• Me (unregistered)

    Thats what happens when you get closer to the sun.

  • brian (unregistered)

    anyone have some really high SPF sun block?

  • (cs)

    An inconvenient truth indeed.

  • Wene Gerchinko (unregistered)

    Looks more like Global Fat Fingering to me. Typically, character generators are supplied data by human entry.

    The REAL WTF here is that we still use humans to do data entry.

  • ben (unregistered)

    How is 670 F anything like "three times" 212 F?

  • (cs)

    Wow, I didn't know the Ionosphere was so low to the Earth...and under cloud cover.

  • Feyr (unregistered) in reply to Wene Gerchinko

    yeah, we should be using indians or some stuff from the third world

  • (cs) in reply to ben
    ben:
    How is 670 F anything like "three times" 212 F?

    Are you kidding?

  • (cs)

    Well, it seems awfully logical to me that the top of the mountain would be the hottest place. It's closer to the sun, after all.

    Now if only we could find a way to blame this on global warming....

  • Kalen (unregistered) in reply to ben
    ben:
    How is 670 F anything like "three times" 212 F?

    Indeed. Absolute zero is -459 F, so 670 F isn't even double that!

  • john doe (unregistered) in reply to ben
    ben:
    How is 670 F anything like "three times" 212 F?
    That's indeed WTF, but Celsius would also be no good. The temperature is just 1.682 times the point of boiling water. ((670-32)*5/9+273.15)/373.15 Everybody knows that!
  • (cs) in reply to ben
    ben:
    How is 670 F anything like "three times" 212 F?
    If that's a joke, I guess you're the only one who gets it. And if not, you might want to step away from the keyboard until you figure it out.
  • Dwayne (unregistered) in reply to ssprencel
    ssprencel:
    ben:
    How is 670 F anything like "three times" 212 F?
    Are you kidding?
    No. It's only 1.68 times greater, in fact. Welcome to physics.
  • (cs) in reply to ben
    ben:
    How is 670 F anything like "three times" 212 F?
    More like: How is 627.4 K anything like "three times" 373 K?
  • TobiX (unregistered) in reply to ben

    The first thought I had was "How the hell is 670 anything like three times 100?" - Then I realized there are at least 4 different temperature scales and went on...

    So we have water boiling at: 100° Celsius 212° Fahrenheit 373.15 Kelvin 671.67 Rankine

    And Wikipedia also knows the follownig scales: Delisle, Leiden, Newton, Rankine, Réaumur, Rømer

    ...

  • AndrewB (unregistered)

    Yeah, 670 degrees F is 1.68 times the boiling point of water, not 3+ times.

    The real WTF is that anyone would think that 0 degrees F equals "no heat" and anything colder than that is in a state of "negative heat."

  • (cs) in reply to AndrewB

    Wow, you guys are nuts...the point is the stupid graphics. The fact that numerically 212 is about 1/3 of 670 is all he's trying to point out, not that the actual amount of heat is 3x greater...this should have been caught by someone somewhere or, at the very least, a piece of software. That's the wonder in this graphic, not whether or not 670 is roughly 3x 212 or 670F is roughly 3x the heat of 212F...

    Unbelievable.

  • meow (unregistered)

    SPF 1 million oughta do it.

  • (cs) in reply to ben
    ben:
    How is 670 F anything like "three times" 212 F?

    212 x 3

    636

    That looks close enough to 670 for me.

  • Martin (unregistered)

    Whopping 34 C last night, even though the show falling is quite visible.. And this is not human entry.. [image] And yes, it is usually a celcius display.. I just realized that the temperature is pretty accurate had it been farenheit.

  • Dwayne (unregistered) in reply to Edowyth
    Edowyth:
    Wow, you guys are nuts...the point is the stupid graphics. The fact that numerically 212 is about 1/3 of 670 is all he's trying to point out, not that the actual amount of heat is 3x greater...
    It's actually temperature, not heat. :P
  • Sarah Connor (unregistered)

    Anybody not wearing 2 million sunblock is gonna have a real bad day. Get it?

  • (cs) in reply to Martin
    Martin:
    Whopping 34 C last night, even though the show falling is quite visible.. And this is not human entry.. And yes, it *is* usually a celcius display.. I just realized that the temperature is pretty accurate had it been farenheit.

    Uh, is it one of those signs that alternates C and F? A lot of signs display time, temp in C, time, temp in F, repeat.

