Shows $508 for 2 cartons, so 254 per. NY has probably most expensive smokes, ranging $140-155 per carton
kalium-xyz 7 hours ago [-]
Wont the state tax apply to the NIST ones as well?
plaguuuuuu 9 hours ago [-]
Australia is US$350-$400
perpetuallunch 5 hours ago [-]
Or retail at $15 per pack of twenty over-under the counter at your nearest “convenience” store, if it hasn’t been fire bomber over night in Melbourne, thought that seems to have eased off a bit since they arrested that guy.
most needs for such water are for calibration of instruments - many labs run stable isotopes measurements which has many applications from tracing how plants use water to measuring your metabolic base rate .. so the main use case it to calibrate instruments because it's really difficult to have an absolute measurement of stable isotope ratios from first principles - and the ratios are so small you typically express them in relation to standards like VSMOW
pseudohadamard 6 hours ago [-]
Just remember that if you decide to brew up a cup from VSMOW you have to do it in strict conformance to ISO 3103.
perpetuallunch 5 hours ago [-]
I prefer my tea brewed with SLAP, or more recently SLAP2.
rwmj 18 hours ago [-]
Interesting article but left me wondering why they don't use ¹H₂¹⁶O as the "standard water"? Surely you can make that (relatively) easily in a centrifuge by spinning out the lightest fraction of water.
barbegal 13 hours ago [-]
18 O enriched water is available to buy but the pricing suggests it's quite expensive to separate 16 O from 18 O. And you get much less variability in the ratio of isotopes from mixing compared to separating a single isotope as much as possible.
thayne 17 hours ago [-]
At the very least that has the advantage that it's possible to make more of it, so you aren't dependent on a limited sample of standard water.
ameliaquining 12 hours ago [-]
The article doesn't mention this, but they actually did make more. Or rather, they put together a new sample, VSMOW2, in 1999. It's exactly the same as VSMOW, to within measurement error. Like the original, you can buy it from the USGS. Documentation (including how it was prepared): https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/AnalyticalReferenceMaterials/...
This actually goes both ways; VSMOW itself was carefully made (by mixing in small amounts of water from other sources) to match the composition of an earlier reference water sample, NBS-1, which came from the Potomac River (one supposes it was a convenience sample). NBS-1 is no longer used as a point of reference, since everyone's agreed to use VSMOW instead, but the USGS sells it too.
cozzyd 3 hours ago [-]
Just wait for the new reflecting pool standard of official water.
0cf8612b2e1e 11 hours ago [-]
I at first thought you meant taking hydrogen gas and burning it in O18, which seems even simpler than bulk processing water.
For more context, sample reference materials from the NIST reference catalogue are not meant to be exceptionally high purity examples of the sample -- SRMs are usually commercially-produced products. The real value is that each sample comes with a datasheet with incredibly detailed and accurate measurements that are (as you said) used for calibration of measuring devices in industrial settings. To quote a Veritasium video about the topic from a few years ago[1], "the thing you're paying for is not the peanut butter, it's the knowledge of exactly what is in the peanut butter".
Truth. I once paid nearly $500 for a set of 17 certified, calibrated wooden pencils, with documentation showing that each one met their rated hardness levels of 9H thru 6B. And for $500, they don't even come with erasers, that is an added-cost option.
I'd like to ask a more specific question than my sibling's excellent "Wait, why?" question :)
Why offer erasers on these things? The procedure described below has nothing to do with using these as pencils, and at $500 for a pack I can't imagine anyone, anywhere casually drawing with these.
(Is there another procedure, similar to the one described below, except instead of dragging the pencil tip across a surface you drag the eraser across it? )
buildsjets 9 hours ago [-]
I’d suggest you read “The TSO’d Pencil” to understand the reference.
Can I ask why :-) Sounds like an interesting project.
cwillu 14 hours ago [-]
His link includes procedures, which suggest he was testing the hardness of some surface coating or similar:
> For the pencil hardness test, reference ASTM D3363, pencils of increasing hardness values are moved over the surface in a precisely defined way until one lead damages the surface. Surface Hardness is defined by the hardest pencil grade which just fails to damage the surface.
> Observe the pencil track. Sufficient pressure must have been applied either to cut or damage the coating or to crush the lead pencil point.
> If neither coating damage or pencil point crushing is observed, repeat the test until a definite observation is made.
> If scratching or damage of the surface occurs, proceed with the next softer pencil grade and repeat the testing process until a pencil lead grade is found which crushes and does not damage the coating.
> If crushing of the hardest lead should occur, the coating is therefore extremely hard and is beyond the measuring range of this test
buildsjets 11 hours ago [-]
The pencil hardness scale is commonly used to assess paint film hardness by checking what is the softest pencil that can mar the surface when you scratch it with a given force. In this case, we needed to assess whether exposure to a certain chemical degraded the integrity of the paint coating that we were counting on for corrosion protection.
wildzzz 13 hours ago [-]
You use the kit to test the harness of a finish coating, like a paint or a ceramic coating for cars. Pencils have their own hardness scale which can be used to gauge the hardness of the coating. Its really more of a relative qualitative test than quantitative as you'd use this for sample/coupon testing identical coatings. There are more absolute, quantitative methods to measure various hardness characteristics (scratch, indentation, and rebound). Like you'd use the pencil kit on a factory floor to make sure each paint sample performs the same, the sample being a small area on the product or a plate that's painted the same way.
8note 13 hours ago [-]
the pencil aspect is because its easy for a person to carry and take notes with?
and you dont need to fit the car into a proper harness tester?
That’s $508 for two cartons for 400 cigarettes total, so $1.27 per cigarette. They’re not characterized like the peanut butter, they’re just manufactured to a specific QC standard.
California/New York prices are easily $0.75/cigg so it’s not that much more expensive.
I had seen the cigarette. But but not the meat which costs $2,690 for four tuna-can size cans and is a mix of pork and chicken
Thinking of a concept for a restaurant meal along the lines of a calibrated fried spam dinner, that costs ~2k for about a can worth, fried like they do in Hawaii.
