Hottest Rain on Record: Rain Falls at 119°F in Imperial, California
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What is the story behind Celsius and Fahrenheit? What US continue to use F when the rest of the world is now on C?
The same happens with voltages, what side of the road you drive on and the use of imperial for building materials as well as telco standards.
Island nations and very large territories are the ones that exhibit these properties because they can.
What is worse is that as soon as the US invades some territory they push their standards.
The funny thing is that the military usually gets it right because they only care about two things: accuracy and efficiency, there is no consideration for costs to switch or legal hassles, they just choose what works best.
I would have guessed it is arbitrary, but you may know something I don't. So I'm curious to learn about it.
One Nautical Mile is roughly 1852 metres, so 1 kt is roughly 2 km/hr. More accurately, 1 m/s is very close to 2 kts.
The United States is sentimentally attached to its pre-SI units more than they care about international inter-operability – so they continue to endure the ongoing cost of juggling a separate system of units while also using SI units in most science and some engineering work.
It's all quite confusing when you explain it, but pretty natural when you live there
My old flat had a faucet that was a pain to update to a mixing tap because the hot water used inch threads and the cold used metric....
Since everything is fractions you don’t get irrational numbers and calculations are super easy even without calculators case and point say you need to square a measurement squaring 3/16th of an inch is something any fifth grader can do in their head or simply look it up in an easy table. Squaring 4.7625mm on the other hand requires a calculator and since you get an irrational number you can’t easily accurately measure it with common tools in the real world.
What stops one from using 3/16th of a meter? (I admit I rarely see SI units with fractions, but if one finds them so useful, why not? Personally I prefer non-fractions by the way, it's much easier to rank and compare numbers in your head if they're all given as real numbers. E.g. can you tell quickly if 5/17 is bigger or smaller than 8/30?)
And how will you square 2.829 inch? Not everything you measure will happen to be some perfect fraction
For the other metric units, such as meters and grams, the new units had a clear advantage over the old: decimal based subunits.
That was an advantage that you could not simply add on to your existing units without making a total mess of things.
This does not apply to temperature, because we very rarely use subunits with temperature.
Furthermore, the other base units are frequently used together in very commonly used derived units. For example, force is length x mass / time^2, pressure is mass / length / time^2, and energy is mass x length^2 / time^2. Those are all important enough that they have their own names.
There are no commonly used named derived units that are based on temperature (and I can't actually offhand think of any named derived units based on temperature).
In short, a government can make a pretty good case to its citizens to switch to meters and grams, despite the costs of dealing with that obsoleting a whole bunch of existing rulers, scales, and written records, because it is actually a better system.
But as far as I can tell, meter+gram+F would work as well as meter+gram+C, so it is hard to make a good, let alone compelling, case to your citizens that it is better. All they've got is "everyone else is doing it".
For meters and grams, "everyone else is doing it" might be good enough, even if meters and grams were not actually better than the old system, because of international trade.
People choose dimensions and weights of goods to come out nicely in the units they use, and they want to buy goods with nice dimensions and weights, so if you are trading internationally in goods, you have to deal with length and mass units of your trading partners.
Length and mass cross borders in trade.
For temperature, that is generally not the case. If I'm importing stuff from, say, France to the US, for almost all goods it does not make one bit of difference if France and the US use different temperature units.
Temperature does not cross borders in trade.
Everything is essentially always divided by two 1 inch, 1/2 inch, 1/4 inch etc, or by 1000 when very fine precision is required.
You never get numbers that are hard to add up, divide or multiply when this especially comes into play when calculating derived units like PSI, clamping torque etc.
And more importantly it makes calculating squares which are often used quite easy it’s much easier to square 3/16th of an inch than 4.7625.... mm
Metric only really allows for easy conversion between magnitude of scale but when it comes to other calculations you get numbers which are hard to accurately calculate in your head and irrational numbers much more often than when using imperial units.
And irrational numbers can’t be measured. It’s very easy to make a measurement tape that does 1/16th of an inch increments and measuring 3/16th of an inch is a breeze measuring 4.76251784744823823... mm on the other hand is eyeballing it.
If you're dealing with something that's already constructed, then you won't get a measure like 4.7625mm. You might measure 4mm or 5mm. (Otherwise I may as well say that 4.8mm ~= 7/37in and ask you to add that to 3/16in.)
