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When I use degrees, I measure them in:
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real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 5, Informative) by GungnirSniper on Friday March 14 2014, @08:27AM
It would help most USians translate into the more logical scale, if we post Celsius first and then Fahrenheit in parentheses.
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(Score: 2) by geb on Friday March 14 2014, @10:09AM
However, after looking through wikipedia's list of temperature scales, I think we should standardise on Gas Mark [wikipedia.org]. Nobody uses temperatures above 250C anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 14 2014, @10:10AM
They agreed to adopt SI units 140 years ago, they were one of the first countries in the world to do so. But failed. They recognised their failure early on, reinforcing their adoption with further laws, but still kept failing to actually do what they promised. Still crashing climate probes into alien planets in 1999 because of their stupidity.
Fuck 'em.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 15 2014, @05:48PM
I hate to sound brutal, but the best way to pull the yanks out of the dark ages is to just not pamper to their deficiencies.
I hate to sound stubborn, but the best way to pull the World out of the dark ages is to stand firm in our convictions. Each decade of Fahrenheit has an intuitive feel that Celcius can't match. Furthermore, much of either system is no less arbitrary than the other. If your system were based on Planck units, then maybe you'd have a stronger argument. If we ever do go back to the dark ages, it's also much easier to use the old system. Much of it is organized around even powers of two (16 ounces = lb., etc.). That makes it really easy to divide things in two with a simple lo-tech balance, recursively if necessary to get the proper number of ounces. The lb. was hexidecimal before anybody knew how important that base would become in modern society. Dark ages? I think not. Hi tech and retro at the same time.
(Score: 1) by velex on Monday March 17 2014, @11:57PM
oblig http://xkcd.com/526/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Non Sequor on Friday March 14 2014, @11:08AM
How is celsius more logical?
Regardless of which scale you use, you have to learn a lot of different data points (range of outsoor temperatures, body temperature, temperatures used in cooking, etc.).
Very little of what a temperature scale is used for involves boiling or freezing water. So why is being tied to those two points more logical?
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Sir Garlon on Friday March 14 2014, @12:02PM
It's not that those two points were logical, it's that they were consistently reproducible with eighteenth-century equipment. Fahrenheit [wikipedia.org] chose zero as the coolest temperature he could reproduce, and 100 as body temperature -- though the Fahrenheit scale was later recalibrated more precisely with reference to the freezing and boiling points of water, which is why 100 isn't quite body temperature any more.
And that, along with (maybe) how to solve a separable ordinary differential equation, is about all I remember from undergraduate thermodynamics.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Non Sequor on Friday March 14 2014, @12:34PM
I got that part. I was responding to the statement that celsius was a more logical scale.
At this point, cultural inertia is an entirely reasonable reason to keep using one rather than the other because there are no longer any convincing technical reasons to prefer one over the other. People should use the units that the data sets they commonly encounter are expressed in unless there is a strong rationale for making the effort to convert those data sets to other units.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 5, Funny) by NullPtr on Saturday March 15 2014, @12:00AM
Does this help?
http://apt46.net/wp-content/upload/ucOQh.jpg [apt46.net]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 15 2014, @07:42PM
You sir, win the Internets.
(Score: 1) by Nerdanel on Monday March 17 2014, @02:44PM
You aren't necessarily dead at 100 degrees Celsius. That's the temperature of a really very hot sauna.
(Score: 1) by zsau on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:32AM
High thirties (100 F) isn't "really hot". It's hot, but it's not like it's 45 degrees.
On the other hand, it basically never gets below 0 Celsius, so to call that "fairly cold" would sound like a joking understatement.
So basically, which temperature scale makes sense depends on where you live. Where I live, cold winter nights approach 0 Celsius (but rarely reach), and hot summer days approach 50 (but don't reach) degrees, so the Celsius scale makes a lot of day-to-day sense.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday March 20 2014, @06:15AM
Do you live in California or something? I've lived in multiple places in the US where temperatures below 0C (32F) are quite common for at least a couple months of the year. Seems a bit generous, or maybe naive, to say it "basically never" happens.
That's not even considering the harsh, frozen north of Canada ;)
(Score: 1) by zsau on Thursday March 20 2014, @07:07AM
My point exactly. Did you see the image I replied to? The image presented one person's experience as if it was normal and would be shared by others, so I presented another experience in the same way. Then, I concluded that which one seems more natural will depend on where you live.
In reality, which one is natural will depend on which one you're used to, and the arguments used to justify that will be picked based on what regularities they've observed. If I was Russian, I might have observed that 0 degrees Celsius presents a very natural midpoint in the annual temperature variation, whereas the Fahrenheit scale is off -- despite having a similar variation as parts of America.
