3 ms·
If you live in a climate where you have real winter, then being able to tell the difference between freezing and not freezing is very important. -1 means snow f
by henrikschroder 15y ago
If you live in a climate where you have real winter, then being able to tell the difference between freezing and not freezing is very important. -1 means snow from the sky, ice on the roads, lower humidity. +1 means rain, wet roads, and higher humidity. It's a very important divider, which is why it's at a prominent place on the Celsius scale, unlike the Fahrenheit one where it's between 32 and 34.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Anders Celsius lived further north than Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit. :-)
- philwelch 15y agoI'm not fond of the tradeoff between not having to remember the number 32 and having to use a sign bit for half the year. Frankly you're not totally safe from ice until 35 or so, and it's useful to have a marker around 0 or so that just says "your face will fall off". Likewise, it's nice to have a convenient marker around 100 for "your face will melt off". 0 and 100 are good for extreme ends of a range, not so much for middle values.
- mseebach 15y agoBut -1 doesn't mean that. A myriad of factors comes into play before you can tell if there will be ice on the road, not least the temperature of the road it self. It takes prolonged periods of cold to chill a road down to where it can sustain ice. Conversely, after a night with hard freezing, ice can remain on the road for hours, even as temperatures climb into decidedly balmy territory. In Denmark people rely on weather forecast warnings on the radio for this more than intuitive reading of the thermometer.