• ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    The freezing point of water is very important to weather, and requires prior knowledge of the arbitrary number 32.

    • Lizardking27@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Okay so fahrenheit has a well-defined high and low, but an arbitrary freezing point of one certain chemical. All other chemical freezing points are arbitrary.

      Celsius has an arbitrary high and low, but a well-defined freezing point of that same chemical. All other freezing points are arbitrary.

      If your motivation is to minimize the amount of arbitrary values you have to memorize, fahrenheit is the clear winner.

      • criticon@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        The 0 in Fahrenheit was based on nothing and the 100F was supposed to be human temperature but it is off by some degrees

        The water is not an arbitrary temperature, the weather is water dependant, at 0C the water will freeze and you get snow/ice instead of rain

        • actually@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          0°F is when the ocean freezes

          100° F was human body temperature, later revised somewhat with better measurements and a decrease of parasites . The average person in those days in London had a slightly higher body temperature than today

          • criticon@lemmy.ca
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            2 months ago

            0F is not ocean freezing, is the freezing temp of a brine mix that he chose arbitrarily (some think that he chose that temp because it was close to the coldest his town had ever been and he used it to calibrate the scales of his thermometers)

            FYI, the ocean freezes at around 28F

            • actually@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              Oceans freezing also depends on currents, and mixing of the water from the surface. 28° will freeze water in a room.

              This is why often the ocean is not frozen at much lower temperatures.

              I’m not at all cognizant of how 0 was decided

      • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        The zero C is freezing and 100 C is boiling, so not really arbitrary.

        But it’s pretty hard to define a scale that has intuitive, round numbers for everything we might care about.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      yeah, and let me know how accurate our weather models and prediction systems are. Can you calculate accurately how much the temperature in a specific part of the atmosphere will drop to a large updraft?

      What’s that? This is literally an entire career field of study and development? Oh that’s weird.

      Also the only real time this is relevant, is when things that have this weird property called thermal mass get below freezing, it’s snowing in 30f weather? That’s not sticking, the ground is too warm. or the sun will literally just melt it even if it is cold enough. Water? You mean that weird thing called like, a lake or river? Those get below freezing, without actively freezing, lakes won’t even drop that much in terms of temperature, aside from the surface level. The surface may freeze, but even that is pretty variable.

      Also yes, it’s the arbitrary number of 32, so is literally every number though. We have 2 numbers to remember, you also have 2 numbers to remember, god forbid you have like, a password, or a passcode, or like, a numbers based lock somewhere. Humans have never been known to be good at memorizing short strings of data.

      like idk how to tell you this, but, it’s not that big of a deal?