-40F 🤝 -40C
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
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Even a broken clock is right twice day.
cries in digital clock
Even a stuck digital clock is right once a day.
When it's stuck, yes. When it's broken and the display is of welll...
It might not be right, but it's never wrong.
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Fun fact!
isn't it strange how they match up at such an exact number
Pedantry:
K and °R agree on 0
K and °C agree on the unit difference
°F and °R agree on the unit difference
°R and °Ra are the exact same thing (??)
Celsius and Fahrenheit agree on -40, but since they're scales that scale at different rates there's bound to be some value where they intersect rather than some meaningful number like Kelvin and Rankine being zeroed to Absolute Zero
Same with 574.59°F = 574.59K
Two lines which are not perpendicular will meet at one point?
Also Rankine, being an absolute scale, theoretically shouldn't be in ° anything, and it's only some weird historical quirk that is the reason it usually is called degrees.
Imagine if some distance measuring system decided their zero was at like 10 feet.
Let me just shorten this down 8 feet
welds on an extra 2 feet
If using log scale, 0 is at -∞
no 0 would be at 1
I mean, the temperature can be -1. But nothing measures negative.
Imagine if it did though.
Rankine and Kelvin have zero at the same point, which is absolute zero, and should not be used with the degree symbol
This concludes my TED talk
According to Wikipedia Rankine is properly used with the degree symbol, but sometimes is not by analogy with Kelvin.
Gross
I went down a huge rabbit hole cause of this. I personally like °F over °C but agree it's arbitrary. So I tried to make a scale that started at the coldest air temp on earth (some day in Antarctica) and went to the hottest day on earth (some day in death valley) and put the coldest day at 0°A and the hottest at 100°A.
Sadly this made a scale that was less precise than I'd like. I like that I can feel the difference between 73°F and 74°F and don't want to have to use decimals.
So maybe the end points could be only places where people actually live. Well it looks like some people live in Russia around -70°C and some people live in northern Africa around 50°C so if you just take °C and add 60 you can get a -10 to 110 scale where most temps would fall between 0 and 100. Still has the unit difference of °C (which I don't like) but I like that most temps are between 0 and 100. I also don't really like negative temperature since it seems wonky.
To "fix" the unit scale you could just multiply everything by 2 so the difference between each full degree is half as much. So temps would be between -20 and 220. °A = 2(°C + 60) °A = 2(°C) + 120
And it turns out I (basically) created the Fahrenheit scale but moved. °F= 1.8(°C) + 32
TL;DR: I'm stupid and this was fun but also a waste of time lol
Celsius tried to fit too much into 100 notches to please big math.
F is more nuanced with more notches, but the ends aren't logical. It coukd be shifted perhaps, but how?
If freezing was moved to 0, then water boiling would be 180
Perhaps C could have had a 200 degree range, then it would be closer to F and not so hard to convert.
But also: Scientists are important and we shouldn't make it too easy, it demeans their work. Maybe make the C scale show water boiling at 183.4521 degrees so scientific calculations are more impressive-looking and respectable.
and not so hard to convert
"Please change the entire world's system to make it easier for the one country that uses a different one"
It wouldn't even change the difficulty, really. You'd just wind up multiplying or dividing by 9/10 instead of 9/5.
America moving zero to Celcius' zero would be better, it would remove one whole step from the calculation
Then if they made their degrees about 9 fifths the size (they could get higher resolution than they'd lose by doing what we do and quoting temperature to one decimal place where needed) it would be dead simple to convert (just change the symbol from °F to °C!)
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This is why Celsius is the only SI unit that isn’t just wholly better than its imperial counterpart. Both F and C are fairly arbitrary, but in my view F has the slight edge by giving numbers 0-100 in most weather conditions across earth.
Kelvin 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.
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 maybe more likely then your scenario.
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.
0°F is the coldest night Mister Fahrenheit has ever witnessed, 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 that 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.
The French tried to implement that in the First Republic, together with 12 months à 30 days per year, 3 weeks à 10 days per month and 5 (6) extra days at the end of the year to make it work (from Christmas to New Year, how thematic!)
It failed because the French were fearing they'd have to work more (if they'd also only have 2 days off per 10d instead of per 7d). One of the biggest tragedies in French history. Without the week reform the time reform might've succeeded.
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.
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.
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.
0 lbs/lg = Absense of weight.
0 inches/centimeters = Absence of size.
0 Kelvin = Absence of heat.
If something is 0lbs, 0 inches and 0 Kelvin: does it even exist? 🤔
what the fuck is lg, using TVs as a unit of weight?
FRRACK
I have long since given up on an ideal world where there are universally used standard units. Now I embrace unit chaos. I want my equations to contain fucked up units that are harder to decipher than just doing the calc again. It's how I artistically express myself.