Science Memes

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Seriously. (lemmy.ca)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago (6 children)

Kelvin is the SI unit. Anyway also for the weather Celsius is clearer: Below 0 = snow, above 0 = rain. And Celsius at least has fixed points that can be recreated - if all thermometers and data on scales were lost we could easily recreate °C, but not °F.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

Ah well I should have said metric measurement then. It is part of the metric system, yes?

If you can’t remember the number 32 then I guess. Personally I think it’s pretty bizarre to have negative temperatures all the time but whatever floats your boat.

Regarding losing all thermometers and data… if you lost the definition of Celsius there would be no way to recreate it. This seems maybe more likely then your scenario.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (4 children)

No seriously what is significant about 0F? I live in a place that sees a lot of negative F too.

It's so arbitrary. If it was 0 at freezing water and 100 at human body temp I'd understand it but no, it's literally nothing significant in people's lives. It has no tangible anchor.

It's purely emotion keeping it around.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

0°F is the coldest night Mister Fahrenheit has ever witnessed, thinking it couldn't become any colder than this.

100°F is Mister Fahrenheit's slightly feverish body temperature.

?????

PS: Pretty much all other countries also had their own measurement systems and simply switched to metric because it made sense. I'm glad we did, and that pretty much all others did too.

PPS: I'd also be up for revamping time measurement, why can't we have 10h a day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute? 100.000 seconds in total per day, currently we have 86.400 so a second would only become slightly shorter.

The French tried to implement that in the First Republic, together with 12 months à 30 days per year, 3 weeks à 10 days per month and 5 (6) extra days at the end of the year to make it work (from Christmas to New Year, how thematic!)

It failed because the French were fearing they'd have to work more (if they'd also only have 2 days off per 10d instead of per 7d). One of the biggest tragedies in French history. Without the week reform the time reform might've succeeded.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Changing the length of a second would be so insanely difficult that it's probably isn't worth attempting. Pretty mush every other standard unit has the second in there somewhere at some point, so changing that would mean spending decades of changing math on so many things. That story about the Mars probe that slammed into the planet because someone screwed up the units? That would be happening everywhere all the time.

In the end you're always going to have weirdness with time because the orbit of the Earth around the sun isn't going to be divided evenly by the rotation of the Earth. Whatever you do is going to come out janky, so why spend all the time and effort to change from our current jankiness to a different janky system? We'd have to put a lot of time and effort into solving the new problems caused by the new jankiness. Then someone else will probably propose some new janky system to replace that system, and it's a never ending frustration because we'll never have a perfect system because ultimately orbital mechanics don't divide into even numbers.

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