0 is roughly the temperature on the coldest series of days in most of the continental United States and Europe, and 100 is roughly the hottest.
Celsius is great for measuring water while cooking. 0 is freezing (at sea level, assuming a normal room temperature) and 100 is boiling (again, with caveats).
The metric system has everything evolving around a cubic meter of water, so Celsius is easy to grok, and feels logical.
But, having lived in the U.S. and Europe roughly an equal amount of time, Fahrenheit is much much more accurate to estimate outdoor temperature with.
And as it turns out, that's what most people are doing.
Cute asides: The meter is based on a miscalculation of the distance between the equator and North pole. The SI couldn't find anything absolute that actually matched their arbitrary size, so made it dependant on a bar in the SI building, and then realized the bar is changing sizes with time! (This is finally being rectified with some atomic measure.)
On the other hand, my sixth grade teacher taught us that 0 is the freezing point of beer, and 100 is the body temperature of a cow. So, the theory is that some drunk scientists thought a cow had fever..
Which most people are you talking about?
I don’t know anyone outside the US and occasionally the UK who uses Fahrenheit. That’s not “most people”.
Actually the definition has gone through a number of rounds of increasing precision. It did have an atomic definition for a period of time, but now it's based on the speed of light. (IE the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second.) Too bad we didn't know the exact speed of light before coming up with the definition, or we could have a nice round 300,000,000 m/s!
Actually, if there wasn't so much politics (and fake science) involved, there are plenty of things they could have used from the get-go that would have been nice and round.
The "nice round" figure that you offer from the speed of light, and suggest that they would have used had they known it then, is not nice and round and it is not related (and therefore would not have been used).
(1cm = 2.54in IIRC)
1 inch = 2.54cm
Imagine if 1 inch = 2.56 cm
My point about the speed of light was that if we were coming up with a unit of measure now, we would not arbitrarily base it on the distance from the equator to the pole, which is by nature imprecise, but rather on the speed of light, since that is the most fundamental and precise reference we have. And if we were basing it on the speed of light, we would pick a round number, because there is one available that results in a meter of useful length. (By chance, very close to the actual meter.)
Of what use are the smaller steps with Fahrenheit ?
I can not tell if it is 30 or 31 °C outside.
Most thermostats I've seen allow changes of 0.5 degrees C. So it seems that the thermostat manufacturers feel that the majority of users can tell a difference.
And sometimes 1 degree C delta is too much for me in a room (e.g. 21.0 is comfortable, 22.0 is not, 21.5 is just right). So it's obviously a personal preference, but at least for me, I can tell a difference between 0.5 degrees C.
And thus for my use case, whole integers in F is a slightly superior user experience since it avoid fractions.
This argument to me makes no sense: most of the human beings don't live either in the continental US or in Europe :)
0 Celsius to everybody means rain would ideally turn into snow, which makes it great for "measuring weather". And it is useful for agriculture too.
Fahrenheit gives more granularity without the need for a decimal when thinking about temperatures most people would experience on a daily basis.
A normal spring/early summer might have temperatures ranging from 4-38°C or 40-100°F, Fahrenheit gives 60 distinct steps where Celsius provides only 34.
Your used to it, and the explanation is an invented justification.
I lived all my life in metric countries, and have never heard anyone use a decimal to describe the weather, except for a record (47.6°C or whatever it is).
To me, this is a pretty clear indication that people can feel the difference in half degrees Celsius (otherwise, why would the manufacturer bother with it?). And because of that, Fahrenheit is better for human-scale temperatures, as only two significant digits are required instead of three.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they can distinguish two identical rooms with 0.5°C temperature difference.
I personally find Celsius more intuitive when discussing outdoor/environment temperatures, because that's what I grew up with.
Seriously, don't try to invent reasons why Fahrenheit might be more intuitive than Celsius, it's not. Neither is superior, no matter who you ask the more "intuitive" will always be the one a person grew up with.
I just wish the whole world would use a single scale because that's less confusing. And here the argument is on the Celsius side because only a small minority of people in the world (<5%) use Fahrenheit.
Units of length on the order of a finger-width (inch), foot-length, or stride or arms-width (meter), or area that could be plowed in one day (acre). You don't need special calibrated tools to measure/estimate these.
Units of volume are based on successive halvings (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc.) because all you need is two identical cups to split a liquid to be the same level in each--works for non-liquid volumes too, if you measure them by submersing in equal volumes of liquid.