Come to think of it, would love to see an “iron chef- calibrated foods” edition.
tedd4u 10 hours ago [-]
"It was produced by ISO Technical Committee 34 (Food products), Sub-Committee 8 (Tea)."
georgeburdell 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, it’s a bit frightening to know what a hidden dependency NIST is on many things. In my industry, all calibrations ultimately derive from physical NIST standards for resistance, frequency, etc.
masklinn 16 hours ago [-]
It’s frightening that… NIST is doing the very thing it was established to do back when it was called the Bureau of Standards?
GolfPopper 14 hours ago [-]
I suspect the fear comes from both seeing NIST as a single point of critical failure, and perhaps also that it is a far less resilient and/or far more vulnerable, institution than may have been previously realized.
ajsnigrutin 15 hours ago [-]
You can still make cookies out of reference and/or lab materials :)
I wouldn’t put it past people in my country to buy it just to show off wealth :/
I have recently realized we imported the western world in the most superficial ways.
DonHopkins 5 hours ago [-]
Get help. Stop making death threats to people on the internet. And get rid of the gun, juleiie. That's a toxic combination.
Your gun isn't the solution. Threating to shoot people with it is going to get you into a world of trouble you're going to regret for the rest of your life. And that's a huge problem if you ever plan to travel out of your country, or apply for jobs, especially ones involving children.
The government and big corporations like Palantir track things like that, and they sell that data, since it's such a profitable and archetypical application of AI. And they can easily identify who you really are. Your internet death threats go into your permanent record, because they say so much about you.
And it certainly doesn't impress or frighten your intended victims, or make them do what you want. It just proves to everyone how terribly off you are mentally, totally undermines all your claims and arguments, and makes people laugh at and pity you.
Is pity what you really want? There are better less self-humiliating, self-revealing ways to get pity than threatening to shoot people with your gun on the internet, you know.
If you need to talk, the 988 Lifeline is here. At the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, we understand that life's challenges can sometimes be difficult.
why do you consider the cubic inches will be useful to the rest of the world (world who does not use galons)?
sgerenser 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, they should have stopped at hogsheads, which is a well understood quantity worldwide.
cozzyd 3 hours ago [-]
Without cubic furlongs I don't have a good intuition for the amount
14 hours ago [-]
fredoralive 52 minutes ago [-]
1 gallon is 0.832674 gallons. Or 1 gallon is 1.20095 gallons.
ajs1998 14 hours ago [-]
I get your point but unless you actually need tritium water the number still means nothing lol.
colechristensen 14 hours ago [-]
Unless you're actually measuring something with any importance, a gallon is about 4 liters. More closely 3.78541... But saying a quart and a liter are about equal is often good enough.
tedd4u 10 hours ago [-]
As long as you also know a gallon is 4.0… quarts
colechristensen 8 hours ago [-]
quart = quarter ... gallon
jrflowers 13 hours ago [-]
Just think of the largest container of ranch dressing that you’ve ever seen in a grocery store. It’s that much.
bulbar 7 hours ago [-]
To be honest, if you live outside of the US the answer to that is more likely to be a liter (or less) than a gallon.
jrflowers 7 hours ago [-]
In that case you can imagine the biggest container of ranch dressing you’ve ever seen in a grocery store, a gallon is a few of those
BizarroLand 18 hours ago [-]
Makes me want to go to the ocean and start filtering out water somehow.
inigyou 16 hours ago [-]
You can centrifuge it. Heavier molecules move closer to the bottom. Repeat until you reach the desired purity.
You need shitloads of ordinary water to extract a liter of heavy water. And I'd be surprised if there's any superheavy water in that, because tritium radioactively decays.
Fun fact: Heavy water is slightly toxic to humans. If you only drank heavy water, you'd die as it shifts the chemical reactions in your body out of balance. A moderate amount is fine though.
0cf8612b2e1e 11 hours ago [-]
Emphasis on the slightly. I believe it would take weeks of only consuming heavy water. You could certainly drink a single glass of it without ill effects.
danbruc 16 hours ago [-]
Another fun fact - heavy water has a sweet taste.
htrp 15 hours ago [-]
How did someone ever figure this one out?
inigyou 14 hours ago [-]
Probably by drinking it. As I said, it's only slightly toxic. Cody's Lab has done it on YouTube. 0.01% of the normal water you drink is heavy water.
bell-cot 13 hours ago [-]
IIR, a number of rich & famous people have developed severe mercury poisoning after extended conspicuous consumption of swordfish and other very expensive/very contaminated seafood.
Obviously the luxury bottled water industry is missing out on the potential of D2O and T2O.
fnord77 8 hours ago [-]
they're making medicines now with deuterium to alter the half-life
delecti 16 hours ago [-]
There are a variety of ways to do it, but you'd want to be careful that you don't attract attention from your local nuclear regulatory agency.
Slap the 'organic' label on it and sell it at restaurants for $150k/L. It will sell.
fionic 11 hours ago [-]
Idk I feel like if you bought in bulk you would get a discount on the additional mL purchased.
tomsmeding 12 hours ago [-]
I can't help but read VSMOW as Very Standard Mean Ocean Water.
artisinal 19 hours ago [-]
This is why we should ditch Celsius for Kelvin. I never liked how we coupled 0 and 100 to where water freezes and boils under certain conditions. Kelvin doesn't rely on non-invariant reference points.
Guvante 18 hours ago [-]
You want numbers to be understandable and K produces illogical numbers.
(There is a reason it is common to drop the century when talking about years, humans are less skilled at numbers over 100)
And I know temperatures in Fahrenheit go higher but it is common to refer to Phoenix as "over 100" even when it's high can peak over 120.
zinckiwi 18 hours ago [-]
That’s 02025 thinking.
GolfPopper 14 hours ago [-]
X̅ ?
