Topic: Episode #349

[jt512]

One degree F is not too specific. Room temperature is 72 F - not 70, not 75.

You're god damn right it is.  I'm emailing this post to my girlfriend.  She has the bizarre belief that room temperature is 62 in the winter and 82 in the summer. 

[F]ixing 100 to the boiling point of water (at 1 atmosphere, mind you) is arbitrary and all but useless to the average user.

On the other hand, I can't think of anyone to whom fixing 0F to the freezing point of brine is useful, whereas fixing 0C to the freezing point of water would be useful to almost everyone: above 0, it rains; below 0, it snows.

I think it's just what you're used to.

Jay

[craig]

For you.

I think we need a compromise. A unit that is half of a celsius degree, starts at freezing point of water at zero so 100 would be what a hundred and six farienheit

I approve this idea.

[seaotter]

I was talking about Kelvin. And if you use Kelvin, Celsius comes along for the ride.

This is what I was trying to say earlier in the thread.

My scale gives you the best of both worlds. Ease of conversion, just double before you subtract 272. And the intuitive range of freezing at 0 and damn hot at 90.

[jawmo]

So blame the Brits for our backwards, parochial ways.

Well, we shipped our Christians to America and our convicts to Australia. With hindsight maybe it would have been better the other way around, though the aboriginal people of Australia might disagree.

You also shipped your African slaves to America. As for the "aboriginal people," the American Indians, given the choice between convicts and Christians, might have picked the former. The latter certainly didn't do them any favors.

[GodSlayer]

One degree F is not too specific. Room temperature is 72 F - not 70, not 75. Pool temp, likewise, you can feel every 1-2 degrees change.

if I'm ever rich enough to get a heat pump, I'll finally get to find out if this is true.

One degree F is not too specific. Room temperature is 72 F - not 70, not 75. Pool temp, likewise, you can feel every 1-2 degrees change.

wiki says 20 to 25, average used being 23, not "22.22222222222222" (72F exactly)

[GodSlayer]

One degree F is not too specific. Room temperature is 72 F - not 70, not 75.

You're god damn right it is.  I'm emailing this post to my girlfriend.  She has the bizarre belief that room temperature is 62 in the winter and 82 in the summer. 

maybe she's thinking of comfort, not some jargon term 'room temperature'?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_temperature#Comfort_levels

Due to variations in humidity and likely clothing, recommendations for summer and winter may vary; one for summer is 73 °F to 79 °F, with that for winter being 68 °F to 73 °F

sadly YouTube doesn't seem to have the old heat pump ad where the guy's wife walks inside on a winter's day and undresses because they keep the house the same warm temperature all year round, rather than dressing for the conditions and adjusting their heating accordingly.

[Trinoc]

I dispute Steve's suggestion that 100 degrees for boiling point is arbitrary without any practical use. I know that if the oven is above 100 degrees then water in food will tend to boil off, the way it will not do below 100. This seems exactly analogous to knowing that if my fridge goes below 0 degrees then things will start freezing but they will not if it stays above 0.

As for C/F versus K, surely America should use the Rankine scale where degrees are the same size as Fahrenheit, 0^oR is absolute zero and the freezing point of water is 491.67^oR. Then of course you'd have to measure heat in BTUs (Oh, I forgot, you do!*), and you'd need different values for thermodynamic quantities such as Boltzmann's constant. Since a pound is generally used as a unit of weight you would have to measure mass in slugs. Energy would be in foot-poundals so the specific heats of materials would have to be in foot-poundals per degree F. And so on.

Yes, I see how this would make it all much easier for you.

[* I was looking up total US energy use in agriculture to find out how much it is in oil consumption, but whereas the calorific value of oil was in SI units, the total energy consumption was in billions of BTU!]

[GodSlayer]

I can't think of anyone to whom fixing 0F to the freezing point of brine is useful, whereas fixing 0C to the freezing point of water would be useful to almost everyone: above 0, it rains; below 0, it snows.

yea, but, like Steve said, kids know what freezing temperature is with Fahrenheit, it's not like they're oblivious without the aid of Celsius.
...if it's true that it snows below 32F, rains above 32F, well, I'm sure a kid can remember that.