The unit of mass -- pound -- is similarly split into 16 ounces because the pound originated as a measurement for silver, and a simple balance could be used to split 1 lb silver into 8 oz, 4 oz, 2 oz, 1 oz, or smaller, and then be combined to make change.
Units of temperature have integer gradations approximately equal to what sensitive skin of the human body can discern in the atmosphere--I can feel the difference between 70 and 71, but not 70.0 and 70.5--and a nice even value for the normal temperature of the human body (above 100F, you have a fever). Arguably the boiling point of water is more important these days, but only since the rise of steam power and other industrial things that get very hot.
What system would I rather use, if I were hypothetically not already accustomed to one? Well imperial has clearly better optimized user experience, even if some parts have aged with technological change less well than others. It co-evolved with pre-industrial human societies but is still well matched to the day to day environment we find ourselves in, even today, in the produce aisle of a grocery store, in the kitchen, in estimating the weight or size of things we might pick up, etc. Example: when I open a recipe and it says "3 cups of flour and 2 tablespoons of baking soda, 1 teaspoon of salt" then I don't need any special measuring cups or scales to make this recipe--I can make do with stuff lying about the kitchen--it's in the names! Take something that looks like a average-sized drinking cup or mug and fill it with flour three times, take an eating spoon and fill it twice with baking soda, and take a drink-mixing spoon and make one scoop of salt. Alternatively how am I supposed to interpret 0.75 kg flour, 30 mL baking soda, and 5 g salt? Either I've cooked and measured enough to have an intuition for such things, or I'd better have calibrated tools available.
What do you get in return for using the not-so-human-scale SI units? Nice powers of 10? No one was ever stopping you from talking about mega-pounds or micro-inches, so long as you're consistent on lbs vs oz and ft vs in. Imperial units aren't any different in this regard from saying "2 hours" in an SI context and people knowing to multiply by 3600s/hr to get the official unit
At the end of the day I prefer SI for the same reason I prefer English--as a global standard because it is the standard, even though it is actually pretty terrible. It's a bit like Qwerty vs Dvorak/Colemak/Workman, except the decision isn't a personal choice. I do wish the French had decided things differently some 225 years ago though.
[0] I'm struggling to remember what they were I thought I remembered cubits but I'm not sure why you would find those on a tape in the 1940's. Anyway, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
I think the parent is right that it has mostly to do with what you are used to.
Your volume measure has no convenient relation to a length³ measure. I can tell you the volume of this room in litres very easily given the dimensions, but "1 cubic foot = 576/77 US fluid gallons".
"There is not a single agreed-upon upper limit for normal temperature with sources using values between 37.5 and 38.3 °C (99.5 and 100.9 °F)" (Wikipedia.)
You've made a false equivalence of your recipe. We can write "2dL flour" and so on, although flour in particular can have varying densities, so results are much more consistent when weighing. My British grandmother's recipes say things like "8oz flour" and were always weighed.
I can do halving and so on with metric or arbitrary tools (this glass/stick) when necessary, and can expect to have appropriate measuring tools available when I need them. So, since I'm not living in the 16th century, I don't see any benefit to the old units.
A difference smaller than 2C is usually negligible, unless you're close to the freezing point. So even Celsius is "overaccurate"
The intuitiveness of a measuring system is mostly people growing accustomed to it. If you've lived in a child place you probably couldn't tell the difference between 30C and 40C
Outside temperatures vary by a lot more than 1 degree (the difference between precision and accuracy?)
The place I have seen where Fahrenheit makes sense is for human temperatures - what temperature is a high fever?
I have never seen an aircon unit with half-degree Celcius settings, except in some cars which to me seems to be an anti-feature.
They are both hard words to spell, but Celsius is shorter, so a big win for °C there!
This clearly wasn't always the case, but the polarisation of American politics continues to increase.
It's similar in Britain, except there was more progress there before Conservative people took it as an attack on tradition and made it political, and more pressure (legal and practical) to conform with the rest of Europe.
The only meyric measurements in the US are in science.
And there's like 4 different units for pressure IIRC.
I think that is what I said when I said all research done in universities, the military, NASA, etc. is done in metric.
The point I was trying to make is that the US is more metric than most people think about and has nothing to do with "conservatives". The parts for my car are in metric, the wine I buy is in 750 ml bottles, medicine I take is in metric, 2 liter bottles of cola, illicit drugs (grams or kilos although I don't take that!), etc.