(I'm a little sad the five-digit date hasn't become popular.)
chrismorgan 9 hours ago [-]
Why would five-digit years have become popular? They seem roundly a bad idea.
Years aren’t even four digits by custom: they’re just numbers, with the present idiosyncrasy of eschewing a grouping (thousands) separator. We say the sack of Rome was in 410, not 0410. Only for specific serialisation purposes have we ever recorded fixed-width dates, acknowledging that there are limits to this. The recording of two-digit or offset-by-1900 years in computer systems was a case of bad judgement. The recording of four-digit years as is presently customary is pragmatic and entirely adequate for the next few thousand years, and there’s no point in designing things beyond that horizon.
8note 13 hours ago [-]
what makes a number illogical? i havent heard of that concept wrt to numbers
thaumasiotes 17 hours ago [-]
> (There is a reason it is common to drop the century when talking about years,
Yep.
> humans are less skilled at numbers over 100)
No, the reason is that the century is constant and therefore carries no information. Where the century isn't constant, it never gets dropped.
Guvante 16 hours ago [-]
You can say the same thing about decades
No one says 6 even though it has a very reasonable information density for conversations. It is either a relative year or a two digit one.
cwillu 13 hours ago [-]
The 90s called, they'd like a word.
warmdarksea 18 hours ago [-]
this is actually why i like fahrenheit the most... 0F is "really cold" and 100F is "really hot", whereas in celsius 0C is "kind of cold" and 100C is "uninhabitable". it makes sense for the 0-100 range to be reserved for temperatures frequently encountered in our habitat as humans i think...
wongarsu 18 hours ago [-]
Celsius maps nicely to the temperatures observed in a typical Finnish sauna. 100C is among the highest typical sauna temperatures (very relaxing in dry air), and afterwards you cool off with water around 0C
Also, having 100C as water temp for black tee and 80 for green tee is nice to remember
17 hours ago [-]
kccqzy 17 hours ago [-]
That’s a biased view that leads to a scale only convenient for people living in particular latitudes. Now talk to someone living near the equator like Singapore, and 0F is unimaginably cold (even 40F is basically unheard of), and 100F is very hot but not extraordinarily so. Then you talk to someone living close to the arctic and the converse is true.
All this talk about 0F to 100F being frequently encountered probably reveals your local climate conditions more than it helps define a useful global standard for all humans. We should accept that humans live in more diverse conditions than we intuit and such a scale probably won’t be useful for all.
cyral 16 hours ago [-]
Now I'm imagining some kind of timezone-like temperature unit that varies around the world, and a "100 things programmers should know about ___" post about all the intricacies and special cases.
wiml 12 hours ago [-]
Ooh, and it could shift seasonally so that summer temperatures and winter temperatures can both be in the convenient range. And every locality could shift a different amount and at different times of year according to their local climate.
Next, we can look into reforming those pesky mass and volume units…
CrazyStat 10 hours ago [-]
> Now talk to someone living near the equator like Singapore, and 0F is unimaginably cold (even 40F is basically unheard of), and 100F is very hot but not extraordinarily so.
Bad example--Singapore has never had a single 100F day in recorded history. The highest temperature ever recorded was 37C/98.6F. As a small island its climate is greatly moderated by the masses of water around it. It rarely gets above 90F.
The broader point about the 0-100 Fahrenheit scale being convenient for people from a certain climate is correct, of course.
chrismorgan 9 hours ago [-]
Where I live now (Hyderabad, India), the record low is about 45°F, the temperature will not drop below 50°F more than two or three days in a year, and the daily maximum will not drop below 100°F for at least fifty consecutive days in the summer.
strictnein 14 hours ago [-]
> That’s a biased view that leads to a scale only convenient for people living in particular latitudes
I mean, the other option is cool vs dead
> We should accept that humans live in more diverse conditions
The second most diverse range of temps in the world is smack dab in the middle of the US: South Dakota up through northern Minnesota. Most years that area experiences -40F in the winter and 110F in the summer.
al_borland 17 hours ago [-]
This has always been my primary argument in favor of Fahrenheit. It makes sense for humans, which is all a majority of the population really cares about. In addition, it's more granular. Sometimes turning the thermostat up or down by 1C could be too much, where 1F is just right.
In science and math, I can see where having round numbers for commonly used temperatures would be useful, but if 0C and 100C are the only places that happens, it's not that hard to memorize 2 numbers.
Timpanzee 16 hours ago [-]
You only think it makes sense for humans because it makes sense for you, where you live the same way you feel changing a thermostat by 1F is perfect but 1C is too much: that’s true for you, not universally.
Fahrenheit functionally requires you to be biased in order for it to seem like a good system.
al_borland 16 hours ago [-]
It provides greater granularity in the range of human comfort, without descending into decimals. How is that not more useful for day-to-day human usage?
0F is cold, 100F is hot. I experience both of these temperatures outside where I live every year.
-20C to 40C seems much more arbitrary as a way to measure the zone humans mostly live in.
I would wager that the outdoor and room temperature are an overwhelming majority of human use for temperature. It seems like it would make sense to optimize for how temperature is more commonly used at a population level.
I would say those who see Celsius as a good system are also biased, because they grew up with it and it’s what they’re used to.
kelnos 10 hours ago [-]
> 0F is cold, 100F is hot. I experience both of these temperatures outside where I live every year.
This is just your location, and things like this vary around the world a lot. Hell, they vary in the US. To me, where I live (in the US), 0F and 100F aren't really useful as benchmarks; we don't see either of those temperatures here, ever. The normal range is more like 40F-80F (with extremes maybe down to 25F and up to 90F, but those numbers push credibility a bit).
But ok let's look at averages. Do "most humans" (whatever that means) really live within 0F to 100F? That doesn't really pass the smell test for me; there are lots of humans who live in places where it regularly exceeds 100F. And in those places I doubt it gets anywhere near 0F, with many places never getting down to even 20F. There are also lots of places that get warm, but will never see 100F, and seldom see 90F.
It's all super super arbitrary.
