Comment on If only it was like that
ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world 11 months agoIt’s the only way this meme makes sense. It’s a complaint that humans don’t like the average of the temperates that produce the feelings of extreme hot and extreme cold. You’d have to change math, change physiology, or lose linearity.
theblueredditrefugee@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
Nonlinear measures are used for
Why not temperature?
ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world 11 months ago
None of those scales have negative scalars.
theblueredditrefugee@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
Actually, earthquake magnitude can be projected to negative numbers. It’s well defined but it stops describing earthquakes. For instance, a -3 magnitude earthquake is the energy released by a cat knocking your cell phone off of a nightstand. (see page 290 of this book). Pretty sure the others are also logarithmic scales which are well-defined for any negative number. It just so happens that those negative numbers don’t describe anything we care to describe with those scales.
ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That negative number comes from taking a logarithm of a number less than one. Not from a negative scalar.