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Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

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Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#81

Post by makeitdouble »

School-Cotton wrote: post #60
mgaunard wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"vast majority" is a bit of a hyperbole; there are more English speakers outside of the USA than in it, though it's close to 50/50, and it's indeed the country with the most English speakers.

I did say native English speakers, but regardless, the point stands that the US is an extremely important market for any media targeting itself to the broader Anglosphere.

> Anglosphere

If you're moving the target to the Anglosphere, we have to count the whole population consumming content in English as their second of third language, so the US becomes a way tinier portion of it.

I'll give you that for The Guardian, a US newspaper with US subscribers, the US market is extremely important. The broader case is harder to make.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#82

Post by School-Cotton »

matsemann wrote: post #74
School-Cotton wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as the boundary doesn’t happen in the middle of the work week, I find it completely arbitrary whether the official first day is Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. Why’s it any more weird to start on one or the other?

It just "feels wrong". Like, why is the weekend split in half? Doesn't map to my mental model of the world (which of course is influenced by how I'm used to seeing calendars). Related, but a few years ago the Norwegian broadcaster NRK asked people how the visualize a year. https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually... (English version) Quite interesting how different people are. Mostly it's a clock…

That is interesting. I don’t really have a mental visualization for the concept of “year” at all. If I had to try I guess I’d just imagine a calendar (twelve month-pages).

I wonder if visualizing a year as a circle is a particularly Norwegian thing, or if I’m the odd one out anywhere…

Back to the subject of which day the week begins: I’d say the fact that the week begins on Sunday doesn’t have much of a meaning in US culture, if any. If I say “next week” at work, it clearly means “the next M-F period”. If I wanted to refer to Saturday and Sunday I’d say “this weekend”. So if what I normally mean by a week begins on Monday and ends on Friday, you have to slot the weekend on one of those ends, and it feels slightly wrong whichever way you do it.

So, the only practical, concrete way in which “the week starts on Sunday” means anything to Americans is that we are used to seeing calendars printed with Sunday on the left, and Saturday on the right. I continue to maintain that this is arbitrary! But it does make me really confused when I have to use a calendar widget in an interface that wasn’t localized, and starts with a day other than Sunday, so I get your frustration.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#83

Post by Kwpolska »

algas wrote: post #46
brucedawson wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"To be fair..." (chorus of Letterkenny voices) I appreciate the ASCII-only excuse, but I've corrected the omission anyway. Non-ASCII characters in randomascii - what will they think of next?

You may have overcorrected a bit; 300 Kelvin is written 300K, not 300 °K. (The system is a mess.)

It is written "300 K", with a space in the middle. Possibly even a non-breaking space.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#84

Post by School-Cotton »

makeitdouble wrote: post #81
School-Cotton wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did say native English speakers, but regardless, the point stands that the US is an extremely important market for any media targeting itself to the broader Anglosphere.

> Anglosphere If you're moving the target to the Anglosphere, we have to count the whole population consumming content in English as their second of third language, so the US becomes a way tinier portion of it. I'll give you that for The Guardian, a US newspaper with US subscribers, the US market is extremely important. The broader case is harder to make.

> If you're moving the target to the Anglosphere, we have to count the whole population consumming content in English as their second of third language, so the US becomes a way tinier portion of it.

By “Anglosphere” I don’t mean everyone who speaks English. I mean the countries whose primary language is English and whose majority culture originally descends from England: at least the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. (A few other countries like Ireland or parts of South Africa don’t fit the strict definition but have a long and close association with England so can be thought of similarly. My point here is not to debate to what extent Ireland is culturally similar to England which is of course a controversial subject).

People in these countries consume much of the same media and are much more culturally similar to each other than they are to people in e.g. India or the Philippines, even the ones who speak native-level English.

> The Guardian, a US newspaper with US subscribers

The Guardian is British.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#85

Post by mgaunard »

School-Cotton wrote: post #60
mgaunard wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"vast majority" is a bit of a hyperbole; there are more English speakers outside of the USA than in it, though it's close to 50/50, and it's indeed the country with the most English speakers.

I did say native English speakers, but regardless, the point stands that the US is an extremely important market for any media targeting itself to the broader Anglosphere.