Having said that, I still prefer F over C, but I don't pretend there's any rational reason for it: it's just because I grew up with Fahrenheit, and no matter how hard I try, I just can't feel Celsius the same way. I feel like you maybe don't interact with too many people who grew up with Celsius; you'd probably realize they feel the same way about C as you do about F, and that there's no rational reason for it. It's just what you were trained to think and feel in, and it stuck.
masklinn 16 hours ago [-]
> 0F is cold, 100F is hot. I experience both of these temperatures outside where I live every year.
Most people never experience anywhere near 0F in their lives.
> -20C to -40C seems much more arbitrary as a way to measure the zone humans mostly live in.
The zone most humans live in does not routinely (if ever) get anywhere near -20, to say nothing of -40.
al_borland 15 hours ago [-]
The -40C was a typo, should have been 40C, to mirror the 0F to 100F, rounding a bit to make it less silly. It’s been fixed now.
Millions do experience 0F, and it’s ok to not use the full range. At or around 0F is cold, as you move closer or beyond it, it’s cold. As you move closer to or beyond 100F, it’s hot. Most people would likely prefer to never deal with <0F or >100F.
masklinn 7 hours ago [-]
> Millions do experience 0F, and it’s ok to not use the full range.
That’s not even an argument. Billions never experience freezing temperatures let alone 0F, and it’s ok to use negative numbers.
> At or around 0F is cold, as you move closer or beyond it, it’s cold.
The exact same statement can be made about 0C. Hell if you live in a subtropical area 10C is cold.
> Most people would likely prefer to never deal with <0F or >100F.
Most people would likely prefer to never deal with < 15C or > 30C.
kelnos 10 hours ago [-]
Millions -- hundreds of millions, even -- regularly experience -10F and 110F as well, but you've arbitrarily picked 0F-100F, so I guess their experience doesn't matter, because you prefer round numbers?
tdeck 11 hours ago [-]
> you feel changing a thermostat by 1F is perfect but 1C is too much: that’s true for you, not universally.
I've noticed that here in Japan all the AC units seem to be adjusted by half a degree Celsius at a time, so I do think 1C is a bit much even for people who never used fahrenheit.
bananamogul 10 hours ago [-]
Actually, 1 degree of Fahrenheit is the amount of temperature change a typical human can connect. It's a human-calibrated scale.
Though why 32F instead of 0F for frozen water...I have no idea.
chrismorgan 10 hours ago [-]
> 1 degree of Fahrenheit is the amount of temperature change a typical human can connect
Every non-US thermostat I've seen that works in Celsius is adjustable by half-degrees, so it seems the manufacturers agree with my feeling there...
chrismorgan 10 hours ago [-]
Living in Australia and India, I have never encountered such a thermostat. But I do vaguely recall encountering a thermostat somewhere at some point that went up by twos in Fahrenheit.
I would guess you would only encounter ½°C steps on units that support both Celsius and Fahrenheit, so that they’re closer to parity. I don’t think any unit that I’ve owned has supported Fahrenheit at all.
bigDinosaur 6 hours ago [-]
I can't express just how profoundly culturally biased this is. There is absolutely nothing about Fahrenheit that 'just makes sense' to someone who grew up with Celsius instead.
Your comment about granularity is also nonsensical. I can adjust my heating by more granularity than 1C. That has literally nothing to do with the units being used.
plibblr 4 hours ago [-]
As someone who has used Celsius all my life, I actually kinda think they have a point here - where I live temperatures range from -10 to 39 in Celsius, and our home thermostats have 0.5 degree increments. Had we used Fahrenheit it would be a more human-friendly and compact-display-friendly 11-99 with little need for the fractional part.
-10.5 = 5 characters
11 = 2 characters
vagrantJin 17 hours ago [-]
Celcius is pretty intuitive actually. It takes atmospheric pressure into account, Water is pretty abundant on the surface of the planet, and life kinda depends on it. It's a remarkable substance and quite stable. I dont think theres another substance where we can see all three phases with kitchen appliances and still consume it. Equally good for bathing and drinking. I need steam to clean clothes and cook my food. Using water as a benchmark for how we measure temperature is remarkably useful.
al_borland 16 hours ago [-]
With all of those examples, the actual temperature doesn’t really matter.
For drinking and bathing, people go by feel. In the kitchen, the freezer makes water freeze, and the stovetop will make it boil into steam, but exact temperatures aren’t really relevant here either. The same goes for ironing clothes, the iron just does it.
When I think about where explicit temperatures are needed in the home, the oven and thermostat are the two things that come to mind. Water is pretty irrelevant for both of those. For cooking or frying someone may monitor meat or oil temps, but those aren’t water. A hot tub might have an actual temp on it, but those tend to be around 100F, not 100C, as they are meant for humans, not boiling.
Water is an amazing liquid, but I still struggle to see how measuring all our temperatures based on it makes sense.
kelnos 10 hours ago [-]
> For drinking and bathing, people go by feel.
Yes, and people who grew up with Celsius feel in Celsius, and people who grew up with Fahrenheit (like myself) feel in Fahrenheit.
Stop trying to make some sort of determination of what's logical or reasonable here. Neither one is more or less logical than the other for day-to-day layperson use; anyone can "feel best" in any scale if they were taught it at a young age and used solely that scale for the formative years of their lives. Hell, I bet you could make a kid feel in Kelvin if that's all they were exposed to for their childhood. Or in some made-up scale that takes your 0F-100F and compresses it inside 22-35.
QuantumNomad_ 15 hours ago [-]
> When I think about where explicit temperatures are needed in the home, the oven and thermostat are the two things that come to mind.
But in that case in what way is for example baking a frozen pizza from the store at 400 to 425 degrees F more relatable/convenient/natural than 200 to 220 degrees C?
al_borland 14 hours ago [-]
It's not. When it comes to an oven, F and C are equally arbitrary, so it really doesn't matter. Optimize for what people use most, and let the other random uses fall as they may.
kelnos 10 hours ago [-]
You have it backward. There's no absolute truth on what's optimal for what people use most. What's optimal is just what you were reinforcement-trained to feel when you were growing up as a child. That's it.
