Why isnt the list ordered by cursedness?
Galen has by far the lowest score and real Celsius the highest
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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Can we count 10/0 as a big number? Or even just as a number.
no
NaN
LOL, the original Celsius scale really is 10/0 cursed.
Dividing by zero 😱
Dividing by zero
still makes more sense to me than a lower-number-means-warmer-temperature scale.
I am very surprised that Rankine gets such a high cursedness score. Isn't it just the same as Kelvin but based on Fahrenheit instead of Celsius?
Because it implies you are using US Costumary/Imperial units for science or "fancy" engineering.
Yeah, well that’s a cultural thing really. Celcius and fahrenheit scales are both quite arbitrary. The kelvin scale uses absolute zero, which totally makes sense, but the other fixed point is pretty arbitrary when you think of it. The fahrenheit scale makes sense for the human experience of weather, while the celcius scale makes sense for generally life on Earth where water plays an important role. Neither of them are particularly universal, and they both suck in their unique ways.
see also: natural units
(Edit)
Life Pro Tip: If you take the piss out of two units at the same time, you can make everyone equally angry.
Technically they arr arbitrary yes, but sometimes some arbitrary makes more sense than others. Why is fahrenheit 0 at -32°C? Accordinfmg to wikipedia he chose 0°F as the melting point of water and ammonium chloride (what percentage of solution?) and the highest was initially "the average of the hottest temperature of a healthy man". Do you see why this feels more arbitrady then " the melting and boiling point of water at 101.300 Pa"? Not only these points are constant and measurable, but water is such ubiqutous in human life that it feels at least less arbitrary as a reference point.
Historically, it was ok. Now it just doesn't make much sense, sincd we tried (and mostly succeded) to standardize measurements units for centuries (and make them all base 10)
I don’t really use the Fahrenheit scale for anything, but when I bump into it, I prefer to think of those values as: 0°F is a cold winter and 100°F is a hot summer weather. Makes sense for the human experience, which makes it a very practical unit. The original definition was more technical than that, but it was also severely limited by the technology at the time, so it had some flaws.
You also have to look at these units in the proper historical context. Measurements were a complete mess, so having at least something that sort of makes some sense and is somewhat repeatable, is a clear improvement. Both, Fahrenheit and Celcius scales totally addressed those concerns, and that makes them both good enough. Absolute zero and plank temperature weren’t even known back then, so what can you expect.
When it comes to using these units in serious scientific and engineering applications, you run into problems, but the kelvin scale addresses those pretty well. It’s not exactly elegant, but at least it’s functional. Because of historical baggage, we’re pretty much stuck with these units, but it could be worse.
I agree, historically they make sense, but times have evolved and I honestlt believe certain things should belong to the past, just like we abandoned 12 base monetary and measurement systems, except for a single place on earth that just ignores what everyone else does and goes their own way.
In a global world, we should unite things instead of dividing for ideological/political reasons. Still, my own is an ideological reason why the imperial system should disappear, but there are pratical issues it causes, espeically when used internationally in industrial and scientific fields, which is very common.
I think a large portion of it is that governments/institutions/whatever don’t want to pay the large amount of money it would take to replace all signage/software/etc.
The classic “high short term costs for long term benefits” vs. “no (direct monetary) short term costs for ‘future me’ problems”.
I mean the imperial system has it's niche uses too. Fractional measurements are helpful if you're doing multiple of something and you don't want to calculate. What if you have 16 boards and you need to lay them out across 19 feet, what's the width for each board and gap? Well its 19/16 or 1-3/16. And you could say your tolerance is ±1/16. Versus a decimal system, you need to hit 1.1875, with a ±0.0625 tolerance. Yeah no, imperial is better in that case.
Bur imperial does have it's pains, especially once you start working with anything that isn't a multiple of 2. Just wanted to point out it does have some uses.