Yes there are different units for pressure but the one used by the university I work at is metric.
It feels like dying. At 120 with over 80% humdity walking more than a couple hundred meters induces nausea and tunnel vision.
The lede is sort of misleading because extreme temps can coincide with rain all over the SW, especially in the Sonoran and Mojave deserts. It’s not that weird. However, the imperial valley is definitely the worst for working conditions. Even in dry air, shadeless work is tough. Your feet can be burned through a boot sole because the surface temps are much higher than shade air temps. If windless, your sweat fails to cool you; too much wind and you cannot possibly drink enough water to be hydrated.
It’s a tough place. Now try working in that and writing code in basic so your sensors resume coms to loggers.
If you have access to a steam room at a gym you can experience a likely higher temperature depending on the room's thermometer (pour some cold water on it :)) and full condensation for yourself.
The primary issue with extreme humidity on top of extreme heat is that perspiration can become nearly ineffective. High heat, lower humidity isn't that bad provided you have enough fluids to stay hydrated.
50 deg F = 10 deg C
For every 10 def F, there's roughly a 6 deg C change.
So (approximately)
40 deg F = 4 deg C
60 deg F = 16 deg C
etc.
I find that it works reasonably well for frequent requests from said Celsius understanding visitors.
*Edited for line breaks
-40 is the same in both though, as far as I recall
F -> C: subtract 32, divide by 2. So 76F = 44/2 ~= 22C
C -> F: multiply by 2, add 32. So 15C = 30+32 ~= 62F
The factor of 2 isn’t precise (the actual ratio is closer to 5/9). But it only really diverges at hotter temps: so 95F is actually 35C, whereas this formula will give you 31.5C, which is more like 89F; but 50F will give you 9C (48F), when the correct value is 10C. For most weather purposes it’s close enough - at least to decide what to wear - and it’s easy for most people to calculate.
C = (F-30) / 2
F = 2 * C + 30
C = (F-32) * 5 / 9
F = C / 5 * 9 + 32
C F
-40 -40
0 32 (Approx water freezing point)
10 50
20 68 ( ~ 70)
~21 70
30 86
37 98.6 (body temperature)
40 104
50 122
... ...
100 212 (Approx water boiling point)Whether we record a temperature on earth or estimate the temperature of the big bang, we are dealing with the same class of rules and laws, of physics, and performing the same basic task of coming to a conclusion about the some hidden property based on some other observable properties.
The machines we make to measure temperature come from the same stuff as the universe does, so there isn't anything special with regard to reading a value from a machine vs. calculating a temperature based on the properties of the stars and galaxies in the universe. Therefore, regardless of when the temperature has occurred, or where it happened, we are still measuring it. And as long as it was written down, it has been recorded.
Compare with Celsius, where 0° is pretty cold and 100° is painful death (and also unprecedented as far as meterology goes). Even 50° is absurdly hot.
I'm all for using Metric units everywhere else, but they ain't exactly intuitive for weather reports.
Unfortunately, that got ruined by a later reaction to Celsius; the Royal Society redefined in terms of freezing/boiling of water, fixed those at exactly 32F and 212F, and as a result the original second reference point was no longer exactly 96 (it became 98-ish).
The truth is the UK is temperate, and the weather is not so newsworthy. I can remember it being -12 one extreme winter, and it can touch 90 on exceptional summer days.
What has been newsworthy this year has been the extreme long period of sunny hot weather. But since our press are infested with climate-change deniers that has less sensationalist coverage.
You can start today by sacrificing your finger lickin bbq beef eating habit.
In the older, darker, and more fundamental sense of the word, I shudder to think that the way irrationality is growing, probably soon.
Never gonna happen. People are far far far more resilient and capable than that.
And once the pumps fail on Miami Beach it’s game over for a while. Hit it twice in a row and who knows what will happen. Miami Beach will likely be the first wealthy city in the US that will have to be abandoned. They’ll build a wall to protect Manhattan and the subway, but no one is building a wall for Miami Beach.
And look at Puerto Rico. If it gets hit again this year you might as well just evacuate the island. The power grid is still being repaired as we speak from last year. Another massive storm and certain areas can expect to have no power or running water for years.
What will change attitudes is cost. The cost of fossil fuels is only going up, the cost of renewables is only going down. They will cross over.
