this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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Science Memes

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Burning Up (mander.xyz)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I present the temperature scale that I made up- the Human Scale (H°)

I thought about the Fahrenheit vs Celsius debate, and I think both have practical uses, however I think combined they could make a very practical scale.

Fahrenheit: while my American sensibilities agree that 100° is a good marker for what % of my patience is used up to cut a bitch, I think a similar place would be the average human body temperature. For this reason, 100°H = 98.6°F . It's not a perfect match, but it can still give us the satisfaction of "IT'S 100°!?" while having practical implications for medical uses "your body temperature is 102°, 2° warmer than average".

Celsius: I think this scale makes a ton of sense for colder temperatures. When the thermometer reads 0°, that's when you can expect snow. For this reason, 0°H = 0°C.

The conversation rates are:

H = (F-32) × 1.5

H= C × 2.7

More precise is

H = (F-32) × 1.501501501...

H = C × 2.7027027027...

While using the freezing point of water and the average human body temperature seem like inconsistent and arbitrary benchmarks, my goal is less about consistency and more about practicality for everyday use.

Now watch this scale grow as big as Esperanto.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I believe the Fahrenheit scale was originally set up for 100° to be human body temperature. We're just built colder now I guess? I had to look up what zero was and apparently he originally set it at the coldest the air had ever been around his village, but later had to standardize it and so cooked up some brine that froze at 0°.

I would propose that 100 should be calibrated around the wet bulb temperature, which I think is around 105°F but varies with humidity. That's the temperature where sweating doesn't cool you off any more, so any temperature 100 or more is deadly to most people. I like 0 being freezing for water, seems sensible and is also a good "prolonged exposure to this or lower will kill you" cutoff point.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I heard it was supposed to be human body temperature, but they used horse body temperature instead because it was close to human body temperature but more... stable.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Straight to jail with you

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

the wet bulb temperature^1^ is just the temperature of a wet thermometer, and varies with humidity and temperature. Wet bulb temp is never higher than the dry bulb temp, so (entertainingly) you're proposing that the meaning of 100° varies wildly and is always lower than the true temperature, effectively making the air temperature always ≥100°, and increases when the air is drier, like some sort of inverse relative humidity.

^1^(I'm aware you probably didn't mean wet bulb temperature here, but let's have fun with the idea) :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

This.... Is actually a pretty good idea.

There's a few meme images around that Celsius is how water "feels" and Fahrenheit is how people feel (and Kelvin is how atoms feel), which isn't entirely off base....

But frankly, I would support human scale more than Fahrenheit. I live in a country with Celsius, and my only real gripe with it is that whole degrees are not very precise. You have to go to half-degrees, or even 1/10th of a degree to get reasonable precision on temperature.

Just seems like the human scale would work well for 90% of use cases, aside from science where we should be using either Celsius or Kelvin.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

This is great! It's gonna be as big as The Swatch .beat!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

the problem is that the average body temperature is slowly decreasing, so this isn't that well defined, we would need to link it to an event that is at constant temperature

also the celsius scale isn't that good imo because it's about the freezing and boiling of water at ambient pressure so it isn't universal

I say we set the boltzmann constant to a known value, and define temperatures from there

after that we find a range of temperature with useful round values and offset the scale for everyday use

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

So I had to look up the Boltzmann constant and... That's a lot of math.

I think you have a point on the decreasing human temperature. It looks like the decrease is at 0.05°F every decade, which actually is quite a bit. If it was something like 0.005°F, I'd say that that's a problem for the people of the year 2500 to solve.

That said, the reason it's been decreasing seems to be due to medical advances and not some change in the Earth's gravity or climate change. I would be surprised to see humans in the year 2500 having an average body temperature of 72.9°F, or closing in on 0°F in the year 3,984. I imagine there will be fluctuations, but there's got to be a lower limit to what is physically possible.

I'd still defend the Celsius number, since even though there are changes due to air pressure, it's changing over space and not time. In the year 2500, water at sea level will still freeze at 0°C.

I think my big thing is I'm less concerned about a logically consistent scale, and more towards a scale that's geared to the emotional side of temperature.

Thinking outloud moment

If we are going for the emotional side of temperature specifically, we would also need to factor in wind, humidity, sunlight, what season it is, etc. and that's a lot of variables, and even then that's how you get the wind-chill factor. But even that is almost completely subjective. I feel like that scale would go from "IT'S GOTTA BE NEGATIVE A MILLION FUCKIN' DEGREES" to "I FEEL LIKE IM ON THE SURFACE OF THE SUN, so like a bazillion degrees" and then we go to the traffic report.

Either way, it's not a perfect scale, but I'd still take that over the other two.