My wife says "30C" and knows exactly how that feels, while I struggle to find a reference point. I say "86F" and know exactly how that feels. Even though she prefers C, she can feel F slightly better than I feel C, as she moved to the US when she was in her teens. (Whereas I've spent my entire life in the US, outside of business and holiday travel.)
ajmurmann 18 hours ago [-]
This makes sense if weather is the main focus. For things like cooking Celsius is great though.
0cf8612b2e1e 17 hours ago [-]
I am failing to understand why there would be a distinction. They all seem arbitrary set points you learn.
450F vs 230C does not feel like anything gets easier there. Maybe in some highly technical baking there are some nice deltas that appear?
clickety_clack 17 hours ago [-]
Aren’t you just remembering specific numbers though? Unless you’re trying to boil water unseen so that you can only see a thermometer, the specific 100°C mark isn't that useful.
kelnos 10 hours ago [-]
> Aren’t you just remembering specific numbers though?
That's the thing about this. It's so tiring for people to argue which temperature scale is "better". Nothing is better or worse. What's "better" is individual, and is just "what you grew up with". Because right, you're just remembering specific numbers, and remembering how those temperatures feel. (Or in the case of cooking, remembering what those temperatures do to your food.)
> Unless you’re trying to boil water unseen so that you can only see a thermometer, the specific 100°C mark isn't that useful.
Even then it's not that useful, as water doesn't really boil the way most people think it does. (And god forbid you aren't at sea level and aren't at standard temperature and pressure.)
quickthrowman 15 hours ago [-]
The temperature water boils at is irrelevant when you can just look at it to see if it’s boiling. Any stove will get it hot enough, assuming you have enough energy.
kelnos 10 hours ago [-]
Also if you set something to heat water until it's exactly 100C/212F, it probably won't be boiling when it gets there. Some bits of it might be bubbling, but it won't be what we normally think of as "boiling".
Paracompact 17 hours ago [-]
OF will still kill you faster than 100F, and most folks aren't comfortable at 50F.
It inspires the following idea: A nonlinear scale where ~72F is 0, and +X represents the same level of heat discomfort as -X represents cold discomfort.
8note 12 hours ago [-]
thats a very location dependent scale.
youd still need to include where the discomfort is measured
clickety_clack 17 hours ago [-]
I actually came around to Fahrenheit for the exact same reason. 0°F and 100°F are kind of the top and bottom of the temperature range I’m going to be experiencing and anything outside that is waaay too hot or cold. In Celsius a large portion of people have to flip to negative numbers regularly during the normal year, and everything between 45°C and 100°C is completely unused.
kelnos 10 hours ago [-]
I dunno, temperature doesn't really work like that. As a sibling mentioned, saunas: I can sit in a 190F dry sauna for about a half hour at a time and it feels hot but nice and soothing. But I can only handle a 120F steam room for maybe 10 minutes before I need to get out of there. (Speaking of the dry sauna, if someone pours a bit of water on the stones, it near-instantly feels significantly hotter, even though the temperature hasn't changed.)
Put another way, I can sit in a 190F sauna for a half hour, but a half hour out in the sun in, say, Singapore, feels awful to me. 85F where I live now (unusual but happens), in a relatively dry climate, is bearable, while the same temperature where I grew up, in a much more humid place (where it was more common), feels gross and saps my energy.
And I can be out snowboarding in 25F weather that's calm and sunny, and feel fine in a medium-weight clothing. But add clouds and wind, at the same temperature, and it's unbearable.
And to me, based on the temperatures I usually see, 15F is waaay too cold, and 90F is waaay too hot. Sure, I guess I could round that down to 100F and up to 100F, but that just feels like being arbitrary for the sake of easy numbers.
mmooss 16 hours ago [-]
> 0°F and 100°F are kind of the top and bottom of the temperature range I’m going to be experiencing and anything outside that is waaay too hot or cold.
Food, saunas, the weather, a fever, and much more are often over 100F.
arjie 15 hours ago [-]
Haha, judging by my personal standards, we need to set the zero to 15 C and the 100 to 40 C. My Degrees Arjie are going to be a revolution.
Timpanzee 16 hours ago [-]
Except 0F being “really cold” and 100F being “really hot” is a personal bias of yours based on where you’ve lived. It’s not true for everyone or everywhere.
And even if it were true, it still wouldn’t work. 100F in a dry environment is nice while, in a humid environment, 100F is awful. Same for 0F, a dry and static 0F is fine while a wet and windy 0F is killer.
strictnein 14 hours ago [-]
What's a "wet and windy" 0F? It's more or less a physical impossibility. 0F air can't hold much moisture. Also, it's not a killer.
Timpanzee 11 hours ago [-]
Experience 0F wind in central North America or Central Asia vs 0F wind on the coast and tell me it’s not different. Also, it’s killer, not a killer, as in it sucks a lot.
TylerE 18 hours ago [-]
Also for things like hvac temps Celsius is rather too coarse where as 1F is right around the perceivable difference.
SketchySeaBeast 17 hours ago [-]
There's nothing stopping the use of decimal points for Celsius. Though there's also nothing stopping decimal points in Fahrenheit, the rare instance where an imperial sub-unit doesn't make things go fucky.
fps-hero 3 hours ago [-]
Strange statement to say in an article specifically about water, of which both the Kelvin and Celsius derive their scale.
analog31 18 hours ago [-]
I think that both the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales are now defined in terms of Kelvin and a formula. Most if not all of the units of measure are no longer related to their history except for an agreement to make the new units match the old ones at some point.
