Comment on Burning Up
psud@aussie.zone 2 months ago100F is just about half
Your scale in water terms starts at 32. 100 is nowhere near halfway between 32 and 212
Comment on Burning Up
psud@aussie.zone 2 months ago100F is just about half
Your scale in water terms starts at 32. 100 is nowhere near halfway between 32 and 212
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
the celsius scale literally covers 55% of the range of the fahrenheit scale. I’d say “about half” is perfectly reasonable.
psud@aussie.zone 2 months ago
Celcius degrees are quite a bit larger than Fahrenheit degrees. 0 to 100C is much larger than 0 to 100F so I don’t get what you mean by Celcius covering about half of Fahrenheit. In any case neither scale runs out of numbers high or low
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
my main point was that accuracy matters a lot less with fahrenheit, because it’s so much broader. a range of about 10 degrees fahrenheit is the average subjectively experienced “change” in temperature, at least on the higher end, where there’s more difference between the individual numbers. On the cold side there’s a lot less variance as it meets at about -40 in both systems.
this is very true though, hard to run out of numbers when you can just make more up, although there is an ultimate limit in either direction, due to what temperature actually measures. That’s a physics thing though.
psud@aussie.zone 2 months ago
The words you are looking for are that Fahrenheit is more precise. But it’s not as there are an infinity of numbers between any two integers.
My thermometer at work which I use for health and safety stuff reports temperature to two decimal places. Had we wanted more precision we could have gone with twenty decimal places. In too big or too small metric units we use multipliers - metres are too small for long distances so we use kilometres (thousands of metres), metres are too big for construction so we use millimetres (thousandths of metres)
Where Celcius degrees are too big, people (scientists, since whole degrees or a single decimal is enough for everyone else) use milikelvins