Three scientists arguing over the definition of zero
Celsius says “zero is the freezing point of water”
Fahrenheit says “no, zero is the freezing point of ammonium chloride”
Kelvin says “hold my beer”
Handy temperature conversion scale.
Submitted 7 months ago by FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6cf04645-09d1-4a53-b8de-a28514e00ff4.png
Comments
herescunty@lemmy.world 7 months ago
umbrella@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
Kelvin: Zero is the freezing point of the universe
SirQuackTheDuck@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Kelvin: Zero is the freezing point.
Scientists: Of what?
Kelvin: Yes.
Paradachshund@lemmy.today 7 months ago
Is that true about fahrenheit? I’ve never heard that before.
fhqwgads@possumpat.io 7 months ago
If I remember correctly, it’s not the freezing point. Fahrenheit used a brine that included ammonium chloride to set 0 on his scale since it was the closest thing he could make in his lab that was a consistent temperature. The other end was body temperature, which he set at 96 if I’m remembering right since it’s more easily divisible than 100. He was a little off on his body temperature measurements so it’s considered a little higher than that now.
Paraneoptera@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
It’s debated. One source points to the lower end of the scale established as the freezing point of a brine made by dissolving ammonium chloride in water.
Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
100C° is not death, it is Finnish sauna temp. Really, Sauna competitions start with 110C°. Famously in 2010 one Russian competitor died, and the Finn who won had to be sent to ER.
jballs@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Sauna competitions
I appreciate how you just dropped this casually like of course everyone knows about Sauna competitions.
Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
Haha, sure, but there isn’t much to know.
Sauna competition is that they go inside hot sauna and last one who comes out wins. They increase the temperature and throw water to the sauna stones. That humidity makes the temperature feel quite a lot harder (air is quite good insulator, which is why you don’t boil).
In the competition quite often people got first degree burn injuries, which is quite crazy.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
I think it means dead as in trying to live in a 100° environment. Kind of like the survival rule of 3s, where you can survive 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water, 3 hours in an extreme environment, and 3 minutes without air.
I guess it could say “unsustainable” instead of dead, but that’s less snappy.
force@lemmy.world 7 months ago
3 hours in an extreme environment is so vague. you’d die in like 20 minutes naked in Antarctica, or you could survive just fine forever with proper clothing. you may die in a day and a half in the desert if you had no water
BreadOven@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I think I’ve been in one getting close to 100 C. It was pretty unbearable after about a minute. Crazy Fins (I mean that in the way that I love them, but the saunas are crazy).
frezik@midwest.social 7 months ago
Shit, what’s the most hardcore sport? Rugby? No, saunas.
Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
This is why I’m Fahrenheit hang all the way. I’m not running lab experiments daily, but i am going outside all the time. If you have to express the temperature with decimal precision for everyday use, you’ve lost.
RandomStickman@kbin.run 7 months ago
What? No one's using C to that precision outside the lab. It just depends on what you grew up with man. I know below 0 I need a winter jacket, ~10C chilly, ~20C is shorts weather, ~30C is hot, >40C is death. Perfectly practical everyday estimations.
For me the only advantage of F is you can say it's 69F out and bake things at 420F.
EfreetSK@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Also let me point out one nice feature here - the freezing point is 0. Bellow it you can expect snow instead of rain, ice on the road, sidewalk, plants are in danger, etc. A lot of things and situations in your life are affected by this simple fact that water freezes so it’s nice that we have it at 0.
Fahrenheit has 32°F …
bobs_monkey@lemm.ee 7 months ago
When pizzas call for 425°F, I purposely set the temp at 420° because of course
littletranspunk@lemmus.org 7 months ago
I agree with most of that, but I have been in Phoenix, AZ in ~42°C. Sure it wasn’t pleasant, but I’m not dead.
joel_feila@lemmy.world 7 months ago
at 10 c i’m wearing 2 pairs pants and 2 light jackets.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
People who use Celsius don’t typically casually refer to the temperature with a decimal place.
The comfortable range is more compressed, but just like you probably say 75 instead of 74.5, they say 24 instead of 23.889.