I dispute Steve's suggestion that 100 degrees for boiling point is arbitrary without any practical use. I know that if the oven is above 100 degrees then water in food will tend to boil off, the way it will not do below 100. This seems exactly analogous to knowing that if my fridge goes below 0 degrees then things will start freezing but they will not if it stays above 0.

...but if you used Fahrenheit, wouldn't you still know what temperature to keep your oven or your fridge at? ...it's a different number, not a lack of numbers.

[jt512]

One degree F is not too specific. Room temperature is 72 F - not 70, not 75.

You're god damn right it is.  I'm emailing this post to my girlfriend.  She has the bizarre belief that room temperature is 62 in the winter and 82 in the summer. 

maybe she's thinking of comfort, not some jargon term 'room temperature'?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_temperature#Comfort_levels

Due to variations in humidity and likely clothing, recommendations for summer and winter may vary; one for summer is 73 °F to 79 °F, with that for winter being 68 °F to 73 °F

sadly YouTube doesn't seem to have the old heat pump ad where the guy's wife walks inside on a winter's day and undresses because they keep the house the same warm temperature all year round, rather than dressing for the conditions and adjusting their heating accordingly.

You're all wrong (except Steve). 

Jay

[jt512]

I can't think of anyone to whom fixing 0F to the freezing point of brine is useful, whereas fixing 0C to the freezing point of water would be useful to almost everyone: above 0, it rains; below 0, it snows.

yea, but, like Steve said, kids know what freezing temperature is with Fahrenheit, it's not like they're oblivious without the aid of Celsius.

I didn't mention anything about kids, but now that you bring it up, a freezing point of 0 would give them exposure to the mathematical concept of negative numbers at an earlier age.

Jay

[GodSlayer]

I can't think of anyone to whom fixing 0F to the freezing point of brine is useful, whereas fixing 0C to the freezing point of water would be useful to almost everyone: above 0, it rains; below 0, it snows.

yea, but, like Steve said, kids know what freezing temperature is with Fahrenheit, it's not like they're oblivious without the aid of Celsius.

I didn't mention anything about kids

I mention kids because if even kids can manage, surely adults can, too.

[Chew]

I dispute Steve's suggestion that 100 degrees for boiling point is arbitrary without any practical use.

I dispute your disputation of Steve's suggestion. Why 100 degrees between freezing and boiling? Why not 10 degrees? Or not 1 degree? Why freezing? Why not the temperature difference between maximum density and boiling? It's arbitrary.

[Trinoc]

I dispute Steve's suggestion that 100 degrees for boiling point is arbitrary without any practical use.

I dispute your disputation of Steve's suggestion. Why 100 degrees between freezing and boiling? Why not 10 degrees? Or not 1 degree? Why freezing? Why not the temperature difference between maximum density and boiling? It's arbitrary.

Freezing and boiling are things we observe water doing on an almost daily basis. These other things are not. It could just as well be 1 degree, or 10, or 1000, but a lot of people are unhappy using either large numbers or decimal fractions (why the hell do we use percentages, for example?). The degree was presumably chosen by Celsius, Fahrenheit, etc., to be a unit that represents a, well, degree of change which is neither too small to be normally discernible nor so large that one routinely needs to specify fractions of a degree. With the limited accuracy of instruments at the time, specifying changes to a precision smaller than a degree might have given the false impression that they were accurate to that many figures.

To answer Godslayer's point. Yes, the number of degrees between freezing and boiling points could be anything at all. I could memorise freezing and boiling point on the Rankine scale if I liked. Just like I had to memorise 16 ounces to a pound, 14 pounds to a stone, 8 stones to a hundredweight, 20 hundredweights to a ton, 5¹/₂ yards to a rod, pole or perch and so on. But when I'm calculating something I've got more important things to worry about than conversion factors between units and scales. That's why the metric system, and later the SI system of units, were devised to make all calculations where possible simple powers of 10 without arbitrary scaling factors when combining units (e.g. 1 joule = 1 newton applied over 1 metre).

To anyone who thinks this isn't an issue, I refer them to the fate of a certain Mars probe ...

[Skeptic]

Skeptigrade, Skeptons.. we need a unit of measurement for the confidence in stuff like science journal articles.

[GodSlayer]

Skeptigrade, Skeptons.. we need a unit of measurement for the confidence in stuff like science journal articles.

and another unit for the confidence deserved in the people who tell us how confident to be in the journals.