I think it’s about time we switched to using seconds as the universal time unit. I really hate the messy base 60 conversions we inherited from the Babylonians. Also, month is such a broken unit, and it just makes many calculations unnecessarily complicated.
0°F is a cold winter and 100°F is a hot summer
Makes sense for some specific location. But in general sense 0°F is not cold and 100°F is not hot.
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Human experience in weather is arbitrary and that's just cope, celcius feels as much natural as fahrenheit, the only difference is what you learned as kid
The fahrenheit scale makes sense for the human experience of weather
Wat. Yanks keep saying this but... wat
It’s only fair to give credit when credit is due. Doesn’t mean I like that unit, but I can see where they’re coming from.
It doesn't make any sense to me, sorry
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Culturally speaking, it's pretty cursed to use some units that are specific to a country instead of the global standard for science. Extra cursed if it's for serious engineering (just ask NASA).
The other scores seem to be more about inherent cursedness, not simply 'there is a far better option'.
Yes, but if you have to convert from Fahrenheit to another scale anyways, why in the hell would you not just go straight to Kelvin?!
Converting between Kelvin and Celsius is simple addition; converting between Rankine and Fahrenheit is simple addition. Converting between the two groups requires multiplication, and pre calculator, that's notably harder.
Also, all your kJ/kg/°C or BTU/lb/°F tables and factors are identical when you swap to referencing absolute zero. If you change to the other unit system, all that goes out the window.
Fahrenheit stacks I guess
After joking about this at work, I landed on the most cursed scale I could think of... pT = log10 FPW.
Pros: no bottom to scale, increasing negative values asymptotically approach absolute zero. Water freezes at zero.
1 pT is almost exactly the melting point of iridium. Lightning bolts are around 2 pT. Boiling points of neon and helium are in the neighborhood of -1 and -2.
At least that follows some mathematical logic. Mohs scale of hardness is pretty close to pT scale in that sense, but there’s no mathematics or logic involved. It’s just a list of standard materials that define specific points on the scale. When you compare the results with a more logical scale, it looks neatly non-linar at first glance, but the closer you look, the less sense it makes. It’s just a list of exceptions to whatever rule you may have had in mind.
Doesn’t mean it’s a useless scale. You can totally use it for qualitative assessment of hardness, but steer clear of it when numbers and decimals actually matter.
Real Celsius 10/0 , Galen | 4/-4
Lmfao. Surprised there isn't one that is something like sqrt(-1)/10. Probably something to do with E&M lol
You could totally make an extra cursed temperature scale. Randall proposed the °X scale, but maybe we can do better than that. That was pretty cursed because it defines three points based on statistics observed on of Earth and uses linear interpolation to connect the dots.
I propose an extra cursed system that uses completely fictional values. Let’s take -π as the melting point of unicorns and +GrahamsNumber as the peak temperature in the core of the hypothetical planet Vulcan. Between the two points you can fit any seventh degree polynomial you like in order to get the values that fit your needs. On Wednesdays you can use a sine wave too.
Mesuring temperature in radians: 3.14/π
Is that hot pie like on my grandma’s window sill? Or hot pie like where my grandma gave lap dances to put herself through law school?
These scores a killing me
Solved global warming. Nice.
I actually think a great compromise between c and f would be c x 2 so 200c is boiling point, all the benefits of c and f
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I once read that circular thermometers were a thing and that's why fahrenheit has 180° between freezing and boiling.
I think a degree F was 1/10,000 of the volume of mercury he happened to use in his first thermometer. The 180 was probably a coincidence because bimetal spring thermometers came along later.
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Non-linear temperature hurts my noggin
I recommend staying in abstract then. Real world stuff like latent heat and state-changes might maky it boyle.
Meanwhile me measuring temperature with scale of pain
maybe that's just the Galen scale. subjective units of distress!
It’s about 2.7x I’m not leaving the house today. If it drops down to like 2.5x I might go check the mail.
I was positive that the Wedgwood scale had to be fictional but nope! That Josiah dude was WEIRD 😄
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