• SoyViking [he/him]
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    51 year ago

    Yeah that’s all very cool but Celsius means that the temperature display on my kettle reaches 100 once the water is boiling. That’s a round number. Checkmate, atheists.

  • @[email protected]
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    551 year ago

    Celsius can be used in place of all three, the others cannot.

    The freezing point of water is also a great place to zero the scale.

    • ayaya
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      91 year ago

      The freezing point of water is also a great place to zero the scale

      I disagree. Realistically the scale shouldn’t be able to be negative at all. It doesn’t really make any sense for something have a negative temperature.

      Imagine if other scales worked that way. An object can’t be negative centimeters long. Light can’t be negative lumens. You can’t score negative % on a test. If you are measuring something you can’t have less than nothing.

      • @[email protected]
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        101 year ago

        It’s not nothing, it’s just below the freezing point of water. Zero energy is zero Kelvin. This is also a bad take because Fahrenheit also goes negative. I suppose you should just start using Kelvin if that is your opinion.

    • @[email protected]
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      251 year ago

      i love this idea that water is completely irrelevant to humans, as if it’s not like 60% of our mass and vital to living

      yeah no let’s base the temperature scale around what some english dude felt was comfortable

      • ioen
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        41 year ago

        Yeah, like who needs to tell quickly whether road conditions will be icy? It’s much more useful to know how much warmer it is than the arbitrary temperature Americans say is the lowest you can survive

    • @[email protected]
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      51 year ago

      I could be wrong on this, but I think Kelvin is basically required for thermodynamic measurements. Entropy measurements, for example, depend on ratios between temperatures relative to absolute zero. You could still manage using centigrade of course, but you would have to offset all of your temperature measurements by 273.15

      Probably a lot of other physical applications that also depend on having an absolute zero reference, but that’s the only one I can think of for now.

    • mac
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      1 year ago

      Plus 100 is boiling it’s a perfect scale.

  • Flax
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    111 year ago

    “On a scale of -20 ➡️ 40, how hot are you?” Isn’t that hard to comprehend

  • @[email protected]
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    511 year ago

    Most people are inherently biased towards their chosen system. A “water scale” doesn’t make sense to fahrenheit users, and a “human scale” is dismissed as even existing by the Celsius users. But hey, if you want to fight, have at it. It’s annoying and pointless, but that’s what the internet is for.

    • @[email protected]
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      211 year ago

      Did it never occur to you that Celsius is basically Kelvin with the zero point moved to human reference?

      Human reference because >50% of our body is water. We are essentially water bags.

      • @[email protected]
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        121 year ago

        This is interesting but not really justified historically. Celsius predates the concept of absolute zero, and water is very important to our world, not just ourselves.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          I was replying to a (now gone) post on how Kelvin is for science, Fahrenheit for humans ,and Celsius is useless. It should give a perspective how to get from Kelvin to Celsius, not give a wildly off-topic history lesson.

    • @[email protected]
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      71 year ago

      how do you calibrate a fahrenheit thermometer? With celsius it’s hilariously trivial, if the thermometer says it’s about 0 when you see water freeze, it’s correct enough for everyday use.

      • TheHarpyEagle
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        151 year ago

        I mean you can do the same with a Fahrenheit thermometer, just check that it reaches 32. Most anyone used to that scale knows 32 is the magic number.

      • AlpineSteakHouse [any]
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        111 year ago

        how do you calibrate a fahrenheit thermometer? With celsius it’s hilariously trivial, if the thermometer says it’s about 0 when you see water freeze, it’s correct enough for everyday use.

        You do the exact same but use 32 degrees instead of zero. I know celsius is cool and good but most people seem incapable of understanding how its just fucking marks on a line and any non-sciencey advantage is pretty much null.

    • TheHarpyEagle
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      1 year ago

      I’m honestly just so tired. Could I snap my fingers and have the US switch to metric units with everyone understanding them as intuitively as the units they grew up with, I would. I really don’t have an emotional attachment to what letter appears next to the temperature.

      We couldn’t even stick the the unanimously popular bill to abolish DST. This issue is so much further down the list of priorities and yet so much more expensive to change that I don’t expect it to come up during my lifetime. To spend the next few decades arguing about it without any hope of a meaningful resolution sounds like my personal hell.

    • @[email protected]
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      211 year ago

      “human scale” is dismissed as even existing by the Celsius users

      Celsius user here.
      I find “I’m more used to it, therefore it makes more intuitive sense to me” is a perfectly understandable argument.

      The problem with the human scale argument is that it makes it sound completely arbitrary.
      To a human there is no objective difference between -1F, 0F or +1F. They are all about the same degree of “cold”.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        Also when they describe their fahrenheit human scale it is “0 is really cold” and “100 is really hot”, which are subjective and not very informative gauges of anything.

      • @[email protected]
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        51 year ago

        Is there a difference between 19, 20, and 21 Celsius? It’s also pretty subtle. Yes, there’s a bigger difference than fahrenheit, but I’ve never cared regardless of scale down to what degree the temperature is. As a fahrenheit user, it’s always 10s. 0-10, 10-20, etc.

        • @[email protected]
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          31 year ago

          Is there a difference between 19, 20, and 21 Celsius?

          First off, nobody claimed that Celsius is based on human perception so humans not being able to differentiate between these is simply irrelevant to the argument.
          Second, the bounds of 0 and 100 are based on the freezing temp of water which are specific, non-arbitrary temperatures.

          I’m not arguing one system over the other, I just think the “human scale” argument has been made up just to have an argument.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          Is there a difference between 19, 20, and 21 Celsius?

          Yes, as anyone that’s ever worked in an office can tell you.

          Edit: Apparently I was expecting too much cognitive ability / common knowledge so let me be clearer: Generally women prefer it warmer (>20), men like it cooler (<20). It’s a very common office discussion.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        i mean a lot of measurements are arbitrary necause their manmade. thats creation of measurements in a nutshell. they exist to give people context to conpare to. time is a manmade construct, unit of length is a manmade construct. unit of weight is a manmade construct.

        for instance with 1 kilo, tell me the last time a regular person had platinum-iridium ingot. its completely arbitrary.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 year ago

          tell me the last time a regular person had platinum-iridium ingot

          What, you don’t?

          But yeah, I agree, units are made up. I mean, why is the boiling point at 100C and not any other number? Someone made it up.
          I’m just saying the argument “0F is really cold” is just as true as -10F is really cold or +10F is really cold.

  • amio
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    1 year ago

    How very American.

    I suppose it is how people feel, just, y’know, the roughly 4-5% of people who happen to already use that temperature scale. Shocker, that.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      I hate human scales. Last few times I stood on one it told me I was too heavy for my liking.

  • @[email protected]
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    511 year ago

    Yeah, the reason you can’t stop thinking about it is because it makes no sense but you insist it does so your brain can’t stop processing it, trying to figure it out, but every answer you come up with is crap and you know it. It’s called cognitive dissonance, you’re really not supposed to lean into it.