0 °F is pretty close to the freezing point of salt water. So close I always wonder if that “saline solution” was just salt and water.
stickly@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Hot take: the best temperature scale would have 0º be freezing and 100º be human body temp. Fahrenheit is already supposed to be that but nobody gives a shit about a saline solution freeze point and they fucked up the human body temp.
xeekei@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
We do not know because Fahrenheit didn’t document it, and i wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t keep track of it through his test runs either. He didn’t say which salt and how much of it in how much water, no purity indication, no nothing. He was a craftsman, not a chemist and made the scale to sell his, I concede, at the time superior thermometers.
But that’s all just hogwash, Fahrenheit today is literally defined through Celsius, so the US uses a metric scale but with a factor and an offset they pulled out of their ass to make it more rollercoaster like the rest of the units they like. Good for them.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Fahrenheit today is literally defined through Celsius
The same as pretty much every unit they use
At this point, that’s basically every unit other than the seven fundamental units. Degrees Celsius is defined from the fundamental unit Kelvin.
Plus the actual definitions of those fundamental units were defined based on historical measurements tied to former definitions. Today the second is defined around the frequency of the cesium-133 atom, but it was traditionally measured as 1/(60 x 60 x 24) of the time of a single rotation of the earth, which stopped serving us when we realized the rotations had too much variation between days. The meter is currently defined around the speed of light and the second, but was previously defined in terms of what they thought the Earth’s circumference was, and then a metal bar they kept in Paris, then based on the wavelength of light emitted from a transition in krypton-86. Same with the kilogram, currently kept at Planck’s constant but previously based on a particular chunk of metal that was mysteriously losing mass over time, and before that defined from the density of 4°C water and the definition of the meter.
Conventions are important. The history of how we got to particular conventions can often be messy.
Knightfox@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Shh, the non-American’s believe the US doesn’t understand metric at all and if you tell them otherwise they won’t be able to circle jerk.
Honytawk@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
If Americans actually understood metric, they wouldn’t be using a completely different system from the rest of the world in every media they produce.
Or do you think the rest of the world haven’t discovered your archaic system of temperature yet?
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
i mean, we aren’t pure water we’re saline water. so we kinda should care about saline freeze point.
wabasso@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I think I see what you’re getting at, but you could just memorize 40, 35, or even 30 as “watch out, pretty close to human body temperature”. Three anchors in the scale beats two.
Luccus@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
I propose the body temperature of an average opossum as the fixed point for 100 because they are cute as heck. We shall call this unit Possigrade. And anything above 100 Possigrade should be called the ‘rabies zone’ and 0 Possigrade should correspond to 8°C, as this feels very cold when dressed inappropriately. In addition, there is now the Bakers Possigrade, where 100 corresponds to 27°C, as this is the temperature at which sourdough bread rises by about ⅓ in 5.5 hours.
But seriously: Celsius is fine. On Earth, we are primarily interested in water at atmospheric pressure. Too many things contain water (pipes, food, paint, etc) and they react differently at 0 °C than at 4 °C. For this reason, we deliberately avoid using water in applications that are regularly exposed to sub-zero temperatures. Water is simply everywhere, so 0 °C and 100 °C are important tipping points for general use.
stickly@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Celsius is great for engineering because Things Happen™️ when water starts boiling or freezing. But most people aren’t engineering daily. Cooking temps generally dont require much precision and there are too many niche break points to easily factor: safe meat temps, refrigeration temps, oil smoke points, etc… Our chefs are basically screwed no matter what.
That leaves measuring weather as the most universal daily application. Celsius not great because the temp outside your door is going to be between mid -20º and mid 40º. It’s nice to have water freezing at 0º (snow, frost, ice) but thats the only interesting break point. You could just as easily set 100º to be the temperature of the sun and have the same daily experience.
Humans are endothermic, which means being somewhere hotter than us is Not Good™️. That would be very nice to set as a breaking point for weather purposes, but unfortunately the danger varies wildly with humidity/airflow/personal tempature regulation/hydration/etc… If we set the triple digit break to indicate an unsafe body temp then we at least can approximate the danger and get a little bonus medical utility.
Mean body temp varies slightly based on several factors:
Image
So set 100º to be one standard deviation over and its perfect for daily use. Checkmate Celciusts
luciferofastora@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
I’d argue that it’s more covenient to use a common scale for all applications of the same measurement than to have multiple different scales, just because that would eliminate all conversion concerns. Someone I know is in engineering school has switched entirely to using °C simply because that’s what they deal with at school anyway, to the point they don’t even write °C anymore in casual chats.
For other applications, it seems like the scales we’re used to are more or less arbitrary anyway, so that’s really just a matter of getting used to it. Some are used to calling ~70°F room temperature, others say ~20°C,
So if it matters for one case, but not so much for others, and we were to pick a single scale, I should think it would be ideal to go with the case where it does matter.
Or we just keep doing this thing where people use what they’re used to and we just quickly look it up or someone comments with the conversion and move on with our lives.
stickly@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’ll agree to a single universal scale but only on the condition that -100º=0ºK
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Perrsonally I set 100° Egg (or 100°E) to equal 180°F because that’s how much i want to heat my egg when i am making ice cream. Gets you a good, custardy base for your ice cream machine.
I would also accept °Icecreams or °Is as the units
Honytawk@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
Give one reason why we should use a different system for daily life when we already have a great system for engineering.
You are just making things more complex when there is absolutely no need.
Dasus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Endothermic refers to the ability of the organism to regulate it’s temperature, not just the ability to generate heat, but also to cool itself down. We humans are so good at it, that we can literally just jog prey down in hot environments and pretty much all animals will overheat before we do.
Hell, in my apartment there’s a room especially for making it very hot and humid. Even above 100c, and I still don’t boil. Weird, huh?
Alright. Sure. Yeah. Why not. /s
stickly@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
And I bet that room has its own thermostat, fuel, and doesn’t reach that temperature without human input. How often is the average human stepping into a sauna that it needs to be considered on a common use scale? The hottest recorded temperature on earth is 56°C, why would our daily scale need to be pegged 78% higher than that?
Exactly! So we have 8.3 billion self-adjusting thermostats set to [nearly] the same target no matter their environment. Unlike the freezing temp, water’s boiling point can vary wildly on Earth. If I forget to check the altitude I could mistakenly think my boiling teapot is at 100°C instead of 68°C.
Home cooking usually depends way more on your ingredients and the quirks of your appliances than your target temp. Maybe your kitchen is a little more humid today and this batch of cookies is more chewy than yesterday. That’s why many recipes give hints on target texture or look (crispy, soft, golden brown…). But yes if you want a very specific outcome you’ll care much more about temp accuracy.
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Iv always found Celsius makes way better sense for material tempature and Fahrenheit for the weather.
Celsius is no where near granular enough for the weather not by a fucking long shot.
I rather use the arbitrary jacket scale and shorts scale then Celsius for weather.
Is it jacket weather or shorts weather are the only two criteria. And it varies person to person and has zero ability to be translated between people. Yet everyone understands it natively and intuitively anyways.
Honytawk@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
Celcius is plenty of granular enough for science, why should it not be granular enough for something basic as the weather?
You do know that decimals exist, right?