this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
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I went down a huge rabbit hole cause of this. I personally like °F over °C but agree it's arbitrary. So I tried to make a scale that started at the coldest air temp on earth (some day in Antarctica) and went to the hottest day on earth (some day in death valley) and put the coldest day at 0°A and the hottest at 100°A.
Sadly this made a scale that was less precise than I'd like. I like that I can feel the difference between 73°F and 74°F and don't want to have to use decimals.
So maybe the end points could be only places where people actually live. Well it looks like some people live in Russia around -70°C and some people live in northern Africa around 50°C so if you just take °C and add 60 you can get a -10 to 110 scale where most temps would fall between 0 and 100. Still has the unit difference of °C (which I don't like) but I like that most temps are between 0 and 100. I also don't really like negative temperature since it seems wonky.
To "fix" the unit scale you could just multiply everything by 2 so the difference between each full degree is half as much. So temps would be between -20 and 220. °A = 2(°C + 60) °A = 2(°C) + 120
And it turns out I (basically) created the Fahrenheit scale but moved. °F= 1.8(°C) + 32
TL;DR: I'm stupid and this was fun but also a waste of time lol
Celsius is tied to points of ice melting and water vaporising. Since water is very important for the life on our planet, it makes even more sense than arbitrary chosen meters or seconds.
At sea level. Welcome to La Paz, where the triple point is made up and the freezing point doesn't matter!
And similarly, Fahrenheit seems to be tied to the internal temperature of the human body, with 100 degrees being the maximum that the average person can handle before their organs start to be damaged.
Yes, Fahrenheit is about humans, and Celsius is about the element that makes life possible. The latter is more generic.
Maximum is 100 °F and minimum is 95 °F. Those seem pretty arbitrary to me
But not everybody experiences temperature the same, so using a system based on what 'humans' like, seems a bit useless
It's not about what humans "like," it's about the human bodies' internal operating temperature and using that as a reference point, the same way that Celsius is about the states of matter of water . Fahrenheit is useful in medicine for that reason, while Celsius is useful anytime a comparison to water is helpful, and beyond that, it's really just whatever you grew up with. Using a system based on what water "likes" is equally as useless unless you grew up using it as your reference point for temperature in your daily life. Neither 75 Fahrenheit or 23.8889 Celsius tell me whether or not I'm going to need a jacket today unless I've already experienced said temperature and use that scale in my daily life.
does you scale change as Earth warms?
Add a scale revision for each year to the meme
People live in -70c (-94f) weather? How the fuck do they do that?
Once you're below -6C or so you just need more insulation. -6C to 10C in many ways can be harder to manage due to humidity, especially in wet conditions. My prolonged exposure experience is only down to -30C. I did not have enough insulation, but an extra base layer, better gloves/boots would have been sufficient. I was fine with fairly light clothing down to -18C. I hear -50C is where it starts to get really harsh again.
Your body also adjusts a lot. In the Summer in wearing a puffy indoors at 10C(50F) but in the winter I'll go out in a t-shirt at -10C, especially if doing manual labor.
That's crazy. My body doesn't adjust to cold weather. I'm always cold when it's cold outside, and I'm talking about cold which is considerably warmer than the cold you're talking about.
Yeah like i said, -6 to about 10C is bad cold due to humidity. But after a few weeks of daily outside temps below zero i adjust. Colorado was even crazier when I was there. Needed thick socks and snowboots but otherwise the sun was still so warming I'd break a sweat walking with a jacket on.
This last winter it got down to 0 F, and 15% humidity. I put every single insulating layer I own on to go outside, and within a minute I was freezing. Granted, I don't have dedicated cold weather boots, or pants. That was the main point of weakness. So, this year I'm going to invest in some winter pants and boots. My regular ones aren't cutting it with these record breaking winters that we've been getting.
After a few weeks, the humidity is driven out of the air, and humidity is what allows heat to transfer to/from your body more efficiently. Hit feels hotter when it's humid, and the same with cold, however hot air can hold more moisture, so it tends to build humidity over time. After a couple weeks with cold weather, the humidity drops and the cold starts to feel less cold.
Water capacity of air drops to about 0.25% around 20F/-6C. That doesn't take weeks, it's ideal gas law. Something about that difference between the 0.45%(ish) at 0C/32F is really impactful. That's absolute humidity, not relative btw. Relative humidity is weather dependent.
In any case, there's bound to be a lot of other factors such as calorie intake, behavioral changes like exercise, and biases such as the types of activities being done in cold vs hot or the indoors temperature that impact things. The body does tend to find a stasis if it can and that adjustment does occur to some extent. More or less for any given individual. Maybe i made my previous statements too general.