Show HN: Degrees What?

Ovens aren't accurate enough for measuring 5°C, let alone 2.5°C.

(Ignoring badly-translated American recipes which call for 179°C and 454.5g of potatoes.)

For air temperature, my behaviour wouldn't change at all if someone told me it is 18±0.25°C rather than the normal 18±0.5°C. We could round to the nearest 2° and it would be fine.

It's how these things go. You and me think of "temperature" as something simple, like it all started. You know, you find some material that noticeably expands or contracts when warmed or cooled, you turn it into an indicator along what will be a scale, and you make a mark for e.g. "roughly when water starts freezing over" and "when water starts boiling"[0]. You make a regular gradation in between, let it spill over below and above your "min" and "max" anchors, you put some numbers on this, and "Bob's your uncle".

This of course is super useful, so others refine your "thermometer", as they realize just how stable and broadly-applicable this "temperature" is as a measure. Eventually some start asking how it all works, and you hear some grumbling about average kinetic energy of particles, which still kinda makes sense. I mean, lots of tiny things buzzing around, and there's that German guy saying you can't possibly measure each of the tiny things individually, but whatever - the average, low-frequency part is stable.

But then those theorists push and push, and break through the barriers of sanity. They enter R'lyeh and start transcribing the Eldritch tablets found inside. Suddenly, you see temperature redefined using something else, something you recall should also be a statistical phenomenon but suddenly isn't[1]. You see words like entropy and enthalpy thrown around, and then some American mathematicians get involved, and suddenly there's also negtropy and fractional bits, and nothing makes any kind of sense anymore - temperatures going below absolute zero, the "nothing actually moves anymore" point, leading to negative temperatures where heat flows from colder to hotter...

...really that's one of the least weird thing in hard sciences these days.

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[0] - In the process discovering that this was a really good choice of anchors, as water behaves in strange ways at exactly those two temperatures.

[1] - Or is it? Are you sure what "statistical" means these days? Are you sure what "means" means these days?

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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundiver

This approach reminds me of the works of a different person - Edward Tufte. He writes about visualizing information, but that by itself is a user interface (even if we didn't call it this until recently). He gives plenty of praise to designs like this - which show you everything at once, and play into strengths of your visual system, which is very good at focusing, zooming out, filtering out things you're not interested in, and switching focus rapidly.