Isn’t basing a temperature scale on the freezing and boiling points of water a bit arbitrary in and of itself?
The reason they are arbitrary numbers in Fahrenheit is because they weren’t considerations when the scale was made.
Comment on If only it was like that
YoorWeb@lemmy.world 10 months agodoggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
Deme@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Water is everywhere.
Cooking, weather, etc. You are also water.
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Except that water boils at different temperatures when exposed to different amounts of pressure.
So this works pretty universally on earth… Near the ground/ocean level (plus or minus a few hundred meters). Once you get outside of that specific condition the numbers move.
So yes, fairly arbitrary.
Let’s all switch to Kelvin.
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
The nice thing about celcius and kelvin is that they’re the same scale, but celcius is just shifted 273.15 units. And it’s more intuitive for humans to work with smaller numbers with bigger relative differences. But yes, kelvin would be a lot better to work with, especially considering stuff like doubling temperature (doubling energy) would actually work correctly in kelvin.
But if there’s one thing that makes a lot of sense to base temperature enough for human use, I would indeed say it’s water, because all life uses water, we are completely surrounded by it, and it’s super important to nearly everything we do too.
Deme@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Sure, but the vast majority of people live in low lying areas and even then it doesn’t shift that drastically. You need to climb a mountain to see the difference when it comes to applications of daily life.
Although now that I think about it. The same criticism applies to pretty much every definition of temperature that is based on the behaviour of matter. This also applies to Kelvin. Temperature is a property of matter and every type of matter behaves differently.
seth@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Technically Kelvin is an absolute scale, where there are not “degrees,” just references to “absolute zero” which is supposed to be no vibrational energy, but is not actually zero kinetic energy since there is still zero-point energy. It’s as arbitrarily chosen a reference as any other scale, and for a specific purpose. We used it often when I was in the natural sciences, but it can be just as strange to have to think in terms of adjusting for 273.15K for the misleading “freezing point of water” or 298.15K for STP, another arbitrary standard of measurement. Kelvin is no better than Rankine. And, it’s even more confusing if you think of temperature as an average energy in a system, and have to consider quantum gases with a temperature “below absolute zero.”
Annoyance in the 21st century at cultural relics and colloquial is kind of silly.
BluesF@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It is, but if you look at how Farenheit was conceived it’s absurdly nonsensical. 0°F is the freezing temperature or some mixture of chemicals, and 90°F is a guess at human body temperature lmao.
And the freezing/boiling points of water are arbitrary except in that they are used to actually define both scales. They provide easily measurable standards.
MaoZedongers@lemmy.today 9 months ago
I think it’s the freezing point of brine
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
No, 0° was the lowest temperature recorded in the city Fahrenheit lived, and 100° was considered normal body temperature, with the quality of thermometer available at the time.
It’s quite arbitrary, but ends up mapping pretty nicely to comfortable ranges for humans.
force@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Well TECHNICALLY it’s not based on the state change of water.
It’s based on the formula C = K - 273.15 where K = 1.380649×10−23/(6.62607015×10−34)(9192631770) * hΔν[Cs]/k
So even MORE abstract and unrelatable
ferralcat@monyet.cc 10 months ago
This makes no sense. K is not a constant. Is there a variable in there?
Temperature is a measure of entropy. It depends on the disorder in a system somehow.
assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Temperature isn’t a measure of entropy, but the internal energy of a system. Internal energy is the total energy sum of kinetic and thermal and gravitational energy.
You might wonder how that’s calculated, and the short answer? It isn’t. We rarely look at the actual value. This also goes for enthalpy and entropy. What matters most of the time is the difference in enthalpy/entropy/energy. If you take a look at various enthalpy numbers across textbooks and software and steam tables, you’ll see the value vary significantly depending on what they use as their 0 point. No matter where the scale starts though, the difference between two distinct points will remain the same.
force@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I honestly am not sure what you’re confused about. The definition I gave is the SI definition of Kelvin & Celsius since 2019.
blueson@feddit.nu 10 months ago
If ypu want to be radical, use Kelvin. At least it scaled identical to C so it’s easy to comprehend.
barsoap@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Every scale and unit is, ultimately, arbitrary. We all do have a very good understanding of what freezing and boiling water is, though, we don’t have a good intuition of “coldest day in some random place in some random year” is.
Venicon@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
I would like to dump on America for this but as Scotland is in the UK we have some unholy abomination of in between when it comes to our measurements.
namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 10 months ago
I work with Americans and this hits home hard. It’s especially infuriating when they format their dates. “I had a meeting with so-and-so on 4/5” and nobody has any fucking clue what they mean.
The worst part is how hopelessly oblivious they are about it. It’s not even like they don’t care that nobody does things their stupid way - it’s the fact that they’re so insulated that they can’t even fathom that nobody does things the same way they do. It just goes to show how clueless they are about the rest of the world and how little they get out of their neighborhoods.
It drives me mad. At this point, it’s just offensive how ignorant they can be sometimes. If you have to work with other people, you should at least make an effort to be aware of the fact that others do things a different way and try to avoid situations like this, but they just refuse to do so.
