Comment on If only it was like that
theblueredditrefugee@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months agoNonlinear measures are used for
- Brightness of lights
- Loudness of noises
- Magnitude of earthquakes
Why not temperature?
Comment on If only it was like that
theblueredditrefugee@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months agoNonlinear measures are used for
Why not temperature?
ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world 10 months ago
None of those scales have negative scalars.
theblueredditrefugee@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 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 10 months ago
That negative number comes from taking a logarithm of a number less than one. Not from a negative scalar.