Comment on Seriously.
pumpkinseedoil@mander.xyz 2 months agoKelvin is the SI unit. Anyway also for the weather Celsius is clearer: Below 0 = snow, above 0 = rain. And Celsius at least has fixed points that can be recreated - if all thermometers and data on scales were lost we could easily recreate °C, but not °F.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
Ah well I should have said metric measurement then. It is part of the metric system, yes?
If you can’t remember the number 32 then I guess. Personally I think it’s pretty bizarre to have negative temperatures all the time but whatever floats your boat.
Regarding losing all thermometers and data… if you lost the definition of Celsius there would be no way to recreate it. This seems nonsensical.
KingOfTheCouch@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
No seriously what is significant about 0F? I live in a place that sees a lot of negative F too.
It’s so arbitrary. If it was 0 at freezing water and 100 at human body temp I’d understand it but no, it’s literally nothing significant in people’s lives. It has no tangible anchor.
It’s purely emotion keeping it around.
pumpkinseedoil@mander.xyz 2 months ago
0°F is the coldest night Mister Fahrenheit has ever seen, thinking it couldn’t become any colder than this.
100°F is Mister Fahrenheit’s slightly feverish body temperature.
???
PS: Pretty much all other countries also had their own measurement systems and simply switched to metric because it made sense. I’m glad we did, and pretty much all others did too.
PPS: I’d also be up for revamping time measurement, why can’t we have 10h a day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute? 100.000 seconds in total per day, currently we have 86.400 so a second would only become slightly shorter.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Changing the length of a second would be so insanely difficult that it’s probably isn’t worth attempting. Pretty mush every other standard unit has the second in there somewhere at some point, so changing that would mean spending decades of changing math on so many things. That story about the Mars probe that slammed into the planet because someone screwed up the units? That would be happening everywhere all the time.
In the end you’re always going to have weirdness with time because the orbit of the Earth around the sun isn’t going to be divided evenly by the rotation of the Earth. Whatever you do is going to come out janky, so why spend all the time and effort to change from our current jankiness to a different janky system? We’d have to put a lot of time and effort into solving the new problems caused by the new jankiness. Then someone else will probably propose some new janky system to replace that system, and it’s a never ending frustration because we’ll never have a perfect system because ultimately orbital mechanics don’t divide into even numbers.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
Nothing. It’s equally arbitrary as setting 0 to be the freezing point of water.
But it covers the weather for the vast majority of people, the vast majority of time, better than Celsius does. That’s what I mean.
If you want to remove sentimentality from your temperature then use Kelvin but Celsius is just as arbitrary and sentimental as Fahrenheit is.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
0 as the freezing point of water isn’t arbitrary though, and neither is boiling.
They’re both very useful reference points since water is universally available and you can easily tell when it freezes and boils, it makes it comparatively trivial and accessible to create your own thermometer which is likely to at least generally agree with someone else’s.
this is the one aspect where i kind of prefer imperial measurements for distance, basing measurements on the human body means everyone has easy access to a reference that is likely to be not too tremendously wrong.
Obviously not super relevant these days, but back in the day it was a pretty neat feature. Like fuck, it wasn’t that long ago that the meter and the kilogram were still defined by a SINGLE specific object kept in a climate controlled vault.