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Burning Up
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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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only if you grow up with fahrenheit.
100F was defined as the human body temperature (The guy they used had a cold or something so it's off by a degree and a half.)
That's useful for perception of heat. When the dry bulb gets above 100F, wind only cools you down by sweat evaporation, and when the wet bulb gets above 100F, even that can’t cool you down, and you will die if you don’t get to a cooler or drier environment.
This is more intuitive than 36.5C.
what Fahrenheit used for his endpoints was 1) the melting point of a brine mixture that he didn't write down the ratio of, and 2) his wife's armpit.
those "bulb" things is something i only ever hear of from americans. it's never used here.
and I fail to see how two numbers are somehow differently intuitive. they are just numbers. also, 36.5 is too low. it's pretty much 37.0 now, because average body temp has interestingly enough shifted since he took those measurements.
What does Europe use for apparent temperature measurement then? Just humidity and not evaporation?
temperature, wind speed and direction, and humidity are given separately. regular news report style forecasts don't give humidity at all.
What's a dry/wet bulb?
Dry bulb is a normal temperature reading with say a thermometer. Wet bulb is that same thermometer but it is wrapped in a wet cloth to simulate evaporation of sweat.
The purpose of wet bulb temperature measurement is to fix the dangerous temperature threshold at body temperature instead of having to adjust for humidity. So if the wet bulb temperature crosses 35C/95F you know that it is dangerous to even be outside because your sweat can't even evaporate enough to prevent you from overheating just standing in the shade.
Dry bulb is the temperature independent of humidity. Wet bulb is has a wet cloth on the thermometer bulb. This simulates how much sweat cools you in the current humidity and wind.
Measuring humidity instead and cross-referencing to get heat index is more common these days, but IMO it's worse. 120 in the desert vs 120 heat index due to humidity is the difference between someone using a hair dryer on your face and getting cooked in a steam room, and it doesn't consider wind and cloud cover.
Wait, doesn't everybody walk around with a pocket psychrometric chart?
So you're saying that 0 and 100 aren't intuitively obvious? I find that really strange when it's doing a better job keeping to base 10 than the metric system in this particular use case.
For Celsius, 0 is freezing cold and 100 is boiling hot - that's intuitive too.
I have literally never felt 0°F in my life and couldn't tell you how cold it is, just that it's very cold. I believe everyone has a rough understanding how 0°C and 100°C feel though.
It is intuitive, and that's fine. Having the same intuition around human comfort zones is also fine. One measurement system can't really cover everything.
People tend not to want to live in places where it's routinely under 0F or over 100F. You'll tolerate it, but you won't like it. It's a very natural range of human comfort.
the numbers may be, but if you asked me to tell you what they feel like i would have to convert them to celsius first. where i live temperatures are generally between -30 and +30, and i could tell you in an instant what I would wear for a given temperature in that range. 50F though? no clue. since it's right between 0 and 100 i guess it would be just right, temperature wise, so t-shirt and long pants?
Can you remember that at temperatures near 0F and 100F, you need to take special precautions when going outside? The rest is a matter of getting used to what the numbers mean, but those are very intuitive danger points.
-18 is such an arbitrary place for "special precautions". at 0, I know to start driving more carefully since the roads ice up. at -15, i know to wear long johns. at +15, i know to start using a thinner jacket. at -30, i know to use a thick hat and wax on my cheeks to prevent the blood vessels from rupturing. at +30, I know to use a large hat and sun cream on my cheeks to prevent them from burning.
cool little trick, you see how -18 is like, pretty close to -20, yeah. You can just round them. It really doesn't matter
see, that's what i'm saying. having a scale that starts at "it really doesn't matter" makes it hard to use for everyday things.
but it literally has numbers?
You know that celsius starts at -273.15 degrees right? That's ENTIRELY arbitrary, and by your logic, makes the system useless.
you're literally just making this up?
no, Celsius starts at +273.15 K, because that's where an element we are all dependent on to live and in contact with every day undergoes an important phase transition.
