4mo ago

Burning Up

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I like the saying "Fahrenheit is what you feel, Celsius is what water feels, and Kelvin is what the universe feels".
- Fahrenheit is what Americans feel, Celsius is what everyone else feels, and Kelvin is just Celsius +273.
  
  Kelvin is just Celsius +274.15
  Ftfy
  
  273.15
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin
  
  Oops you're right. I just converted 1°C to kelvin and brain farted
  
  Fahrenheit is what everyone feels. It's a scale of 0 to 100 of how hot it is outside. Excluding extreme outliers, it covers the range of temperatures the average human might experience. In Celsius that's like -20 to 40. I personally use Celsius anyway, because I don't consider it much of an inconvenience, but Fahrenheit is certainly the more human-centric scale.
  
  This is no way describes how I feel. I almost never experience below -5C, e.g. like 20F, but from there down it doesn't really matter if it's 10F or -10F. You need special clothing and then you're fine.
  While my pain point is at 95F, most people I know consider "hot outside" being around 80F, and "unbearably hot outside" at around 88F. So, how is this intuitive?
  
  this is pretty well aligned with how it works here in the US as well. The idea is literally, anything below 0 f is "fucking cold" and anything above 100f is "fucking hot"
  sure, 80f is pretty damn warm, that's how numbers work, they have a range. It's not like there's a distinct point where "hotness" begins and "coldness" ends
  90f is generally pretty hot, but it's mostly tolerable, you drink water, you'll be fine, once you get into the 100f range, you start to run into accidental heat exhaustion heat stroke problems if you aren't really on top of it.
  below 0f, your nose hairs are basically guaranteed to be frozen, and any facial hair you have is probably going to get frozen over time as well.
  It's a heuristic, you're not supposed to treat it as an ultimatum.
  
  I almost never experience below -5C
  Okay. Fahrenheit did. 0°F was supposedly based on the lowest air temperature he measured in his hometown.
  This isn't about pain points and special clothing, it's about measuring the typical range of climate.
  
  Exactly. He did. I don't. So, don't push on me some guy's hometown lowest temperature as a 0.
  (Also he did a bit more than just measure the low of his hometown, but it sorta correlates to his location)
  
  It's a system designed to correlate to typical ambient temperatures, which it does. Just as Celsius is designed to correlate to water temperatures, and Kelvin is designed to correlate to absolute temperatures. Hence the top comment: Fahrenheit is how humans feel (range of climate temperatures humans live in), Celsius is how water feels (range of temperatures for liquid water), Kelvin is how the universe feels (range of all temperatures).
  Denying the nature of the general scale because you don't personally use the whole thing is as silly as calling Celsius pointless because you don't personally use ice cubes.
- Fahrenheit is what that one German town's lowest air temperature measured back in 1708.
  If fahrenheit was what humans felt, then 50° would be room temperature.

537 comments