• protist@mander.xyz
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    1 year ago

    I’m assuming this is because the concept of absolute zero did not exist when most of these temperature scales were defined, whereas zero distance and zero weight were easily observable

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      USGS uses imperial for a ton of publications. As a geographer, I had to get pretty comfortable with both standards.

  • chaogomu@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Fun fact;

    Fahrenheit and Celsius line up at -40

    Fahrenheit and Kelvin line up at 575

    Those numbers are not particularly useful, but they are fun to know.

    • EvokerKing@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I was about to make the same comment. I got bored in math class with a graphing calculator and figured it out lol.

      • chaogomu@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I knew about the Fahrenheit and Celsius one as a kid (because the local weatherman pointed it out one winter) but I only looked up the Kelvin one a few years back.

      • Epicurus0319@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        It was invented by some scottish guy long before we had the means to measure things that would need it, and ever since that multibillion-dollar satellite thing fell to pieces even American scientists use metric units, we learn them in every grade level’s science class and our scientific community has this understandable atmosphere of regret that Congress was too lazy to completely kill off imperial units when they had the chance

  • lntl@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I’ve always been curious why 32 was chosen for the freezing point of water in Fahrenheit. or was there something else and did that just land at 32?

    it’s kind of a mystery and i love it

    • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Fahrenheit is actually a base-ten system, where 0° was the freezing temperature of a salt/water mixture used in laboratories in the 18th century, and 100° was supposed to be a human’s blood temperature. Another convenient perk of the fahrenheit system is that most European weather occurs inside it’s 0-100 range.

      Eventually Fahrenheit saw the scientific need to know the freezing and boiling point of plain water, but instead of adjusting his system, he just found those values within his system.

      • Ambiorickx@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The story I heard, and I don’t know if this is true or not, is that 100 isn’t just a human’s blood temperature, but specifically Mrs. Fahrenheit’s blood temperature.