Hey, it only makes sense that water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212 degrees at sea level. Duh. Next you'll probably say it doesn't make sense that a mile is 5280 feet. /facepalm.
Now my question: Why can't those Metric people get their acts together? 2.54 centimeters to an Inch? really? Can't you use round numbers?
(SARCASM).
Last edited by belfpala; 2012-11-10 at 04:38 PM.
A few things ... Farenheit is more a scale of convenience than Celcius as it used 0 and 100 to correspond to the normal extremes of human involvement. It was a common sense approach at the time.
Also - and think about this, whilst 1 Celcius degree = 1 Kelvin degree, 1 degree Celcius is NOT equal to 1 degree Kelvin.
According to wikipedia he based it on three basic measurements:
the temperature of a 1:1:1 mixture of Water, ice and ammonium chloride is 0F.
the temperature of a 1:1 mixture of water and ice is 32F
the temperature of the human body is 96F
The difference between the freezing point of water and its boiling point is 180 degrees
The celcius scale is based around the triple point of water - the temperature at which pure water exists in all three physical states (solid, liquid and gas) at standard air pressure and Absolute Zero (-273.15°C, or 0K).
Wouldn't this confuse the shit out of everyone when they make the transfer from tau to pi, in terms of the guy saying its very unlikely the real world will stop using pi.
Especially if they've never been taught how to use anything but tau.
Not really sure why he thinks using pi is all that hard either. I never had a problem learning geometry/trig/pre calc 30
It isn't, some people just get off on changing stuff that doesn't need changing.
---------- Post added 2012-11-10 at 05:54 PM ----------
And how is that different to teaching kids pi as opposed to tau/2?
c = 2πr
a = πr²
as opposed to
c = tr
a = (t/2)r²
It is the same damn thing.
The only reason to teach Tau seems to be for trig functions. As I said above, we put coefficients in front of almost everything. Kids should get used to it. As I noted above, even with tau, you have coefficients for the surface area or volume of a sphere, for example.
But then again, in terms of fundamental numbers, I don't see any difference between:
pi = C/D
or
tau = C/R
And then confuse them later on. Remember how in early math classes they called those funky negative-under-a-square-root values from the quadratic formula imaginary numbers? A good lot of students get confused as hell for a while when they find out that not only are those values not "imaginary", but they pop up everywhere and have very tangible uses.
Once formulas make use of pi (and not 2*pi) later on, it's going to have to be defined as (tau/2), which is just going to end up confusing students.
Yeah, Fahrenheit's quite intuitive for people that have always used it. It's fairly German centric in nature, and I grew up in an area that has similar weather to the chilly parts of Germany. For me, zero has always meant really fucking cold and 100 has always meant really fucking hot. It works well for looking temperatures outside, and it has more granularity than Celsius does.
Celsius is an obviously better system for anything that's not describing weather though.
---------- Post added 2012-11-10 at 01:38 PM ----------
I go back and forth pretty easily. Stupid lab work.