Fahrenheit does coincidentally line up nicely for subjective weather scales, so it’s not offensive for that use, similar to how pint is a good cup size, but in general consistency is king and you’re not loosing anything by compressing a scale, particularly when we basically already measure the temperature in five degree increments, and generally refer to in in units of ten.
alvvayson@lemmy.world 7 months ago
As a metric person, I can confirm.
Indoor temperatures are basically 18-22 for most people most of the time. 15-25 covers the whole range of indoor temperatures that people with functioning heat or A/C would see.
For temperatures outside we commonly round to the nearest five: -5 and below: very cold winter weather 0 cold winter weather 5 mild winter weather 10 autumn weather 15 spring weather 20 summer weather 25 beach weather 30 heatwave 35 and higher heatwave in the Sahara
The only thing I admire of the Fahrenheit scale is that they can round to the nearest 10 and still be a little bit more precise than we are with the nearest 5. And when discussing fever temperatures, we need half degrees and Fahrenheit does not.
But it’s an absolutely awful scale for cooking.
Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
I don’t say 74.5, your right but I do care when the temperature is set to 72 or 73. I can tell the difference of that vs. 70 even.
merc@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Fahrenheit does coincidentally line up nicely for subjective weather scales
In what sense?
IHateReddit@lemmy.world 7 months ago
which temperature unit requires using decimals?
Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Have you ever stayed in a hotel with the wall thermostat set to C? If so, press the up/down temperature buttons. They’ll move by 0.2 or 0.5 usually.
YoorWeb@lemmy.world 7 months ago
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Maybe someday a metric country will take 13th place for walking on the moon
whoreticulture@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
When I’m reading through dates, January gives me a hell of a lot more information than “the fifteenth”
RandomStickman@kbin.run 7 months ago
Too much of your identity is wrapped up in being able to talk temperature in multiples of ten, people.
Wtf are you talking about? You're the one that brought up how your favourite unit is superior, and we're the one that has our identity wrapped up in something?
Chill out. Maybe something near 42 degrees. Sorry, meant to say 5.6 degrees for the nerds in here.
Do you know how math works? Of course you're gonna end up with decimals when you're starting from F. Why don't you chill out at 11? Oh, I mean 51.8 you narcissistic swine.
Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
I’d just say 52, but keep raging.
gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
You’re the one that brought up how your favourite unit is superior
Considering the majority of TLCs are people going “lol Americans using their savage system unlike us civilized people” it’s funny to act like this person is somehow unique
you narcissistic swine.
Also funny given the previous
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 7 months ago
If you have to express the temperature with decimal precision for everyday use, you’ve lost.
I don’t think it’s necessary to do in Celsius though?
Lizardking27@lemmy.world 7 months ago
You’re completely right, but this community gets way too much satisfaction from their “fAhReNhEiT sUcKs lMaO” circlejerk so you’re getting downvoted.
But you’re absolutely correct.
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 7 months ago
We all subjectively are more used to our scales, and what numbers mean “very hot” and “very cold” are very varied based on your physiology, adaptation to the climate and the relative humidity.
For water, however, freezing pretty bang on zero (slight variation due to pressure), and you get enough days below zero water of different amounts will start freezing. Which I’d argue is an objective benefit over Fahrenheit for weather. Water freezing at zero is a useful distinction.
Negative? Freezing. Looks great on a graph with an X axis for time and y for temp. To get the equivalent nice graph in Fahrenheit gotta put a line at whatever weird number lines up with freezing.
A random city which I thought may be dipping below zero. That’s interesting, there’s a line at freezing, almost like that’s useful or something.
Putting a line that’s not zero, look at what Fahrenheit needs to do to mimic a fraction of our power!
BallsandBayonets@lemmy.world 7 months ago
You don’t need decimals for everyday measurements. No one can tell the difference between 60 and 62 degrees F. With Celsius 10 or 5 degree ranges is all you need to know for weather purposes, and it falls into much more logical ranges.
Below 0 = cold, limit time outside 0-10C = wear a coat 10-15 = wear a jacket 15-20 = comfortable 20-25 = shorts 25-30 = hot 30-40 = limit time outside 40+ = thank you global warming; don’t live here.
someguy3@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
… You don’t. But I find it funny when failheit rounds to the nearest 10s in conversation.
