Thursday 7 January 2010

Wednesday 6th January 2010 - Is Farenheit Colder than Centigrade?

Glasgow Kentucky is at the same latitude as the Algarve coast.  Does that not give a man a bit of entitlement?  I know it's very cold in Britain just now.  The news stations here are providing us with some solace by showing how cold it is in Britain.  But that's about a tenth of the globe further north.  I thought it would be at least comfortable this far south. 
          And it's going to go on for some time.
 
They still use Farenheit here to tell you the temperature.  The scientific web sites say, rather smugly, "the United States, and a few other places, like Belize".  It does seem to be a more natural way of describing it, since it rarely involves negative numbers.  I have been whiling away the hours finding out why it is such a curious scale.
          Farenheit (it wasn't named after him, like "Celsius", he designed it) based it on three references: zero was the freezing point of brine (well, kind-of brine); 32 was the freezing point of water; and 96 was blood temperature.  The choice of 32 and 64 ( that's 96-32) was to make it easy to draw the scale - you just keep dividing it in two.  Then some bright spark thought it would be a good idea if the boiling point of water was 180 degrees away from the freezing point.  This made it 212, but had the effect of making blood temperature 98.6.
          [this is the blogging equivalent of the potter's wheel from old BBC TV 'Interludes'.  If nothing is happening, I'll just have to provide some erudite interlude.]
 
And, of course, later that night it was even colder, and I huddled even closer to the television.  I dug out a picture of me in Glasgow California last July, and felt a bit warmer.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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