What happens at 0°F?
why does it matter? Water freezes at 32 degrees f. What happens at 32 degrees C? What happens at 212 degrees C?
Also no, it doesn't start at +273.15 K, that's not how number ranges work. If you have a list of numbers between -10 and 10. And you were to sort them, least to most, -10 would be at the bottom, obviously.
you realize that temperature is a measure of the energy within a substance/material right? It's intrinsically tried to the physics and atomic structure underlying the material substance. That always starts at the lowest temperature point, the point being where it is is just a reference
it starts at +273.15K because that is the lower of the two reference points used in its creation. the Kelvin scale was created later and builds on the Celsius scale. of course lower temps are sorted first, that's not what matters. it's why we call these scales "degrees", after all.
why it matters is because the scale i use every day constantly gets "verified" by passing the zero marker and showing that things outside freeze. that makes it a good reference point that builds its own intuition.
that's what this is all about, after all: how useful a scale is for everyday use. a scale that is relevant to my needs and that has important events happen on easy-to-remember points of the scale requires very little teaching.
any number is equally as good for an arbitrary reference point. And it can arguably be even more confusing, let's take a page out of CS acronyms and short hands. GB and GiB (often shortened improperly) GB being 1000, GiB being 1024. Now i feel like i don't have to explain why this is a bad thing.
1024 is an odd unit, but it's sequential powers of 2, so it's trivial to think about. 1000 is a nice unit, but it doesn't map nicely into storage, or binary strings.
like to me the difference between 0-100 and 32-212 is basically nothing. Sure it's a weird number, but they're both numbers so. Really the only proper utility it has is the SI unit meta, and the fact that it maps into kelvin. Outside of that i don't see why 0 or 32 as the freezing point are any different. It might be more visually pleasing, but like, fahrenheit also takes that one as well, given that the 0f-100f thing is accurate. I feel like they're just equivalent.
i just don't see why it matters, like at all. People do much more complicated things on a daily basis. People remember random strings of numbers as passcodes, people remember random strings of letters as for passwords.
idk i feel like it's just weird to sit here on the internet and complain about how you need water to freeze at 0 degrees, and how it must boil at 100 degrees. When neither of those are like, relevant? For most day to day activities at least. Maybe in the winter, but again, 32.
would it be nicer if fahrenheit suddenly had water freeze at 0f tomorrow, as well as boil at 200f? Probably, but like, i wouldn't care. It just seems like such an odd thing to care about to me.
this all started because of the claim that Fahrenheit is better for "human" temperatures. when saying "that's just because you're used to it" apparently wasn't valid, it spiralled on into this massive discussion where i've tried to show with what i feel is quite a lot of anecdata that indeed, you only feel that Fahrenheit is better for human temperatures because you're used to it. meanwhile, the rest of the world can't understand these numbers at all because they are not used to them, and use Celsius for human temperatures every day.
of course it doesn't matter. at least, not in a vacuum. but when interacting with the rest of the world, it does.
so technically, it was originally a shitpost about how fahrenheit temperatures can go above 100, which is clearly better.
beyond that, a lot of people just proposed that fahrenheit is nice because "the 0-100 metric is kind of nice and lines up conveniently" which is perfectly accurate, as evidenced by people existing and using it, there's not exactly a psyop for making people think fahrenheit is better lol.
literally the primary distinction here, is that celsius users think celsius is better because "water freezes at 0, and boils at 100" and fahrenheit users have merely proposed that "fahrenheit lines up fairly nicely with the human experience such that 0f is cold and 100f is hot"
and then celsius users have pretty much gone ape shit over these statements.
like to be clear, both of these arguments are literally the same.
this is like being an english only speaker, and then discovering that the french language genders tables. And then becoming entirely irate over the fact that this language that you don't know, and can't speak genders tables.