And no, I don't live in California; most of the world lives outside of the United States.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Thursday March 20 2014, @08:45AM
I saw what you replied to, but the explanation you gave for your intent doesn't match how your initial response read, unfortunately. It looked more like cluelessness, in response to a silly little joke image, by someone that has little experience with cold temperatures to me. I get what your intent was now, though.
That would be why I added the "or something" at the end, implying the possibility of something other than California with a similar climate that doesn't generally experience extreme colds. It was just a good location to mention there, because it's a location fairly well known for its nice weather, even outside of the US.
--
Veering way off topic with this, but what is it about some people absolutely needing to remind everybody that they aren't in the US every chance they get? "Guys, guys, did you know I'm not in the US? I'm not! I just thought you should know."
It's like the guy that has to tell everyone how he doesn't watch TV [theonion.com] at every possible chance, or the people that make a huge issue out of telling you how they're female because you made the mistake of using a masculine pronoun in a case where you don't know the gender of the appropriate party (and thus are left with either "it" or "he" in English, and nobody likes being called an it).
In each example it's usually irrelevant, unnecessarily nitpicky, and the quality of discussion just gets lowered by it being forced into the conversation for no reason other than the person has some sort of personal crusade to let everybody know.
(Score: 1) by zsau on Thursday March 20 2014, @09:28AM
Pot, kettle, black. Or, what's with posting an "irrelevant", "way off topic" aside which you "forced into the conversation for no reason other than [that you have] some sort of personal crusade to let everybody know"?
Oh, right, it's not a "personal crusade", it's one you copied from a bunch of other people who pride themselves on their independence of thought.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday March 20 2014, @05:40PM
Illustrates my point perfectly. Your irrelevant "I'm not US and you must be told" crusade derailed this portion of the comments, because now it's turned into an argument about that, which has lowered the quality of the conversation.
Granted, I took the bait and complained about it, but it didn't start with me.
And now you've moved on to trying to insult me and insinuate that I'm too stupid too form my own opinions because you don't like what I said. I'm done here.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday March 17 2014, @10:47AM
On the other hand people should use a common scale across the entire world, or at least across the english-speaking portion of the world.
(Score: 2, Informative) by bart9h on Friday March 14 2014, @05:10PM
100 for body temperature is reasonable, but zero as the coolest he could reproduce? What that is?
It's better for the two points to relate to something we can comprehend, which is what Celsius does: everybody knows how cold freezing water is, and how hot boiling water is.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hankwang on Friday March 14 2014, @06:08PM
That's an ice-salt mixture and actually not so bad in terms of reproducibility: a mixture of ice, water, and ammonium chloride, a salt, at a 1:1:1 ratio. This is a frigorific mixture which stabilizes its temperature automatically: that stable temperature was defined as 0 deg F [wikipedia.org]
The second calibration point was 32 deg F, by definition the same as 0 deg C. It is kind of silly to only have two calibration points both for cold temperatures, which means that you will have to extrapolate your thermometer scale. The third one was not very reproducible (96 deg F = body temperature, not 100 deg F) and it would have been a great coincidence anyway if that third point happened to be at a nice round or divisible number.
Avantslash: SoylentNews for mobile [avantslash.org]
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Friday March 14 2014, @06:35PM
Fahrenheit was the first guy ever to devise a quantitative measure of temperature, in 1724. Seventeen. Twenty-four. Cut him some slack. :-) According to Wikipedia, Fahrenheit set zero temperature as that of a mixture of ammonium chloride, water, and ice [wikipedia.org] is frigorific [wikipedia.org]. I just learned the word "frigorific" and think it is my new favorite! I don't know if he discovered those frigorific properties himself, or how much trial and error someone had to do to find something reproducibly that cold, but I bet it was a hell of a lot. I'm inclined to forgive him if he assumed that no one else would find a colder temperature that could be used as a better zero, and he did this work exactly 100 years before the idea of an absolute zero [wikipedia.org] was published.
In hindsight, Fahrenheit's choice of the zero point of his temperature scale doesn't correlate to anything we encounter in daily life, and it's also obsolete for laboratory purposes, so I agree with bart9h: it's past time to retire it. Use Celsius for the weather report and Kelvin for science & engineering. But Fahrenheit's temperature scale did make sense at the time he invented it, and I don't blame him for failing to see the future in terms of his zero not staying the coldest possible temperature reference.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 2) by blackest_k on Saturday March 15 2014, @12:37PM
si units all seem to be water based e.g 1 metric ton of water is 1 meter cubed or a 1000 litres weighing 1 kg per litre temperature in c follows similarly.