0cf8612b2e1e 17 hours ago [-]
The US is technically metric in that the units are defined in terms of the metric equivalent. A US inch is exactly 2.54cm.
mikewarot 15 hours ago [-]
You can thank Carl Edvard Johansson[1] for that, the inventor of the gage block.[2]
He was the one who decided to make it a convenient value, according to Wikipedia[3]
As a result of the definitions above, the U.S. inch was effectively defined as 25.4000508 mm (with a reference temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit) and the UK inch at 25.399977 mm (with a reference temperature of 62 degrees Fahrenheit). When Carl Edvard Johansson started manufacturing gauge blocks in inch sizes in 1912, Johansson's compromise was to manufacture gauge blocks with a nominal size of 25.4mm, with a reference temperature of 20 degrees Celsius, accurate to within a few parts per million of both official definitions. Because Johansson's blocks were so popular, his blocks became the de facto standard for manufacturers internationally, with other manufacturers of gauge blocks following Johansson's definition by producing blocks designed to be equivalent to his.
This makes it relatively easy to handle making metric threads on imperial machines, and vice versa, because you can use 50 / 127 gear tooth pairs to do the ratios.
An odd little factoid: A metalworking lathe will usually have a mechanism for cutting screw threads, with a multi-ratio gearbox for linking the rotation of the spindle to the motion of the carriage. For cutting metric threads, you have to change a pair of gears. So there will be a pair of gears with 50 and 127 teeth, which produces the 2.54 ratio. Then you have to look up the correct gearbox settings for each metric thread pitch in the manual. [0]
It's a big royal pain in the arse, and I've never had a machinist agree to turn metric threads on a lathe. They would rather wait a day and order a metric tap or die. Nowadays the CNC lathes just do it auto-magically.
Also, among old bicycles, there are some weird national thread standards that had metric diameters but inch thread pitches, because of machinery imported into countries like Italy and France during reconstruction after WWII.
[0] Edit: Just noticed duplicate comment preceding mine.
xgulfie 18 hours ago [-]
Kelvin does still rely on each degree being 1% of the way between freezing and boiling so it kinda does rely on a variant reference point
chermi 18 hours ago [-]
The reference point is the triple point, and invariant.
NooneAtAll3 2 hours ago [-]
tripple point of what tho?
which water?
xgulfie 16 hours ago [-]
Sure technically yes, but also celsius is now technically defined as just Kelvin plus 273.15. Degrees have technically been redefined as exactly 1.380649×10^−23 joules
chermi 15 hours ago [-]
Why is that only "technically yes"? It's precisely how the thermodynamic and empirical temperature scales are matched.
throwatdem12311 18 hours ago [-]
Now do metric vs imperial.
artisinal 17 hours ago [-]
Nothing screams freedom more than using ancient terms like horsepower and measuring tires in inches and percentages.
The other day I heard an American talk about a TV being 65 inches. Took me a while to understand they had a 165 centimeter diagonal television.
tancop 16 hours ago [-]
most tv makers and electronics stores in europe give you the screen size in inches first and cm second. they only come in a few common sizes so the specific units dont really matter.
clickety_clack 17 hours ago [-]
I bet you’d use lightyears over petametres or exametres though.
Alpha3031 17 hours ago [-]
It's more typical to use parsecs in practice for astronomy.
vel0city 16 hours ago [-]
Speaking of tires, its actually a crazy mixture of units here in the US. You might have a size like P215/65R15 which translates to a radial passenger tire of a 15" rim, 215mm wide tread (sidewall to sidewall), and an aspect ratio of 65 which is a ratio of the sidewall to tread width.
So a tire size is expressed in inches, millimeters, and ratios.
alehlopeh 17 hours ago [-]
Surely you mean tyres? It’s all arbitrary. Get over yourself.
kelvin still has reference points - absolute zero and tripple point of water
good luck choosing which water, tho
cactusplant7374 18 hours ago [-]
How does the water taste?
fuzzfactor 14 hours ago [-]
Completely decadent, with only a slight aftertaste bearing a noticeable hint of regret . . .
deadbabe 12 hours ago [-]
like what you most want but most can’t have, and what you most can’t have is what you already once had, but lost.
pack_stimulus 19 hours ago [-]
Loved reading this. Thank you!
bananamogul 10 hours ago [-]
So to fill a typical 20,000-gallon pool with this water would cost $2.4 billion.
That might even give a trillionaire pause.
dorianmariecom 18 hours ago [-]
gallon is not a si unit ;)
sandworm101 19 hours ago [-]
As specialized world-class lab supplies and reagents go, that is not very expensive. Stuff like pure Xe (for space thrusters) can be more by mass.
ameliaquining 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but people find it perfectly intuitive that things like xenon are expensive because the material itself is rare; that kind of scarcity is a thing humans have dealt with since the Stone Age. Whereas this stuff is just water.
sandworm101 6 hours ago [-]
Rarity isn't really an issue when buying laboratory quantities. Purity drives the price.
alanfalcon 19 hours ago [-]
[dead]
tomcam 12 hours ago [-]
I got mine at a NIST surplus sale for just $55k/gallon. I think it was mismarked.
Depending on what state you live in, that's not bad these days.
https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=1196a&cclcl=e...
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15975949/Melbourne-Je...
This actually goes both ways; VSMOW itself was carefully made (by mixing in small amounts of water from other sources) to match the composition of an earlier reference water sample, NBS-1, which came from the Potomac River (one supposes it was a convenience sample). NBS-1 is no longer used as a point of reference, since everyone's agreed to use VSMOW instead, but the USGS sells it too.
[1]: https://youtu.be/esQyYGezS7c?t=226
https://www.gardco.com/product/pencil-hardness-test-kit-astm...
Why offer erasers on these things? The procedure described below has nothing to do with using these as pencils, and at $500 for a pack I can't imagine anyone, anywhere casually drawing with these.
(Is there another procedure, similar to the one described below, except instead of dragging the pencil tip across a surface you drag the eraser across it? )
Http://www.rstengineering.com/rst/articles/tsodpencil.pdf
> For the pencil hardness test, reference ASTM D3363, pencils of increasing hardness values are moved over the surface in a precisely defined way until one lead damages the surface. Surface Hardness is defined by the hardest pencil grade which just fails to damage the surface.
