I work with Americans and this hits home hard. It's especially infuriating when they format their dates. "I had a meeting with so-and-so on 4/5" and nobody has any fucking clue what they mean.
The worst part is how hopelessly oblivious they are about it. It's not even like they don't care that nobody does things their stupid way - it's the fact that they're so insulated that they can't even fathom that nobody does things the same way they do. It just goes to show how clueless they are about the rest of the world and how little they get out of their neighborhoods.
It drives me mad. At this point, it's just offensive how ignorant they can be sometimes. If you have to work with other people, you should at least make an effort to be aware of the fact that others do things a different way and try to avoid situations like this, but they just refuse to do so.
Apologies... /rant
Everyone should be using ISO8601 anyway. yyyy-mm-dd is superior to both and leaves 0 ambiguity to the reader no matter where they're from.
heck even inside these borders.. the concept of timezones blows their minds at work lol..
them: "yeah let's set a meeting at 9am!"
me: eastern? pacific? central? help me... heeeelllp meee
I'm American and always use 30 Dec 2023 as my date scheme. It makes much more sense. I also work in a multicultural laboratory, so there should be no question as to what date it is, but some of my colleagues still use mm-dd-yy.
Isn't basing a temperature scale on the freezing and boiling points of water a bit arbitrary in and of itself?
The reason they are arbitrary numbers in Fahrenheit is because they weren't considerations when the scale was made.
Water is everywhere.
Cooking, weather, etc. You are also water.
Except that water boils at different temperatures when exposed to different amounts of pressure.
So this works pretty universally on earth.... Near the ground/ocean level (plus or minus a few hundred meters). Once you get outside of that specific condition the numbers move.
So yes, fairly arbitrary.
Let's all switch to Kelvin.
The nice thing about celcius and kelvin is that they're the same scale, but celcius is just shifted 273.15 units. And it's more intuitive for humans to work with smaller numbers with bigger relative differences. But yes, kelvin would be a lot better to work with, especially considering stuff like doubling temperature (doubling energy) would actually work correctly in kelvin.
But if there's one thing that makes a lot of sense to base temperature enough for human use, I would indeed say it's water, because all life uses water, we are completely surrounded by it, and it's super important to nearly everything we do too.
Every scale and unit is, ultimately, arbitrary. We all do have a very good understanding of what freezing and boiling water is, though, we don't have a good intuition of "coldest day in some random place in some random year" is. Then there's a couple of other common points of orientation: 20C is room temperature, 37C body temperature and thus warm baths and "it's too bloody hot outside" hover around that (you actually want wet-bulb temperature for that, but it's still a point of orientation), another point is about 60C which is the hottest you can have a beverage and drink it without excessive slurping. Also a common temperature in cooking as that's when a lot of stuff starts to denature, e.g. egg white is about 62-65C, the temperature you want to hit for carbonara to not get scrambled eggs.
Practically everything we deal with in everyday life (short of winter weather) is within that 0-100 range. Which is due, to, well, water being liquid in that range.
Well TECHNICALLY it's not based on the state change of water.
It's based on the formula C = K - 273.15 where K = 1.380649×10^−23 / (6.62607015×10^−34)(9192631770) * h * Δν[Cs] / k where k is the Boltzmann constant (1.380649×10^−23 J * K^-1), h is the Planck constant, and Δν[Cs] is the hyperfine transition frequency of Caesium
So even MORE abstract and unrelatable
It is, but if you look at how Farenheit was conceived it's absurdly nonsensical. 0°F is the freezing temperature or some mixture of chemicals, and 90°F is a guess at human body temperature lmao.
And the freezing/boiling points of water are arbitrary except in that they are used to actually define both scales. They provide easily measurable standards.
I think it's the freezing point of brine
I would like to dump on America for this but as Scotland is in the UK we have some unholy abomination of in between when it comes to our measurements.
I work with Americans and this hits home hard. It's especially infuriating when they format their dates. "I had a meeting with so-and-so on 4/5" and nobody has any fucking clue what they mean.
The worst part is how hopelessly oblivious they are about it. It's not even like they don't care that nobody does things their stupid way - it's the fact that they're so insulated that they can't even fathom that nobody does things the same way they do. It just goes to show how clueless they are about the rest of the world and how little they get out of their neighborhoods.
It drives me mad. At this point, it's just offensive how ignorant they can be sometimes. If you have to work with other people, you should at least make an effort to be aware of the fact that others do things a different way and try to avoid situations like this, but they just refuse to do so.
Apologies... /rant
Everyone should be using ISO8601 anyway. yyyy-mm-dd is superior to both and leaves 0 ambiguity to the reader no matter where they're from.
heck even inside these borders.. the concept of timezones blows their minds at work lol..
them: "yeah let's set a meeting at 9am!"
me: eastern? pacific? central? help me... heeeelllp meee
I'm American and always use 30 Dec 2023 as my date scheme. It makes much more sense. I also work in a multicultural laboratory, so there should be no question as to what date it is, but some of my colleagues still use mm-dd-yy.
Isn't basing a temperature scale on the freezing and boiling points of water a bit arbitrary in and of itself?
The reason they are arbitrary numbers in Fahrenheit is because they weren't considerations when the scale was made.
Water is everywhere.
Cooking, weather, etc. You are also water.
Except that water boils at different temperatures when exposed to different amounts of pressure.
So this works pretty universally on earth.... Near the ground/ocean level (plus or minus a few hundred meters). Once you get outside of that specific condition the numbers move.
So yes, fairly arbitrary.
Let's all switch to Kelvin.
The nice thing about celcius and kelvin is that they're the same scale, but celcius is just shifted 273.15 units. And it's more intuitive for humans to work with smaller numbers with bigger relative differences. But yes, kelvin would be a lot better to work with, especially considering stuff like doubling temperature (doubling energy) would actually work correctly in kelvin.
But if there's one thing that makes a lot of sense to base temperature enough for human use, I would indeed say it's water, because all life uses water, we are completely surrounded by it, and it's super important to nearly everything we do too.
Every scale and unit is, ultimately, arbitrary. We all do have a very good understanding of what freezing and boiling water is, though, we don't have a good intuition of "coldest day in some random place in some random year" is. Then there's a couple of other common points of orientation: 20C is room temperature, 37C body temperature and thus warm baths and "it's too bloody hot outside" hover around that (you actually want wet-bulb temperature for that, but it's still a point of orientation), another point is about 60C which is the hottest you can have a beverage and drink it without excessive slurping. Also a common temperature in cooking as that's when a lot of stuff starts to denature, e.g. egg white is about 62-65C, the temperature you want to hit for carbonara to not get scrambled eggs.
Practically everything we deal with in everyday life (short of winter weather) is within that 0-100 range. Which is due, to, well, water being liquid in that range.
Well TECHNICALLY it's not based on the state change of water.
It's based on the formula C = K - 273.15 where K = 1.380649×10^−23 / (6.62607015×10^−34)(9192631770) * h * Δν[Cs] / k where k is the Boltzmann constant (1.380649×10^−23 J * K^-1), h is the Planck constant, and Δν[Cs] is the hyperfine transition frequency of Caesium
So even MORE abstract and unrelatable
It is, but if you look at how Farenheit was conceived it's absurdly nonsensical. 0°F is the freezing temperature or some mixture of chemicals, and 90°F is a guess at human body temperature lmao.
And the freezing/boiling points of water are arbitrary except in that they are used to actually define both scales. They provide easily measurable standards.
I think it's the freezing point of brine
I would like to dump on America for this but as Scotland is in the UK we have some unholy abomination of in between when it comes to our measurements.