And believe it or not Celsius is much better for outside because it’s actually zeroed to the actual fucking weather.
BruceTwarzen@kbin.social 7 months ago
And you can't go outside when you're too dense to read the temperature?
Prandom_returns@lemm.ee 7 months ago
What.
assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I really like your attention to detail here. Fahrenheit and Celsius both have degree symbols, but Kelvin doesn’t – just as it should be.
Chenzo@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Someone posted here once something like
Farienhiet is how humans feel. Celsius is how water feels. Kelvin is how atoms feel.
I kinda like that.
Hillock@feddit.de 7 months ago
It only makes sense if you grow up with Fahrenheit. Otherwise Fahrenheit isn’t how humans feels since most of us have no concept what these number mean.
If I would just go with 0 - cold 100 - hot I would assume 50 - perfect. But 50 is still chilly. 70-80 feels like it should be getting hot but that’s the most comfortable temperature.
maniclucky@lemmy.world 7 months ago
And Rankine is a sin.
whodatdair@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
Jokes on you I’m a tardigrade
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 7 months ago
daq@lemmy.sdf.org 7 months ago
What’s so special about 0 - 100? 40° of civilized units sucks, but is still perfectly survivable and is becoming more and more common in some parts of the world. That’s 104° of fucked up units.
Negatives up to -30° are also common around the world and I frequently went out in shorts and t-shirt in -10° for a short time to grab mail or take out trash.
The only sort of reasonable justification for F units I’ve ever heard was that there’s less of a change between whole degrees, but decimals are not exactly hard to figure out imnho.
Skates@feddit.nl 7 months ago
Americans are out here needing 100 degrees of magnitude between “it’s really cold outside” and “it’s really hot outside” while ignoring the scientific uses of anything outside of those values and you expect them to understand decimals?
How many “it’s really hot outside” until iron melts, or water boils, or meat cooks? Fuck knows. But I’ll be damned if I use punctuation in my maths, this country was founded on addition and subtraction and that’s all the founding fathers ever needed, now gtfo with your letters and periods and symbols in my mathematics.
WarmSoda@lemm.ee 7 months ago
The Kelvin timeline is the worst
Donebrach@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yall just jealous that a mile is longer than a kilometer.
brianary@startrek.website 7 months ago
Zero is freezing
10 is not
20 is pleasing
30 is hot
40 frying
50 dying
PsychedSy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Ah, more FCK jokes.
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
The scales have their places.
F is range of comfortable heat for humans. 0 oppressively cold, 100 is oppressively hot. Nearly all humans can agree on that.
C is range of comfortable heat for liquid water at 1ATM.
K is range of comfortable heat for an atom.
ninpnin@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
Really cold water, really hot water 😎
MIDItheKID@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I read somewhere that Farenheight is the scale of how hot/cold people are, Celcius is the scale of how hot/cold water is, and Kelvin is the scale of how hot/cold particles are.
vividspecter@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Cosmicomical@lemmy.world 7 months ago
No degree sign for the my man Kelvin?
rustydomino@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I have this theory that Americans suck at math because they insist on sticking with the imperial measurement system and so nothing makes mathematical sense - Americans intuitively just think in every day units qualitatively. Whereas the rest of the world uses metric, so base 10 math just comes naturally.
Source: I am a US STEM professor. Our students suck at math.
volvoxvsmarla@lemm.ee 7 months ago
When I was 16, I went to high school in California for half a year as an exchange student. I am from Germany and as a junior, I would have had something like my 4th or 5th year of chemistry in school, but out of necessity (or laziness) I took beginner’s chemistry.
For exercises I had been paired with two girls who used to try to make fun of me (I think; I never really figured out what their deal was), and asked me stupid questions about myself or Germany. I remember they once asked laughingly whether I like oranges because I was wearing a t-shirt with an orange print.
