• frezik@midwest.social
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    10 days ago

    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.

    • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
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      10 days ago

      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.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        10 days ago

        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.

    • lime!@feddit.nu
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      10 days ago

      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?

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        10 days ago

        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.

        • lime!@feddit.nu
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          10 days ago

          -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.

          • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            9 days ago

            18 is such an arbitrary place for “special precautions”

            cool little trick, you see how -18 is like, pretty close to -20, yeah. You can just round them. It really doesn’t matter

            • lime!@feddit.nu
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              9 days ago

              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.

              • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                9 days ago

                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?

                • lime!@feddit.nu
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                  9 days ago

                  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?

                  • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                    9 days ago

                    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

      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 days ago

        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.

        • lime!@feddit.nu
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          9 days ago

          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.

        • uienia@lemmy.world
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          9 days ago

          What if it was 99f? Or 1f? Would your scientific “damn this bitch hot out here” change to something else?

          • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            9 days ago

            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?

    • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
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      10 days ago

      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.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        10 days ago

        Base 10 makes it much easier to remember.

        When was the last time you did math related to temperature?

        • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
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          10 days ago

          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?

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          9 days ago

          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.

    • uienia@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      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.