Science Memes

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submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 134 points 10 months ago (117 children)

I'm not sure I agree with the take for farenheit. It's an arbitraty choice, and to me who grew up in a country that uses celsius, I find that far easier to understand and farenheit may as well be random numbers to me.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It makes sense that you find the system you grew up with to be more intuitive, but I grew up with fahrenheit, and I think you've misunderstood the assertion a little bit.

The older observation that this meme is riffing off of is that 100°C is the point at which water stops being sloshy and starts being steamy, whereas 100°F is the (much fuzzier) point at which humans stop moving around and start decomposing.

The Kelvin addition muddies things because 100K isn't really significant.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

But there's numbers below 0 and beyond 100. I don't know why some are so focused on just those two points

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I feel like 0-100F encompasses most living temperatures in the USA. It's also a cleaner scale (in terms of human-comfortable temperatures) than 32 to 37.779 in that regard. 0F is the temperature where humans need to make sure they aren't wet and make sure their drinking water isn't left outside. 100F is the temperature where we need to be worrying about heat stroke and accelerated dehydration.

So, making this human-intuitive scale of temperatures a 0-100 range makes it easier to understand for a layperson.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

in the USA

Well there's a bit of a problem with that one...

It's also a cleaner scale (in terms of human-comfortable temperatures) than 32 to 37.779 in that regard.

Cleaner..?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

32 to 37.779? You just converted 0C to F (backwards) and 100F to Celsius...

0F is way lower than the temperature water freezes at (32F). Water freezes at 0C.

Comfortable temperatures are between 22C and 27C, let's say, which converts roughly to 72F to 80F. None of these are "more intuitive" than the other.

If I see ice, I know it's below 0C. If water boils in my pot, I know it reached a temperature close to 100C. Fahrenheit on the other hand is based on completely arbitrary points.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Lmao I'm so dumb, I was very tired and wrote this in a state of "brain please wake up" limbo.

Point still stands, just 0 to 100 and -17.777 to -37.778

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Your brain must still be a little tired, because why on earth would you think we would use Fahrenheit's 0 and 100 as a basis for anything in Celsius?

I could say the same thing backwards: 0 to 100 C is 32 to 212 F.

The only reason there aren't weird decimals there, is because Fahrenheit was later adjusted to have whole numbers at those same (water based) temperatures.

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