> Observe the pencil track. Sufficient pressure must have been applied either to cut or damage the coating or to crush the lead pencil point.
> If neither coating damage or pencil point crushing is observed, repeat the test until a definite observation is made.
> If scratching or damage of the surface occurs, proceed with the next softer pencil grade and repeat the testing process until a pencil lead grade is found which crushes and does not damage the coating.
> If crushing of the hardest lead should occur, the coating is therefore extremely hard and is beyond the measuring range of this test
and you dont need to fit the car into a proper harness tester?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103
https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2020/02/nist-releases-...
Perhaps you would prefer some standard issue meat.
https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/sial/nist1546a
https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/sial/nist2781
https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=1196a&cclcl=e...
California/New York prices are easily $0.75/cigg so it’s not that much more expensive.
https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/search?query=cigarettes&inp...
Thinking of a concept for a restaurant meal along the lines of a calibrated fried spam dinner, that costs ~2k for about a can worth, fried like they do in Hawaii.
Come to think of it, would love to see an “iron chef- calibrated foods” edition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crjxpZHv7Hk
I have recently realized we imported the western world in the most superficial ways.
Your gun isn't the solution. Threating to shoot people with it is going to get you into a world of trouble you're going to regret for the rest of your life. And that's a huge problem if you ever plan to travel out of your country, or apply for jobs, especially ones involving children.
The government and big corporations like Palantir track things like that, and they sell that data, since it's such a profitable and archetypical application of AI. And they can easily identify who you really are. Your internet death threats go into your permanent record, because they say so much about you.
And it certainly doesn't impress or frighten your intended victims, or make them do what you want. It just proves to everyone how terribly off you are mentally, totally undermines all your claims and arguments, and makes people laugh at and pity you.
Is pity what you really want? There are better less self-humiliating, self-revealing ways to get pity than threatening to shoot people with your gun on the internet, you know.
If you need to talk, the 988 Lifeline is here. At the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, we understand that life's challenges can sometimes be difficult.
https://988lifeline.org
You need shitloads of ordinary water to extract a liter of heavy water. And I'd be surprised if there's any superheavy water in that, because tritium radioactively decays.
Fun fact: Heavy water is slightly toxic to humans. If you only drank heavy water, you'd die as it shifts the chemical reactions in your body out of balance. A moderate amount is fine though.
Obviously the luxury bottled water industry is missing out on the potential of D2O and T2O.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Production_methods
(There is a reason it is common to drop the century when talking about years, humans are less skilled at numbers over 100)
And I know temperatures in Fahrenheit go higher but it is common to refer to Phoenix as "over 100" even when it's high can peak over 120.
(I'm a little sad the five-digit date hasn't become popular.)
Years aren’t even four digits by custom: they’re just numbers, with the present idiosyncrasy of eschewing a grouping (thousands) separator. We say the sack of Rome was in 410, not 0410. Only for specific serialisation purposes have we ever recorded fixed-width dates, acknowledging that there are limits to this. The recording of two-digit or offset-by-1900 years in computer systems was a case of bad judgement. The recording of four-digit years as is presently customary is pragmatic and entirely adequate for the next few thousand years, and there’s no point in designing things beyond that horizon.
Yep.
> humans are less skilled at numbers over 100)
No, the reason is that the century is constant and therefore carries no information. Where the century isn't constant, it never gets dropped.
No one says 6 even though it has a very reasonable information density for conversations. It is either a relative year or a two digit one.
Also, having 100C as water temp for black tee and 80 for green tee is nice to remember
All this talk about 0F to 100F being frequently encountered probably reveals your local climate conditions more than it helps define a useful global standard for all humans. We should accept that humans live in more diverse conditions than we intuit and such a scale probably won’t be useful for all.
Next, we can look into reforming those pesky mass and volume units…
Bad example--Singapore has never had a single 100F day in recorded history. The highest temperature ever recorded was 37C/98.6F. As a small island its climate is greatly moderated by the masses of water around it. It rarely gets above 90F.
The broader point about the 0-100 Fahrenheit scale being convenient for people from a certain climate is correct, of course.
I mean, the other option is cool vs dead
> We should accept that humans live in more diverse conditions
The second most diverse range of temps in the world is smack dab in the middle of the US: South Dakota up through northern Minnesota. Most years that area experiences -40F in the winter and 110F in the summer.
In science and math, I can see where having round numbers for commonly used temperatures would be useful, but if 0C and 100C are the only places that happens, it's not that hard to memorize 2 numbers.
Fahrenheit functionally requires you to be biased in order for it to seem like a good system.
0F is cold, 100F is hot. I experience both of these temperatures outside where I live every year.
-20C to 40C seems much more arbitrary as a way to measure the zone humans mostly live in.
I would wager that the outdoor and room temperature are an overwhelming majority of human use for temperature. It seems like it would make sense to optimize for how temperature is more commonly used at a population level.
I would say those who see Celsius as a good system are also biased, because they grew up with it and it’s what they’re used to.
This is just your location, and things like this vary around the world a lot. Hell, they vary in the US. To me, where I live (in the US), 0F and 100F aren't really useful as benchmarks; we don't see either of those temperatures here, ever. The normal range is more like 40F-80F (with extremes maybe down to 25F and up to 90F, but those numbers push credibility a bit).
But ok let's look at averages. Do "most humans" (whatever that means) really live within 0F to 100F? That doesn't really pass the smell test for me; there are lots of humans who live in places where it regularly exceeds 100F. And in those places I doubt it gets anywhere near 0F, with many places never getting down to even 20F. There are also lots of places that get warm, but will never see 100F, and seldom see 90F.
It's all super super arbitrary.
Having said that, I still prefer F over C, but I don't pretend there's any rational reason for it: it's just because I grew up with Fahrenheit, and no matter how hard I try, I just can't feel Celsius the same way. I feel like you maybe don't interact with too many people who grew up with Celsius; you'd probably realize they feel the same way about C as you do about F, and that there's no rational reason for it. It's just what you were trained to think and feel in, and it stuck.
