A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
I have long since given up on an ideal world where there are universally used standard units. Now I embrace unit chaos. I want my equations to contain fucked up units that are harder to decipher than just doing the calc again. It's how I artistically express myself.
-40F 🤝 -40C
Even a broken clock is right twice day.
cries in digital clock
Even a stuck digital clock is right once a day.
When it's stuck, yes. When it's broken and the display is of welll...
Fun fact!
Pedantry:
K and °R agree on 0
K and °C agree on the unit difference
°F and °R agree on the unit difference
°R and °Ra are the exact same thing (??)
Celsius and Fahrenheit agree on -40, but since they're scales that scale at different rates there's bound to be some value where they intersect rather than some meaningful number like Kelvin and Rankine being zeroed to Absolute Zero
Same with 574.59°F = 574.59K
Also Rankine, being an absolute scale, theoretically shouldn't be in ° anything, and it's only some weird historical quirk that is the reason it usually is called degrees.
Good thing °R and °RA aren’t pointing guns at each other
Neither are °F and °R nor °K and °C
This is almost artfully done
Imagine if some distance measuring system decided their zero was at like 10 feet.
Let me just shorten this down 8 feet
welds on an extra 2 feet
Rankine and Kelvin have zero at the same point, which is absolute zero, and should not be used with the degree symbol
This concludes my TED talk
According to Wikipedia Rankine is properly used with the degree symbol, but sometimes is not by analogy with Kelvin.
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.
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.
Never heard about °R and °RA before this meme
It's the Rankine. Some Scottish dude wanted to use Kelvin without using Kelvin. It's basically the Fahrenheit scale but with 0˚R set at absolute zero.
0˚R = 0K and 1˚R = 0K + 1˚F
From what I can gather, R and Ra are the same thing?
They are. The post could swap one of them out for Re or Rø instead and it would work, though
Comparing arbitrary degrees to absolutes. Notice K is the only one without the degree symbol...
Celsius tried to fit too much into 100 notches to please big math.
F is more nuanced with more notches, but the ends aren't logical. It coukd be shifted perhaps, but how?
If freezing was moved to 0, then water boiling would be 180
Perhaps C could have had a 200 degree range, then it would be closer to F and not so hard to convert.
But also: Scientists are important and we shouldn't make it too easy, it demeans their work. Maybe make the C scale show water boiling at 183.4521 degrees so scientific calculations are more impressive-looking and respectable.
and not so hard to convert
"Please change the entire world's system to make it easier for the one country that uses a different one"
The SI unit scales are chosen to fit together to avoid "respectable" scientific calculations.
To heat one milliliter (1 ml) of water one degree Celsius (1 °C) you need one calorie (1 cal) of energy.
Also the dimensions of one milliliter, is one cubic centimeter (1 cm^3), and that amount of water weighs 1 gram (1 g).
Thus 1 liter of water needs 1 kcal of energy to heat up 1 °C.
This is more like if you measured altitude by counting from sea level vs the center of the earth vs the top of Mount Everest or something
When having a beer, I've always found it funny that one of the few imperial measurements metric nations kept around, the pint, America went and invented their own. Uncharacteristically a smaller version too.
Every time I hear, "pint" I think of Pippin saying, "they come in pints?!"
0 lbs/lg = Absense of weight.
0 inches/centimeters = Absence of size.
0 Kelvin = Absence of heat.
If something is 0lbs, 0 inches and 0 Kelvin: does it even exist? 🤔
But R and K agree on zero
Rankine isn't pointing a gun at Kelvin because of this, but Kelvin is pointing one at Rankine because Rankine is an abomination that should not be
Meanwhile, Pi and the Fine Structure Constant watching the show, passing each other the popcorn.
The best part about the fine structure constant is that it is not related to any other thing. It just is.
It's a magic number that just emerges in physics.
And it is not constant.
Even though it is.