The stats I gave was for English as a first language.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#86

Post by denton-scratch »

masklinn wrote: post #2

> it is not immune to errors They’re pretty much part of the guardian’s dna: > Frequent typographical errors during the age of manual typesetting led Private Eye magazine to dub the paper the "Grauniad" in the 1970s, a nickname still occasionally used by the editors for self-mockery

c.f. Private Eye's "The Getelarph".

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#87

Post by mananaysiempre »

psychoslave wrote: post #7
usui wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kelvin doesn't use degrees

Why do we use degrees for other temperatures by the way? Is that related to some kind of absolute vs relative metric? (Kelvin, I guess, is based on absolute zero as a reference point, doesn't it?) Incidentally, why is the degree immune to disappearance in division unlike all other units? That is, if I divide a distance (m) by a speed (m/s) I get a duration (s). From sheer memory, degree doesn't work like that. Any cl…

> Incidentally, why is the degree immune to disappearance in division unlike all other units?

I understand why one could say that, but I’d say it’s more misleading than helpful. (And the reason why is directly connected to the problem TFA discusses.)

Instead of temperature, let’s look at time first.

If you’re measuring the temporal extent of an event, then it absolutely makes sense to divide 30s by 15s or 6 days by 3 days and obtain a dimensionless 2: one thing takes twice as long as another, and the factor 2 that doesn’t depend on the choice of units, so it’s dimensionless.

Now consider dates. The year AD 2022 denotes (not very precisely) a point in time by specifiying its distance from a fixed reference in years; as another example, astronomers use the “Julian day”, which is a (possibly non-integer) number of days from a different reference point.

And you could technically divide AD 2022 by AD 1011—the ratio between the distances to the reference point is indeed a dimensionless 2, and if you counted days from it instead of years it’d still be the same. But it’s just not a very useful statement. And if you divide the Julian days instead, you’ll get a different number, because the reference point has moved 4712 years. So you can divide the time coordinates as long as the chosen origin stays in place, but you can’t really divide points in time.

Similarly, when you’re talking about differences in temperature, degrees work like any other unit, but temperatures themselves cannot be divided in the standard scales (without tying yourself to the scale): you’ll get the same result in Celsius and Réaumur (using the same origin) but a different result in Fahrenheit (using a different origin).

Of course, the silly part is that there is a natural origin for temperature, it’s just that the usual scales don’t use it. But then there’s a natural origin for time as well (and you’ll occasionally see it used in cosmology), it’s just that it’s metrologically inconvenient (being known only very approximately) in addition to being very far away.

(Library assignment: what defines a coordinate system on an affine line?)

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#88

Post by reddalo »

alpaca128 wrote: post #70
reddalo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Italian and I have the same problem. You just have to set the system to English (UK) and all your problems will be fixed :)

Except now the web browser will offer to translate every Italian website you visit.

You can easily prevent that by choosing "Never translate Italian"

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#89

Post by makeitdouble »

School-Cotton wrote: post #84
makeitdouble wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anglosphere If you're moving the target to the Anglosphere, we have to count the whole population consumming content in English as their second of third language, so the US becomes a way tinier portion of it. I'll give you that for The Guardian, a US newspaper with US subscribers, the US market is extremely important. The broader case is harder to make.

> If you're moving the target to the Anglosphere, we have to count the whole population consumming content in English as their second of third language, so the US becomes a way tinier portion of it. By “Anglosphere” I don’t mean everyone who speaks English. I mean the countries whose primary language is English and whose majority culture originally descends from England: at least the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Ne…

> The Guardian is British.

Touché.

> By “Anglosphere” I don’t mean everyone who speaks English

Thanks, point taken.

Re: Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard

#90

Post by Sharlin »

School-Cotton wrote: post #60
mgaunard wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"vast majority" is a bit of a hyperbole; there are more English speakers outside of the USA than in it, though it's close to 50/50, and it's indeed the country with the most English speakers.

I did say native English speakers, but regardless, the point stands that the US is an extremely important market for any media targeting itself to the broader Anglosphere.

If you included non-native speakers, the stats would be much more lopsided than nearly 50:50.
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