For people to "wake up" from this... they
i. Have to be able to reason and select the correct explanation among many possible explanations to why it happened.
ii. Have to accept the (correct) explanation that flatly places the blame on themselves, rather than other soothing options.
The base case in my mind is really more like inland people would point to the flooded coastal cities (including those along the south - logical consistency doesn't matter) and say it's God's punishment for being liberal. There can be many variations... you can easily invent excuses that don't involve God or politics. But the point is, it has nothing to do with them. That's the perfect kind of explanation for people to move on, because it places no blame on them.
I know misinformation is a driving factor for non-believers but I still get stumped why people who believe in climate change are not always environmentally friendly.
It’s hard to calculate your personal global warming impact directly, but luckily economists have found that there is an incredibly reliable 100% correlation between monetary velocity and natural resource usage.
So if you want to calculate your impact on global warming, just multiply your spending times your PPP. Spending more on virtue-signaling brands has the opposite effect your going for. Sorry.
So if you want to actually do better instead of feel better, just spend less. It’s really that simple.
Never.
You want this changed? Figure out other energy sources. Nothing else will work.
The reason is that every individual has basically zero effect. So no one is motivated to make any changes.
> Everything else aside no President should be able to deny reality.
The President is irrelevant. He has very little on-the-ground effect. Maybe some media noise, which maybe might influence some. That's about it.
Either other energy sources are cheaper, or they are not. And that's about it.
A CO2 tax can't work unless it was implemented globally INCLUDING developing countries. (Which is a non-starter of course.) Because otherwise people will just ship industry and manufacturing elsewhere.
So there isn't much the president can do. I guess some subsidies, but there's a limit to how much of that you can do before they cause more harm than good.
The success of Europe in reducing emissions shows that even unilateral solutions have important impact, and they do not mean deindustrialization. Carbon taxes work exceptionally well.
The developing world is surprisingly dependent on the west, because that's where their carbon embodying products are sold. They need leadership and soft pressure.
The thing that's missing is a united front of developed nations, and the most important piece of that is the US, that's to busy devolving into the middle ages.
It actually shows exactly the opposite: That it only works when technological solutions exist. If there had been no effective replacement for CFC's, we'd still be using them now.
It's a vicious/virtuous circle, we aren't hostages of an implacable march of science, we are in the driver's seat. If we want to go to the Moon, we go there, and if we decide it's not worth it, the Moon tech does not magically get better over time.
So "we don't have the technology alternative" is just code word for "let's do nothing"; if better energy sources were magically available, the economics would simply work by itself and the problem of global warming would disappear.
(That's not to say anything politicians think up is possible, but that political and scientific forces go hand in hand in such endeavors)
Manufacturing only accounts for 20% of fossil fuel CO2 emissions.
Stop eating beef. that is something you can do today.
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/future/images/3/39/%21.j...
But, in any case, it's not a disaster that will kill us all. Just make life inconvenient until it gets the proper attention to fix it.
Thankfully there are enough people in the world that don't think like Scott Adams, and are trying to do something about it right now, rather than when it's far, far too late.
Because it's already too late to avoid major damage, at this point it's about avoiding cataclysmic damage.
What do you base that assertion on? It sounds chicken-littlish to me.
Many of the world's best agricultural land is at risk of desertification.
What happens when NYC, Miami, LA are under water, and the Midwest is too hot and dry to grow wheat?
Will anyone help the US, knowing we did nothing to avert catastrophe?
Probably easier to invade Canada...
> Will anyone help the US, knowing we did nothing to avert catastrophe?
Just to be sure we're on the same page here, you predict we'll do nothing while all those cities start to flood, over the course of years to decades. Then, the rest of the world (who is as guilty as we are of your “sin” of ignoring the issue) will be required to save us from what sounds like damnation, and they will cast us down to suffer our self deserved fate (even though they depend on us as much or more than we do on them)?
Oh yes, sounds completely reasonable... /s
What really will happen, is if the climate models are correct, then it will become no question to anybody that there are big problems with the climate, and at that point we will have the motivation, and years to decades to solve it.
I don't claim to know what the solution will be, but I have the feeling that given all of earth's population working toward a solution can succeed. And this will happen once it can't be denied that it exists (if it will actually be a problem. Yes, models can be wrong)
I foresee an underground movement of anti-AC hacktivists shutting down systems much like the anti-TV movement.