this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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Science Memes

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Burning Up (mander.xyz)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

What annoys me about that phrasing, is that "how water feels" is quite relevant to how humans feel.

The obvious example is that if it's below 0°C, it starts freezing, which causes slippery sidewalks, snow, dry air, all that stuff.
But just in general having a feeling how much water will evaporate and later precipitate at certain temperatures, and even stuff like how hot beverages and cooking temperatures are, it's all still relevant for humans...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Humans are mostly water. If water boils, then humans will mostly boil too.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The obvious example is that if it’s below 0°C, it starts freezing, which causes slippery sidewalks, snow, dry air, all that stuff. But just in general having a feeling how much water will evaporate and later precipitate at certain temperatures, and even stuff like how hot beverages and cooking temperatures are, it’s all still relevant for humans…

that's an interesting idea, BUT, the boiling point for water also exists under f as well, it's just 212 f, which if you want to round for convenience, is 200f. 100f is just about half the boiling point of water.

I guess you celsius folks might be more water pilled than the average US citizen, but it's not like it's impossible.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

In Celcius water boils at exactly 100°C, and you don't have to round, and 50°C is exactly half the boiling point of water.

Yes, Celsius users are waterpilled: the whole system is based on the temperature at which water freezes and evaporates at 1 atm pressure.

(You're just fucking with us right? Like Celsius is has a coarser base unit, and the range applicable to human temperatures are not such pretty numbers, but you can't be seriously thinking Fahrenheit makes more sense for when we talk about water?)

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

In Celcius water boils at exactly 100°C, and you don’t have to round, and 50°C is exactly half the boiling point of water.

unless you're doing literal chemistry, the specific boiling point of the water doesn't matter, especially for any subjective referential experiences you might have, such as, going outside.

(You’re just fucking with us right? Like Celsius is has a coarser base unit, and the range applicable to human temperatures are not such pretty numbers, but you can’t be seriously thinking Fahrenheit makes more sense for when we talk about water?)

i'm not saying it's better, i'm just saying you're having a failure of imagination to conceptualize the usage of the fahrenheit system if you so pleased to use it in such a specific manner, which almost nobody here does. You could still do it though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Cooking is basically water based chemistry, so it makes a lot of sense to use Celsius.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

idk man, there's a lot of temperatures in cooking that are like, kind of close? Not that close, but like, kind of close. Even then, the one case where i consider it genuinely mattering is boiling water which like, you can just kinda know.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

100F is just about half

Your scale in water terms starts at 32. 100 is nowhere near halfway between 32 and 212

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

the celsius scale literally covers 55% of the range of the fahrenheit scale. I'd say "about half" is perfectly reasonable.

granted, it skews since you're starting on the low end. The figure is more like 122f right in the middle, which is, not great, but i wasn't going to calculate the half boiling point as i've literally never seen it be relevant anywhere lol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

In any case neither scale runs out of numbers high or low

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 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.

yeah and you could make a temperature scale call it fuckwit and make water freeze at -1, and water room temperature at 0, and then make it boil at 1. I don't know why you would want to do that though.

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)

well you wouldn't go with twenty decimal spaces because after you get past about 4 decimals, it starts to become inconsequential, and you should really just use sci no anyway.

Where Celcius degrees are too big, people (scientists, since whole degrees or a single decimal is enough for everyone else) use milikelvins

fascinating that you propose this, because this is literally the opposite of what i said lol.