Earlier quoted context omitted.
We had a -40F windchill day here in Michigan a few years ago.
-40°C feels pretty much the same as -40°F
Because it is the same.
The polar vortex is hitting the brakes
121–130 of 349 posts
Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are used to Celsius, sure. But the point the op was making is Fahrenheit was designed with humans in mind and Celsius with the changes of the state of water. Your average person didn't really care what temperature water boils at, just that it is hot.
> Fahrenheit was designed with humans in mind If there was a design, it's not clear what the intent was. It seems about twice as precise as it needs to be (i certainly can't perceive 1F°—for all intents and purposes, 70 feels about the same as 69 and 71) and doesn't seem to correlate to any scale that is immediately based off the needs of humans. At least compared to celcius.
0F .. 100F is about the range of temperatures a human living on earth could reasonably expect to experience without deliberate adventuring. It's not a precise range - plenty of people live in Doha (way above 100F) and in Alberta (way below 0F) - but it's a pretty reasonable approximation.
Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes
#123It's almost like there are better indicators of spring than groundhogs.
So the thing was Groundhog Day is actually really interesting. The prediction doesn't really have to do with groundhogs but instead has to do with whether it is cloudy or not on Groundhog Day. It's kind of funny about it is that they kinda got it backwards. If you bet against Punxsutawney Phil you'll be doing better than random chance.
Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
30 is hot. 20 is nice. 10 is cold. 0 is ice. Not hard to remember for converting Celsius to how humans typically perceive temperature.
Cool yeah let's compress the entire scale to 0-35 and waste the other 65 up to 100 lol yeah what a great scale
The "entire scale" has no maximum. So your waste of the Celsius scale from 35-100 is Fahrenheits waste of the scale from 0-32 or whatever you're trying to base your comments on.
Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes
#125Doing climate research in Fahrenheit in 2025 gives me second hand embarrassment.
Why? Celsius is just as arbitrary a choice as Fahrenheit. It brings nothing extra to the table. You might as well complain that tapered pipe threads are in US inches or that astronomers use AUs and light seconds rather than meters.
Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
0 is cold as fuck, 100 is hot as fuck. Perfect human scale. Stay jelly
-40 - cold as fuck, 40 - hot as fuck. 0 - shit freezes, better drive carefully. I don't understand why this is always breought out when farenheit is criticized, as if the 0F-100F thing is the "killer app" for temperature scales.
Anytime your scale has to go into negative numbers to represent common scenarios, it's not human friendly.
If you're not tying your scale to human-specific temps, why not just use Kelvin? At least that won't go negative.
Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are no "unsolved problems" for nuclear (because the safe storage of fissile waste for 10k years isn't a problem we need to solve, apparently). By contrast, getting solar+wind fully up and running requires totally solving the storage problem. Plus the libs love it. Hence ... nuclear.
> because the safe storage of fissile waste for 10k years isn't a problem we need to solve, apparently We never solved it for the other material that we dug up and burned (coal). So coal ends up emitting a ton of radioactive waste because uh when you dig up the ground you also dig up radioactive uranium (there's no 100% pure carbon deposits). It's also only a self-inflicted problem. You can technically re-use the was…
> We never solved it for the other material that we dug up and burned (coal).
Oh yes. Having fucked up this badly with long chain hydrocarbon combustion, lets do it all over again with fission, because ... well, we did it once already, right?
Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why acknowledgment of climate change would lead to nuclear over solar/wind.
There seems to be a delusional part of the Internet that is convinced that nuclear is the only future, and solar and wind aren’t. To settle this, you basically need to look at what China is doing —- which is to build a lot of nuclear and then exponentially more solar and wind. We’re a huge percentage of the way down the slide to a mostly renewable world with storage, and some nuclear at the edges. But it isn’t a comp…
> There seems to be a delusional part of the Internet that is convinced that nuclear is the only future, and solar and wind aren’t.
"Exponentially more" means literally nothing. 1 is also an exponent.
China is building literally everything. It's also a geographically diverse country, with wide ranges of different climates. Solar is appropriate for Hainan, but makes little sense for Harbin.
Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
My problem isn't remembering the scale, it's that Fahrenheit offers me double the effective resolution and descriptive accuracy without awkward decimal points in the numbers used. I like my room at 73F, not 72F or 74F, and I can feel the difference. That's 22.77C. :-/
My main observation in temperature scale and imperial lengths discussions om the Internet is that Americans seem to have a strange aversion against fractional parts of numbers, as if those were irrational. (On the other hand a lot of Americans consume fava beans.)
I found this take from 'Torque Test Channel' (tests battery tools) humorous: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QUum9NymZY
Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Celsius is useful if you're a beaker of water. Fahrenheit is useful if you're a human.
Humans cannot reliably determine the difference in one degree c, even though it's bigger... Fahrenheit is too fine grained, and has no interesting points relative to the things I interact with. I freeze an boil water often, however
This is false. I frequently find myself annoyed at my AC because it only has settings of 72°F and 74°F, and they are a little too cold and a little too warm for me. I want 73°F. When it's around room temperature, you can absolutely tell the difference.
The further away from room temperature, the less we can distinguish. All our senses work logarithmically like that.