Apologies… /rant
tamiya_tt02@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’m American and always use 30 Dec 2023 as my date scheme. It makes much more sense. I also work in a multicultural laboratory, so there should be no question as to what date it is, but some of my colleagues still use mm-dd-yy.
fallingcats@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
CrypticCoffee@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Nah. I’m British, and today is 31/12/2023. We use slashes. American’s are just wrong.
namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 10 months ago
Thanks, I appreciate it! I also try to use the name of the month instead of the number as frequently as possible. To be honest, it’s not really the order of the fields that matters - format it whichever way makes you happy! Just make sure it’s not ambiguous so other people can tell what you mean. And be aware that not everyone interprets things the same way you do
RBWells@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Like the American below, I generally use 30-December 2023 partly because I work with an international company but mostly because after the century rolled over and we had years that looked like months I got confused.
Had a boss that formatted all dates as YYYY-MM-DD because that makes them sort correctly in lists.
Rootiest@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That’s how you know it’s the correct date format
namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 10 months ago
I work in an international company too! And yet, this confusion persists :-/
I also format everything YYYY-MM-DD for my personal use too. When writing prose, usually some other format is just fine, but I really would love if everyone did year-month-day
utopianfiat@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I insist on YYYY-MM-DD because it allows me to use “MM-DD” for short and piss off the euros
orosus@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The MM-DD format, as a euro, pisses me off. I use YYYY-MM-DD though. It’s the recomended format by ISO, and it allows me to name files with that format and sort by name.
PM_ME_WRISTS_GIRL@lemmynsfw.com 10 months ago
Besides the dates, I also still don’t know if 12am is noon or midnight. Do Americans know? Is there a problem with simply counting to 24?
Rehwyn@lemmy.world 10 months ago
12:00AM is midnight because AM is morning, and 12:00:01 AM is in the morning.
Using 12-hour time is just an artifact from all our analog clocks having 12 hours on their face and not wanting to have to add 12 to the number on the clock for half the day.
nao@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
That doesn’t make it less confusing, it’s the beginnng of the morning but uses the highest available number.
Akareth@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Where I’m from, 12:00 a.m. (00:00) is the middle of the night (we call it midnight here), and morning begins when the sun rises (and we say “good morning” during our mornings).
misophist@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yes, it makes perfect sense to count our hours as such:
12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
/s
ThunderclapSasquatch@startrek.website 10 months ago
12AM is midnight. As for the other part I have this mind blowing concept for you, our culture is not the same as yours. We have our own ways of doing things, just like you.
Sanyanov@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Why should anyone cut time in two zones? How does it help or benefit anyone? If anything, it only serves to add extra confusion. In the era of electronic time keeping, there is a wonderful opportunity to ditch an extremely stupid decision that was proliferated by analog clocks.
We have 24 hours in a day, just count them one by one. Boom. Problem solved. No confusion, no complications, no nothing.
Rootiest@lemmy.world 10 months ago
PM is evening, AM is morning
Akareth@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Where I’m from, 12:00 a.m. (00:00) is the middle of the night (we call it midnight here), and morning begins when the sun rises (and we say “good morning” during our mornings).
ThunderclapSasquatch@startrek.website 10 months ago
Exactly and it’s such a minor thing to bitch about, I understand the date system frustration but over using AM/PM vs 24?
Deme@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The notations can be confusing, especially around noon and midnight. Why does 12am not follow 11am???
Where I live we use 12hr time in casual spoken language but pretty much always specify the time of day as well, like eight in the evening or twelve at midnight. But for anything written or even remotely formal, 24h time is used for obvious reasons.
namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 10 months ago
Agreed. I’ve never understood the logic of splitting the hours of the day in half. 1800 is so much nicer than 6PM.
I don’t think that’s purely an American thing though. If I had to guess, I’d say that most of the world uses 12-hour clocks instead of 24-hours. I could be wrong though. Nevertheless, I usually write all times in 24-hour format. But it always sounds awkward trying to use it in speech. I haven’t figured out a good way to do that yet.
ferralcat@monyet.cc 10 months ago
Thailand splits theri days in 4 (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_six-hour_clock)
Sanyanov@lemmy.world 10 months ago
In my country it’s normal to pronounce time in either format, and it doesn’t make any confusion.
Also we don’t use AM or PM when using 12-hour format: we say night/morning/day/evening. Like “3 in the day” means 3PM, or 15:00.
“Fifteen-o-o” works just fine as well.
JDubbleu@programming.dev 10 months ago
Everyone should be using ISO8601 anyway. yyyy-mm-dd is superior to both and leaves 0 ambiguity to the reader no matter where they’re from.
mmagod@lemmy.world 10 months ago
heck even inside these borders… the concept of timezones blows their minds at work lol…
them: “yeah let’s set a meeting at 9am!”
me: eastern? pacific? central? help me… heeeelllp meee
platypus_plumba@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yes, we’ll have the meeting on 3/2/2023
And I’m like… FUCK. I’ll have to ask again.
Sanyanov@lemmy.world 10 months ago
And get answered like: “2nd of March, DUH”
AWittyUsername@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I hate when software is hard coded either those stupid fucking dates. I generally uninstall
Tankton@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Oh god of when you can choose between 4/5/23 or 5/4/23 and your like… ‘_’
books@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I do everything like this 2023-12-24