Science Memes

11189 readers

3140 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
Keep it rooted (on topic).
No spam.
Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

[email protected]

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

1180

Burning Up (mander.xyz)

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

509 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

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

How is 0F 100% cold though, most places will never get that cold, so it surely makes more sense to have 0F at freezing point of water and 100F at 38C?

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

Not to mention negative numbers.

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

Freezing point of pure water - but saltwater/brine freezes as a different temperature.

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

pure water at mean atmosphere pressure at sea level if we're getting technical, but frankly human body temperature varies from 35.5C (95.9F) to 37.5C (99.5F) anyway, and that's before considering when people are ill, so if we go down that route it falls apart quickly enough that the definition of 100 given above is clearly just as arbitrary

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

I'm okay with "mean atmosphere pressure" bc that's what is most likely to occur, whereas pure water seems far less likely to be found in a coastal village. The oddness of the measuring abilities of the devices made at the time is a more damning argument, but less for them back then and more for us now. Still, roughly negative ten to 40 for Celsius vs. roughly zero to one hundred for Fahrenheit, the latter does seem to use more "natural" numbers, even if nothing else about non-metric systems makes any sense.