gmalivuk wrote:Mambrino wrote:That doesn't sound especially rigorous. Why 0 °F is whatever it is, and not -1 °F?
Of course it's arbitrary, but so is every other base unit.
Except time, actually, which at least corresponds to the natural length of a day even if that isn't quite as constant as we'd like it to be. Whatever solution freezes at 0° in a particular system, that particular solution at that particular pressure is unlikely to be
quite what you actually have on hand in most real-life situations. Nothing important happens outdoors at
exactly 0°C, because wind and current and salinity and pressure and the temperature of the ground and at different places in the atmosphere all play their parts, so we can have snow above 0°C and rain below 0°C, we can have ice on the roads above 0°C and water below 0°C.
surely it feels more connected to everyday scientific phenomena
Only because we use K in science and K is designed to be the same size as °C.
I
thought I had written there a line about every scale being arbitrary. Apparently I forgot it, then.
By everyday, I meant more like difference between a fridge and a freezer, or what happens to water in a kettle when it starts boiling. While all your points are correct and valid, I've personally found all that stuff conceptually more sensible and maybe even easier to manage with °C ("yes, it's not incorrect to say that the water starts to boil at 100°C, but actually the pressure counts, too, so on the top Mount Everest it's different. Actually, the pressure is quite important thing to take into account when talking about this stuff, welcome to physics class").
Of course I've never used Fahrenheits that much, so maybe it's just what you grew up with and are accustomed to use.
(Though speaking of Kelvins defined to be same as C, maybe they had a point when they chose to base K with Celsius.)
(Also, 100°C feels like ... quite pleasant actually, for air temperature. Depends on how you define "extended periods of time". A couple of hours?)
I dare you to try it sometime. You would last minutes, tops.
Neil_Boekend wrote:Mikeski wrote:gmalivuk wrote:Mambrino wrote:(Also, 100°C feels like ... quite pleasant actually, for air temperature. Depends on how you define "extended periods of time". A couple of hours?)
I dare you to try it sometime. You would last minutes, tops.
Stand around in 100 degree heat? I'll pass. Pork and beef are smoked at a temperature of only 105-110. The craziest Finnish sauna you can buy in the USA only goes to 90. "Quite pleasant" isn't the usual idea for a sauna; "sweating your ass off" is.
I have often been in a sauna at 105-110°C. It is comfortable if you are used to being in a sauna. If you aren't then it is uncomfortably hot and nauseating. Since I haven't been in a decent sauna in years I expect it would once again be uncomfortable.
Sweating your ass off and quite comfortable can be the same event. For me a sauna is meant to be relaxing, while sweating my ass off.
Neil got it. I think the generally accepted line between "uncomfortable" and "crazy" is somewhere +120°C (and then you're talking about minutes). About 90-100°C is still normal, though.
And while I did say "couple of hours", now that I'm actually
thinking about it, I must backtrack a little: that would include breaks for drinks and showers (so a
slight overestimation). While the whole occasion might take a couple of hours, continuously in the heat room maybe 20-30 min tops at time (caveat: that obviously depends on the temperature and stuff, probably much shorter if it's much over 100°C, maybe even longer if it's 70-80°C). And of course, the humidity of air and the ventilation count, too: the important bit is whether your body is able to manage
its temperature by sweating.
Edit: Speaking of mapping to natural language, we the Celsius users manage with "about/over/under (rounded to nearest divisible by 5)". Is it that much a difference? I don't know.