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Show HN: Degrees What?

degreeswhat.com

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Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#101
post #95
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Earlier comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36584908

Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kelvin is not measured in degrees however, so is excluded by implication

Wait, so it's just "five Kelvin", not "five degrees Kelvin"? TIL. Now that I think about, what's the etymological reason we use "degrees" to talk about temperature? We don't measure force in "degrees Newton" or electric current in "degrees Ampère". Why do we do it for Celsius and Fahrenheit?

Five kelvins. Just like five metres, no capital letters or funny symbols.

The reason you can do it for Celsius or Fahrenheit is that those are scales but not units. The energy in two bodies (with constant heat capacity) at 100° is not the same as in a single body at 200°, but if you use kelvins then it works out.

Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#103
post #85

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.

If you’re using a touch display, it’s easier to land on specific numbers by moving your finger away from the centre. The further your finger, the finer the adjustment.

Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#104
post #90

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…

Like you, I also find celsius more useful for knowing how hot some thing is while fahrenheit is more useful for knowing how hot some where is. I also find inches, feet, miles etc. more intuitive than meters for basically everything. "so-and-so meters" or "such-and-such kilometers" doesn't describe anything to me, give it to me in inches/feet/miles so I can visualize the damn thing. Moral I suppose is that metric is g…

I suppose the moral is that we relate to whatever measurement we grew up to and are used to. I have no problem visualising meters and kilometers, and I am as dumb an ape as you.

Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#105

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.

That’s how I convert between Celsius and Fahrenheit, if I have to do it in my head: Add 40, multiply by 9/5 or 5/9 depending on what direction, subtract 40. Easily remembered!

Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#106
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but some of my favourite cookbooks are American. What can you do?

Convert to F and also buy measuring cups/spoons and glare angrily from the recipe to my trusty scale, which stands unused in the corner, I guess. Measuring by weight is the one cooking-related hill that I will die on. (Recently, I had a recipe ask for four cups of lettuce, which could've been anything from 0.5x to 4x of what I finally went with, depending on how much I packed the cups. It's lunacy)

If there's anything specific I learned about cooking, it's that there is no specificity. Give up that fight and find another hill to die on, for your sake.

Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kelvin is not measured in degrees however, so is excluded by implication

Wait, so it's just "five Kelvin", not "five degrees Kelvin"? TIL. Now that I think about, what's the etymological reason we use "degrees" to talk about temperature? We don't measure force in "degrees Newton" or electric current in "degrees Ampère". Why do we do it for Celsius and Fahrenheit?

> We don't measure force in "degrees Newton"

Not for force, no, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_scale

Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#109
Huge missed opportunity in this tool to actually answer the "wtf degrees?" question.

Fahrenheit temperature degrees are based on concepts of angular degrees (just as Centigrade is based on concepts of slope).

Many people know the Fahrenheit temperature scale is based in part on the coldest fixed temperature readily available to a scientist in the 1700's, namely the coldest temperature achievable when water ice is placed in a salt water bath (which he called 0 degrees).

Because choosing this fixed point meant Fahrenheit was basing his temperature scale on water, he viewed the coldest pure water temperature (ice) and the hottest pure water temperature (boiling) as significant in that they were, in his mind, opposite "directions" for water.

In his mind, frozen water and boiling water were therefore 180 degrees apart from each other.

Why did water ice and boiling water get these crazy 32 degree and 212 degree temperatures? The Fahrenheit scale is based on two constraints, not one.

The first, as is commonly known, is optimally salted ice water should be zero degrees.

The second constraint is that frozen water and boiling water should be 180 degrees apart.

212 degrees - 32 degrees = 180 degrees. If you constrain the temperature of salted ice to 0 and constrain the temperatures of frozen and boiling water to differ by 180, you get the fixed points of 32 and 212.

When Celsius invented the temperature scale we call centigrade, he used very similar constraints and also used angular thinking.

Both scales consider the freezing and boiling points of pure water to be significant.

The Celsius scale uses the freezing point of water as its zero, the Fahrenheit scale does not.

The Fahrenheit scale uses 180 degree based angular thinking to describe the transition from ice to steam, hence T(boiling) - T(ice) = 180.

The Celsius scale uses surveyor's percentage slope terminology (where a "grade", as in centigrade, of 100 corresponds to rise = 100% of run, or 45 degrees in angular terms), so T(boiling) - T(ice) = 100.

This page would be a wonderful vehicle for showing these connections (and the ice equals about 30 degrees and human body temperature equals about 90 degrees coincidences that Fahrenheit the numerologist found so compelling).

I hope the creator tweaks their page to show the actual angular history and relevance of these temperature scales. There is quite a bit of history of science in these relationships, all with the advantage of being readily accessible to a bright grammar school kid, which is a great age to stoke the fires of interest in science.

Re: Show HN: Degrees What?

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well yes but those measurements are still "arbitrary" in the sense that they have no relation to anything that humans regularly deal with or have an intuition for.

Basing a unit of measurement on the size of the Earth? Why not base it on the size of the Sun, or on the distance between Toronto and Timbuktu, or on the combined height of every member of the U.S congress if they all laid head to toe? Those numbers mean nothing to me, but I have a good intuitive feel for distances like "the general range of human heights", "the size of my foot", or "how far I can walk in an hour". Imperial measurements have their origins in those kind of intuitive, everyday quantities that we humans have a natural feel for; that's the sense in which they're not "arbitrary".

That doesn't nmake imperial measurements unconditionally "better", it just makes them more useful and relatable in certain contexts.

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