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Show HN: Degrees What?

degreeswhat.com

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Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#91

Post by sails »

I like it.

The link https://degreeswhat.com/?100 too quickly tracks the mouse and you lose the pointer to the specific degrees

Unfortunately your compass bearings seems a bit off.

1. Compass degrees go 0 to 360

2. North is traditionally at the top

Yours only has half the compass (East) and seems to be reversed or mirrored

Edit: direct linking works https://degreeswhat.com/?270 and I get the correct bearing (270 = West), I think it is still mirrored for a compass because you increase from 0 anticlockwise.

Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#92

Post by perilunar »

j1elo wrote: post #85
mdturnerphys wrote: post #3

I always want to ask “degrees what?" I once worked on a system that ran at -40 degrees. I loved leaving off the scale when giving tours and telling about it, because someone would invariably ask if I meant Celsius or Fahrenheit and then everyone got to learn where the crossing point of the two scales is.

Funnily enough, the scale on the linked page doesn't allow me to set -40°. It jumps between -39.9 and -40.1 So seems like -40.0 is really where the singularity lies. Either that, or a simple rounding issue. I choose to believe it's the former.

Not a rounding error in this case, but more to do with the precision of your input device and your screen size. The input angle and the converted temperatures are rounded to the nearest 0.1 degrees, but it is possible to hit 40.0° (I should probably add an option to round to whole degrees.)

If you really want to hit an exact number, you can add a query string to the URL.

https://degreeswhat.com/?-40

Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#93

Post by globular-toast »

arrowsmith wrote: post #86
fouronnes3 wrote: post #2

Congrats on a good execution of a fun idea. The mobile UX feels very good. Also sorry to be that guy but: > when people specify a temperature in "degrees" when it’s not clear from the context which scale is being used. It should be degrees Celsius. Anything else is just insane ;)

I'm British and always used to think that Fahrenheit was stupid but I've warmed up to it (pardon the pun) after spending some time in the U.S. Celsius is obviously more useful in a scientific context, but 99% of the time when I'm talking about the temperature, I'm not doing a scientific experiment, I'm asking "how hot/cold is it outside?" In that context I actually find Fahrenheit to be a more intuitively useful scal…

> Thanks, America!

Erm, they didn't invent it. Most (all?) American units were inherited from British. Farenheit was invented in Europe.

I have also warmed to Imperial/American units for certain things. A lot of simple recipes are easier to remember in ounces than in grams. For example, 5 ounces of flour and 4 ounces of butter gives you enough shortcrust pastry for a 9 inch tin. Inches seem about the right size, but centimeters are too small. People's heights tend to fall around 5-6 feet which is nice, or 150-180/1.5-1.8 which is kind of awkward. Basically, imperial measurements seem much more "human" while metric seems based on arbitrary universal constants like the speed of light which have absolutely no bearing on our lives.

None of this means that "cups" are a sane way to measure ingredients for cooking, though. There's just so many reasons why it's bad but even just from a laziness point of view it's an extra thing to wash up.

Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#94

Post by Y_Y »

aziaziazi wrote: post #55
Y_Y wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Negative temperature is a perfectly normal and well-studied phenomenon with lots of common examples. Temperature is defined as the rate of change of entropy wrt internal energy, usually more energy means more entropy, but it's not a given. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature

> A system with a truly negative temperature on the Kelvin scale is hotter than any system with a positive temperature. If a negative-temperature system and a positive-temperature system come in contact, heat will flow from the negative- to the positive-temperature system Wait what?!! That feeds my daily “oh oooh” moment.

Energy flow wants to maximize entropy. Usually things flow from hot to cold because a cold thing will "make better use" of the energy to create entropy (i.e. permit microstates). Something with negative temperature will increase entropy by losing energy, and the positive temperature thing will increase entropy by gaining it, so it's (thermodynamically) a no-brainer.

Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#95

Post by deelly »

unwind wrote: post #80
flangola7 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not? What is it measured in then?

It is simply measured in Kelvin. Kelvin is the standard unit for temperature, 0 Kelvin is the absolute zero point. Each step is the same size as a degree Celsius, but there are no "degrees". Edit: remove assertion that the scale does not go into negative, because physics.

As a non-native reader, I`m not sure that I understand. Could you explain why 100 Kelvin, but 100 degrees Celsius and 100 degrees Fahrenheit? Is there some special meaning in a word "degrees" there?

Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#97

Post by dillydogg »

arrowsmith wrote: post #86
fouronnes3 wrote: post #2

Congrats on a good execution of a fun idea. The mobile UX feels very good. Also sorry to be that guy but: > when people specify a temperature in "degrees" when it’s not clear from the context which scale is being used. It should be degrees Celsius. Anything else is just insane ;)

I'm British and always used to think that Fahrenheit was stupid but I've warmed up to it (pardon the pun) after spending some time in the U.S. Celsius is obviously more useful in a scientific context, but 99% of the time when I'm talking about the temperature, I'm not doing a scientific experiment, I'm asking "how hot/cold is it outside?" In that context I actually find Fahrenheit to be a more intuitively useful scal…

I once read an article I've wished I could find again online.

It begins with something like "I decided to create the perfect scale for measuring the temperature outside for the weather. Of temperatures taken where people live, I will scale the 95th percentile of high temperatures as 100 and the 95th of cold temperatures as 0."

The goal of which was, if a temperature is 100 is really hot.

My memory is that using this method the scale was within 2 degrees of Fahrenheit! Of course, I've never found the story again so who knows the details of their method or if I'm even remembering correctly.

Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#98

Post by perilunar »

globular-toast wrote: post #93
arrowsmith wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm British and always used to think that Fahrenheit was stupid but I've warmed up to it (pardon the pun) after spending some time in the U.S. Celsius is obviously more useful in a scientific context, but 99% of the time when I'm talking about the temperature, I'm not doing a scientific experiment, I'm asking "how hot/cold is it outside?" In that context I actually find Fahrenheit to be a more intuitively useful scal…

> Thanks, America! Erm, they didn't invent it. Most (all?) American units were inherited from British. Farenheit was invented in Europe. I have also warmed to Imperial/American units for certain things. A lot of simple recipes are easier to remember in ounces than in grams. For example, 5 ounces of flour and 4 ounces of butter gives you enough shortcrust pastry for a 9 inch tin. Inches seem about the right size, but…

> while metric seems based on arbitrary universal constants like the speed of light

Um, No. Metric is based on the size of the Earth and the density of water.

The original definition of the meter was "one ten-millionth of the distance from the pole to the equator", making the circumference of the Earth 40,000 km or 40 Mm. The kilogram was originally defined as the mass of one litre of water. (1 m³ = 1000 kg). It wasn't arbitrary.

Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#100

Post by arp242 »

wruza wrote: post #36

This design reminds me an example from Jef Raskin’s book about user interfaces. Instead of choosing a mode (C->F, F->C) it just shows both results, so a user can pick what they need without interacting. It would be cool if compass was inertial.

The downside of this is that there are two numbers to read, which does increase the cognitive overload a little bit (and also requires more UI space, in some cases). But absent any context or input, this is also what I do, including for other things like dates: "4th of March", "Mar 4th", "Mar 4", or some variation thereof, rather than "3/4", "4-3", "2023-03-04", or whatever. This is the only way to make things instantly clear to everyone, no matter where they're from or their background.
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