Most people never experience anywhere near 0F in their lives.
> -20C to -40C seems much more arbitrary as a way to measure the zone humans mostly live in.
The zone most humans live in does not routinely (if ever) get anywhere near -20, to say nothing of -40.
Millions do experience 0F, and it’s ok to not use the full range. At or around 0F is cold, as you move closer or beyond it, it’s cold. As you move closer to or beyond 100F, it’s hot. Most people would likely prefer to never deal with <0F or >100F.
That’s not even an argument. Billions never experience freezing temperatures let alone 0F, and it’s ok to use negative numbers.
> At or around 0F is cold, as you move closer or beyond it, it’s cold.
The exact same statement can be made about 0C. Hell if you live in a subtropical area 10C is cold.
> Most people would likely prefer to never deal with <0F or >100F.
Most people would likely prefer to never deal with < 15C or > 30C.
I've noticed that here in Japan all the AC units seem to be adjusted by half a degree Celsius at a time, so I do think 1C is a bit much even for people who never used fahrenheit.
Though why 32F instead of 0F for frozen water...I have no idea.
Citation needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit suggests no such thing, nor have I ever heard the notion.
I would guess you would only encounter ½°C steps on units that support both Celsius and Fahrenheit, so that they’re closer to parity. I don’t think any unit that I’ve owned has supported Fahrenheit at all.
Your comment about granularity is also nonsensical. I can adjust my heating by more granularity than 1C. That has literally nothing to do with the units being used.
-10.5 = 5 characters 11 = 2 characters
For drinking and bathing, people go by feel. In the kitchen, the freezer makes water freeze, and the stovetop will make it boil into steam, but exact temperatures aren’t really relevant here either. The same goes for ironing clothes, the iron just does it.
When I think about where explicit temperatures are needed in the home, the oven and thermostat are the two things that come to mind. Water is pretty irrelevant for both of those. For cooking or frying someone may monitor meat or oil temps, but those aren’t water. A hot tub might have an actual temp on it, but those tend to be around 100F, not 100C, as they are meant for humans, not boiling.
Water is an amazing liquid, but I still struggle to see how measuring all our temperatures based on it makes sense.
Yes, and people who grew up with Celsius feel in Celsius, and people who grew up with Fahrenheit (like myself) feel in Fahrenheit.
Stop trying to make some sort of determination of what's logical or reasonable here. Neither one is more or less logical than the other for day-to-day layperson use; anyone can "feel best" in any scale if they were taught it at a young age and used solely that scale for the formative years of their lives. Hell, I bet you could make a kid feel in Kelvin if that's all they were exposed to for their childhood. Or in some made-up scale that takes your 0F-100F and compresses it inside 22-35.
But in that case in what way is for example baking a frozen pizza from the store at 400 to 425 degrees F more relatable/convenient/natural than 200 to 220 degrees C?
My wife says "30C" and knows exactly how that feels, while I struggle to find a reference point. I say "86F" and know exactly how that feels. Even though she prefers C, she can feel F slightly better than I feel C, as she moved to the US when she was in her teens. (Whereas I've spent my entire life in the US, outside of business and holiday travel.)
450F vs 230C does not feel like anything gets easier there. Maybe in some highly technical baking there are some nice deltas that appear?
That's the thing about this. It's so tiring for people to argue which temperature scale is "better". Nothing is better or worse. What's "better" is individual, and is just "what you grew up with". Because right, you're just remembering specific numbers, and remembering how those temperatures feel. (Or in the case of cooking, remembering what those temperatures do to your food.)
> Unless you’re trying to boil water unseen so that you can only see a thermometer, the specific 100°C mark isn't that useful.
Even then it's not that useful, as water doesn't really boil the way most people think it does. (And god forbid you aren't at sea level and aren't at standard temperature and pressure.)
It inspires the following idea: A nonlinear scale where ~72F is 0, and +X represents the same level of heat discomfort as -X represents cold discomfort.
youd still need to include where the discomfort is measured
Put another way, I can sit in a 190F sauna for a half hour, but a half hour out in the sun in, say, Singapore, feels awful to me. 85F where I live now (unusual but happens), in a relatively dry climate, is bearable, while the same temperature where I grew up, in a much more humid place (where it was more common), feels gross and saps my energy.
And I can be out snowboarding in 25F weather that's calm and sunny, and feel fine in a medium-weight clothing. But add clouds and wind, at the same temperature, and it's unbearable.
And to me, based on the temperatures I usually see, 15F is waaay too cold, and 90F is waaay too hot. Sure, I guess I could round that down to 100F and up to 100F, but that just feels like being arbitrary for the sake of easy numbers.
Food, saunas, the weather, a fever, and much more are often over 100F.
And even if it were true, it still wouldn’t work. 100F in a dry environment is nice while, in a humid environment, 100F is awful. Same for 0F, a dry and static 0F is fine while a wet and windy 0F is killer.
He was the one who decided to make it a convenient value, according to Wikipedia[3]
This makes it relatively easy to handle making metric threads on imperial machines, and vice versa, because you can use 50 / 127 gear tooth pairs to do the ratios.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Edvard_Johansson
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_block
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch#History
It's a big royal pain in the arse, and I've never had a machinist agree to turn metric threads on a lathe. They would rather wait a day and order a metric tap or die. Nowadays the CNC lathes just do it auto-magically.
Also, among old bicycles, there are some weird national thread standards that had metric diameters but inch thread pitches, because of machinery imported into countries like Italy and France during reconstruction after WWII.
[0] Edit: Just noticed duplicate comment preceding mine.
which water?
The other day I heard an American talk about a TV being 65 inches. Took me a while to understand they had a 165 centimeter diagonal television.
So a tire size is expressed in inches, millimeters, and ratios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units
good luck choosing which water, tho
That might even give a trillionaire pause.
OK I just made the whole story up