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Burning Up
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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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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.