Well, then one day, there we go. Converting exercises. You have students from 9th to 12th grade in groups of 3-4, trying to convert imperial measurements to metrics. And then metrics to metrics. Basically, for a couple of weeks, we just converted stuff like 14 cm to mm or dm. I forgot so much about my time abroad but the most vivid memory I have is of the girls looking at each other (after a couple of days and repeated explanations) and one says “the decimal system just makes no sense” and the other one quietly and slowly nods in agreement. I ask them how it makes no sense. “Well it just makes no sense.” It’s just base 10 everything and the rest is practice, it’s not different from inches to feet. “No but you see this makes sense. There are 12 inches in a foot”, continued by a list of how many shmekels make up a whoopsiedoodle and how many dingelings fit into a hybotron.
I understand how you first have to get accustomed to new units and how conversion might need practice when you aren’t familiar with the prefixes, especially when you aren’t too experienced in the stem field. But I am still flabbergasted by the statement that having a system where everything is just base 10 and then you shift the decimal point around makes no sense. We are talking about fellow juniors here. How do you make it to age 16/17 never having heard of a decimal point or having trouble with base 10 conversion? HOW CAN YOU SAY IT MAKES NO SENSE?! It’s the simplest, most logic based system there is!
merc@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
IMO metric also allows you to reason about things in your head more easily because doing base-10 calculations in your head is doable.
For example, “Each 1m section of a pipeline contains 20L of oil. The goal is to empty a 200 km section of pipe into trucks. If each truck can handle 20 tonnes of oil, how many trucks would be needed?” In metric that calculation is 20 * 1000 * 200 = 4 million L. 20 tonnes is approx 20,000 L since 1L of water is 1kg, so it’s going to be at least within an order of magnitude of that for oil. 4M / 20k = 200.
With US customary units it would be "Each 1 foot section of a pipeline contains 1.5 gallons of oil. The goal is to empty a 100 mile section of pipe into trucks. If each can handle 20 tons of oil, how many trucks will be needed? To handle that calculation you’ll have to convert feet to miles. Gallons to pounds, pounds to tons, etc. You can do it on paper, but all those weird conversions add massively to the difficulty.
SkippingRelax@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Fuck me we did those conversions in primary school in Italy in the eighties. Can’t remember what year exactly but we were prolly 7yo?
joel_feila@lemmy.world 7 months ago
ok how about this america abopts the metric system but every moves on to base 12.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 7 months ago
It may be that or it may be that our entire educational system has turned into shit through decades of low pay for teachers weeding out all the best people.
humbletightband@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Prove it! What is the speed of light in anacondas/average Snapchat duration?
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Does the person on Snapchat have buns? 'Cause otherwise my anaconda don’t want none, hun.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 7 months ago
2! No, 3!
whoreticulture@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
I have a theory that Americans are great at math because they regularly work with base-12 systems.
rustydomino@lemmy.world 7 months ago
That would be cool if true. But then they use measures like subdivisions of an inch in base 8 increments.
Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
And base 3 sometimes (yards). When taught well, there’s a ton of value in learning to quantify the world in a variety of base systems.
Not uniquely American, but thinking in base 7 (weeks), base 12 (years, hours, feet), base 60 (minutes), base 3 (yards), base 10 (the default unless told otherwise), etc. really helps you adapt and estimate a number of other, unrelated, things.
assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 7 months ago
My professor for my first real engineering class had an excellent quote, “A good engineer can work in any unit system.”
There’s actually quite a lot of advantages the US could have in math education if we properly harnessed both unit systems. Becoming fluent in both and regularly doing conversions would give students a lot of real world application and simple math practice.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 7 months ago
A good software developer can also work with any language, but if you’re going to use Javascript to build an enterprise level software you are guaranteed to have a bad time.
You use what is best for the job and from my understanding there’s really no benefit to using imperial measures over SI, beyond the familiarity of growing up with them. If you were taught SI units from the very start you wouldn’t ever use imperial.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Or you end up doing what I do to troll my friends, and mix the styles the systems like.
“This post should be 5/16ths of a decameter” The rational numbers you find in imperial are helpful for dividing things compared to decimals, but everyone gets all weird when you do fractional meters or kilograms.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
Some metric system just don’t offer a single benefit compared to others
CaptPretentious@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Clocks and calendars must give you nightmares…
hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Counting days suck ass. Quick, how many days during next 3 months? How many weeks is 95 days? How many weeks is 666 hours?
Our time and date is pretty much locked in, but it does have some limitations