, anything in the thirties is borderline, and twenties
is snow territory.
In Celsius, the snow line is more like 3 degrees than zero.
Besides, zero is just as arbitrary as thirty-two (which, btw, is
a power of two*) and easy to remember if you use it anyway! I
know a lot of people who don't know that water boiling point is
around 212 F at standard pressure (interestingly, and not
entirely coincidentally, 180 degrees away from freezing) - but if
they don't know it and never found a need to, doesn't that
indicate that it isn't important information to know?
* I really think that's the main difference between American
units and the others - base two vs base ten. Base two is superior
in basically every way, but base ten is more newbie friendly for
doing irrelevant conversions.