On the other hand imperial measurements are pretty good for guestimates a foot pretty close to an actual foot an inch the width of your thumb a yard about the length of your arm to your nose.
temperature 60, 70, 80 degrees is bit chilly warm hot i'd probably want a coat at 60 and a t-shirt at 80. The corresponding temperatures in C I really don't know.
makes sense to use centigrade when you are wanting to be accurate. As for kelvin we know it starts 273 degrees below 0C living with km/h instead of mph here i approximate 100kmh to 60mph and 120 to about 75mph. Its close enough anyway.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 15 2014, @07:21PM
Not all. The meter was originally defined as the length of the meridian from the north pole through Paris to the equator. Which is why the earth circumference is to a good approximation 40000 kilometers. And of course the second is also completely unrelated to water.
However the kilogram was indeed originally defined as the weight of 1 liter of water.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 16 2014, @08:36PM
Err ... I just notice that I made a quite embarrassing error: The meter was of course based on, not defined as the length of the meridian. Indeed, it was defined as the ten millionth part of that.
Otherwise the earth circumference would be just four meters. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by blackest_k on Saturday March 22 2014, @04:05PM
lucky coincidence that 1000 litres = 1000kg of water and that happens to be pretty close to being 1 cubic meter at room temperature.
There's no real reason why they have to be so close, I guess gravity could be a part of it.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 22 2014, @04:15PM
No, as I wrote at the other post, it's not coincidence.
First, that 1000 liters are a cubic meter is no coincidence because that's exactly how the liter is defined.
Second, that a liter of water has the mass of 1 kilogram is no coincidence because that's how the kilogram was originally defined.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by blackest_k on Saturday March 22 2014, @06:21PM
yes your quite right i was thinking of it backwards the litre the kg are relatively arbitrary in that a kilogram and litre of water would be a bit bigger if the meter was.
but apart from the meter seems that water gets used for part of the definition a lot.
(Score: 1) by SleazyRidr on Tuesday March 18 2014, @04:01PM
0 degrees Fahrenheit was set to be colder than the coldest temperature you're likely to find in Denmark. The ammonium chloride mixture was worked out later to make it sound a little more sciency.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3146/did- cecil-err-in-explaining-the-significance-of-zero-f ahrenheit [straightdope.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 16 2014, @11:45AM
The body temperature is "consistently reproducible"? I guess in the same way that the length of a foot is consistently reproducible - everyone can *try* to reproduce it, but inevitably got different results.
To start off, which part of the body do you measure your "body temperature"? Different part give different temperature. Then when? Woman, obviously, would give you slightly different body temperature at different day. Even man, would have slight variation during different body condition, e.g. just woke up, after some exercise, being tired, being excited.
Then there are variations between different people.
No, Fahrenheit is as "logical" a scale as using a foot as length measurement. The only reason it stuck around so long is because Americans refuse to learn anything different.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 19 2014, @03:15PM
It may be 'logical'. However, you are looking at it from a 'what I like' POV. For most people they do not care what the underlying base is. All they care about is how much of X do I need. My recipe calls for 3 cups. The speed limit is 35MPH. However when I drive I put the little needle next to 35 and put three of this cup in.
Sure I can retool everything I own. Are you going to pay for it? As from most normal sane people the effect is *exactly* the same. I put the needle on a number and drive or I use this measuring cup.
Also everything would have to be re-measured. Oh just convert you say. However my property is X feet from the post buried in the street. My deed says that. It is a legal document. Can you imagine the neighborhood disputes going on? Your fence is now 1.2 cm in my yard. Then I get to goto court because some shlub working a state job rounded wrong by .01?
For *anything* scientific we have already converted. For practical day to day things we didnt bother with the cost. The purpose of most temperature readings is to crow on the news should you bring an umbrella or coat or swimsuit. 60 down get a jacket, 50 down get a coat, 80 up you may be able to go swimming! If you look at an scientific journal it better be in C as that is what the audience there expects.
I have noticed in my state they have changed the signage. It no longer says MPH on it and is just a number. They are slowly replacing signs as they rust out. Then at some point they can switch and the cost is minimal and they can re-use. Instead of replacing millions of signs just so someone can get their OCD on.
(Score: 1) by urza9814 on Monday March 24 2014, @04:53PM
Except that when they switch I guarantee they're gonna have to have both MPH and KPH posted for several years for those people whose cars either don't have KPH or they don't know how to switch it. So they'll have to buy all new signage anyway...that's probably just an aesthetic decision.