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The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

climate.gov

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Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#131

Post by djtango »

typewithrhythm wrote: post #57
artursapek wrote: post #44

Earlier 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

I grew up during the F to C transition in the UK and F is not intuitive.

0 = ice 100 = steam

That is pretty intuitive if you ask me. And for gravy comfortable room temp is about 25

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#132

Post by lotsofpulp »

treyd wrote: post #117
epistasis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is that a private company will take the results of government produced meteorology and then have full rights for distribution. At least, that's the plan of one of the current private companies that does this, they want to be the monopoly.

It's insane. I don't understand what could possibly be the justification there.

More money and power for the decision makers.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#133

Post by djtango »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #122
nukem222 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not convinced the people of Doha or Alberta would consider their day to day lives adventures

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#134

Post by taberiand »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #109
beAbU wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-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.

As an American I’m biased, but Fahrenheit matching the 1-100 scale used in so many other things just feels nice. Maps cleanly to 0-1.0 in a float/decimal type in programming which is neat too. Feels less arbitrary even if it actually isn’t. I prefer metric otherwise but for temperature Fahrenheit just “clicks” in ways that Celsius doesn’t.

Fahrenheit doesn't match the 1-100 scale, though - Celsius does. 0 water freezes, 100 water boils.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#135

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

ttepasse wrote: post #75
timschmidt wrote: post #59

Earlier 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.)

American, I think we use fractions all the time: 7/8 inch hardware tools, 3/4 measuring cup in cooking, etc. Especially awkward when you have human distances, because you have to mix feet + inches: 3 feet 4 and 1/4 inches.

It was a dream once I got a metric tape measurer and realized that using centimeters eliminates the need to do annoying conversions.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#136

Post by tnecio »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #127
lesuorac wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The orders of magnitude are different here. Replacing something that becomes a huge problem within two hundred years with something that (potentially) becomes a problem in a few thousand years -- really is better than spending valuable time on developing an "ideal" solution

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#137

Post by hollerith »

taberiand wrote: post #134
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American I’m biased, but Fahrenheit matching the 1-100 scale used in so many other things just feels nice. Maps cleanly to 0-1.0 in a float/decimal type in programming which is neat too. Feels less arbitrary even if it actually isn’t. I prefer metric otherwise but for temperature Fahrenheit just “clicks” in ways that Celsius doesn’t.

Fahrenheit doesn't match the 1-100 scale, though - Celsius does. 0 water freezes, 100 water boils.

Herr Fahrenheit measured the temperature many times over a period of one year in some town in Germany. He defined 0 degrees as the coldest measurement, 100 the hottest measurement.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#138

Post by zdragnar »

reaperducer wrote: post #91
techright75 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no proof he was part of any briefing, and pretty much everyone has denied this has happened. You need to diversify your news sources beyond the ones that confirm your beliefs, truthful or not.

There's no proof he was part of any briefing I guess you missed the video of him going into the Pentagon, and then coming out saying he had a great meeting. It was all over the "legacy" media that the current legacy president doesn't watch or obsess over.

Right, there's only one meeting room at the Pentagon.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#139

Post by wonnage »

mmaunder wrote: post #118
zeagle wrote: post #6

Interesting article. We are past the usual -20 or lower six weeks where I am so feels like a typical year. If I choose a random northern place like Rankin Inlet NU it is still cold up there with a low of -33 tonight. It is a sign of the times when I think huh, climate.gov… is that a reputable source?

Probably is. NOAA and other gov sources help us predict things like clear air turbulence related to the jet stream. One probably doesn’t want to politicize those kinds of predictions too much or risk scraping passengers and their dinners from ceilings.

I doubt that’ll stop the current administration from trying, even unintentionally

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#140

Post by lesuorac »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #127
lesuorac wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> lets do it all over again with fission

You can look at it this way.

Or you could can look at it as we reduced radioactive emissions by switching to nuclear from coal.

Everything has trade-offs. It's not like solar has no side-effects.

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