You see my problem here right? Like it's funny as a shitpost, but celsius users are grabbing a ratchet, realizing they don't know how to use them, accidentally clobbering themselves over the head with it, and then being really confused and mad when people think that this is a pretty silly thing to do.
like it's great that you guys don't know fahrenheit because the rest of the world uses celsius. That's great for you, who asked though? You can do the same things with race and gender as well. "white people are more advanced, surely we must be smarter right?"
like with all due respect, to you and everybody else who uses celsius, this is stupid. I don't know if you guys think that fahrenheit people don't know that celsius has a better boiling point of water, we know all of this shit. And we can even convert back into celsius, more often than not, because we have to interact with you guys, more frequently. Because statistically, there are more of you. Like the sheer amount of people in this thread that were just pretentious for no reason, is mindbogglingly astounding.
Like unironically, having seen this thread twice, once on reddit. I legitimately hold less of an opinion of Europeans now. Like from my perspective, these people are just whining and complaining about the most asinine of things, "oh no 96f, that's not a nice number" yeah, it's a conversion bro. What did you expect? And then when i mention that these are unreasonable opinions, as they are. Obviously. (so would any countering opinions, naturally) they get really confused or just say really stupid things? I've had people unironically tell me that there are different climates, like america doesn't have any of those. I've had someone compare 0f to 100f, in the same exact situation. Literally just going outside naked. Why? Who goes outside naked when it's cold?
You could tell me that this is a once yearly european psyop to make americans think that europeans are stupid, and i would believe you.
like i'm genuinely so confused, because i can't tell if this is just some incredibly elaborate troll, or if celsius users genuinely can't think outside of a box.
...yeah.
yeah no shit, but think of it this way, if you were put into a place that was 100f, you would go "damn this bitch hot out here" and if you were put into a place that was 0f you would go "damn this joint cold as fuck fr"
Stop thinking in celsius.
why would i stop? there's only one place in the world that uses another scale, and it's dangerous for me to even travel there.
because we're not talking about celsius? We're talking about fahrenheit?
This is like pulling up to a car meet in a semi truck, and being really confused when nobody thinks your ride is sick.
the parent post was literally about Fahrenheit vs Celsius.
it was literally about fahrenheit*
Specifically, it was about how in fahrenheit we can refer to really hot temperatures as "OVER 100F"
but it was also a shitpost, like this post, so we probably shouldn't care about it this much lmao
i am referring the the post i responded to.
yeah, that was my post.
What if it was 99f? Or 1f? Would your scientific "damn this bitch hot out here" change to something else?
no? Because it's not entirely hinged around the temperature being one specific number???
Do you think the human body is a perfectly accurate thermometer?
When it comes to a single number on a scale, whatever you grew up with will be more "obvious". 100F doesn't give me any more information than 38C does. The whole "base 10" thing only matters if you are actually doing some math to that number.
Base 10 makes it much easier to remember.
When was the last time you did math related to temperature?
For day to day use, it's just a single number, no one is doing any conversions, etc, with the number. That was my point. There's nothing to remember. Do you forget what 72F feels like? Do you have to scale it in your head?
base 10 is literally just 0-9 so yeah, everyone remembers that.
scaling based on the base 10 figure makes conversions easier, so there's that.
Kelvin is used for math pretty regularly. Rankine was too.
They aren't. And fahrenheit is not a 0-100 scale. It is just the scale you picked out of it in order to make some kind of sense out of the non-intuitive system which it is.
fahrenheit doesn't exist if you use celsius i guess??
It doesn't, because celsius users doesn't think about fahrenheit at all.
yeah, and it seems to me like they're the wrong ones here, because i can think about things in celsius perfectly fine without my worldview imploding, in fact i can pretty accurately estimate temperature conversions even.
Like it's great that you guys don't have to use it, but please think about it a little bit harder before saying something really goofy that can be explained easily. Or just like, shitpost.