    For those who are being pedantic about the 1.6 / 3 times thing, are you including the latent heat of vaporization in your calculations?

  • (cs) in reply to Hitsuji
    Hitsuji:
    ben:
    How is 670 F anything like "three times" 212 F?
    More like: How is 627.4 K anything like "three times" 373 K?

    Okay, I get what you're all driving at. We shouldn't be using a scale with an arbitrary zero because it provides faulty comparisons. But maybe you're reading too much into original statement?

  • Jimbo (unregistered)

    Wow. The real WTF is the number of people that know thermal physics, but can't do 4th grade math or get a joke.

  • (cs)

    When I was in highschool I had a really awful science teacher - we kept a little notebook with some really amazing facts she told us sometimes. An example? "Whales swim upriver to eat trout". We also listed in our notebook the phrase: "The earth is hotter than the sun, because it has clouds". She probably saw this on the news, but did not know that the sun is MUCH hotter than 670 F.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Jimbo
    Jimbo:
    Wow. The real WTF is the number of people that know thermal physics, but can't do 4th grade math or get a joke.
    HA HA HA LOL!!!
  • (cs) in reply to anonymous
    anonymous:
    Jimbo:
    Wow. The real WTF is the number of people that know thermal physics, but can't do 4th grade math or get a joke.
    HA HA HA LOL!!!

    The REAL WTF is that all of the thermal physics dudes didn't get the truth: The Flying Spaghetti Monster altered the results with his noodly appendage.

    Ramen!!!

  • (cs) in reply to ahf

    Earth's surface temperatures do exceed those of the sun for momentaray periods in small regions, and it is because of clouds - and the lightning they sometimes produce. Temperatures can reach 30,000K (50,000°F)

    And there was a widely publicised case a while ago of a whale swimming up the Thames, perhaps to eat trout.

  • (cs) in reply to ahf
    ahf:
    When I was in highschool I had a really awful science teacher - we kept a little notebook with some really amazing facts she told us sometimes. An example? "Whales swim upriver to eat trout". We also listed in our notebook the phrase: "The earth is hotter than the sun, because it has clouds". She probably saw this on the news, but did not know that the sun is MUCH hotter than 670 F.

    I had a college chemistry professor who said that the Earth is the fourth planet from the sun. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Earth! Admittedly this was Chemistry for Nontechnical Majors (I needed a physical science without a lab, and rightly recognized this class as a cake walk). The professor had to stop teaching for one day to teach everybody how exponents work. He said anyone who knew them could leave. There were only a couple of us who got up and left.

  • (cs)

    Anyone here remembers the good old days when this site was all about hardcore coding mistakes. You would read the comments and actually learn something.

    sighs

  • (cs) in reply to haveworld
    haveworld:
    Anyone here remembers the good old days when this site was all about hardcore coding mistakes. You would read the comments and actually learn something.

    sighs

    Actually, in the good old days, if I recall correctly, this site was mostly about crappy database/SQL design sprinkled with (further) bastardizations of Visual Basic.

  • (cs)

    The Goggles!

    They do nothink!!

    (oh joy...)

  • (cs) in reply to haveworld
    haveworld:
    Anyone here remembers the good old days when this site was all about hardcore coding mistakes. You would read the comments and actually learn something.

    sighs

    Well, after today I'm a little less ignorant in physics.

    I wonder if my degree from WTFU will still be as widely recognized now that the name has been changed.

  • (cs) in reply to bstorer
    bstorer:
    haveworld:
    Anyone here remembers the good old days when this site was all about hardcore coding mistakes. You would read the comments and actually learn something.

    sighs

    Actually, in the good old days, if I recall correctly, this site was mostly about crappy database/SQL design sprinkled with (further) bastardizations of Visual Basic.

    And most of the comments were wrong, or WTF on themselves...

    Oh, wait, that was last mounth! I didn't get the old days.

  • Romeo (unregistered)

    The real WTF (Worse Than Failure) is that no one started a flame war about thermal metrics in Europe, USA and latin America.

    CAPTCHA: stinky - yeah, it will be.

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered)

    The real WTF is using such a stupid scale. Fahrenheit, pfff...

  • whicker (unregistered) in reply to ahf
    ahf:
    When I was in highschool I had a really awful science teacher - we kept a little notebook with some really amazing facts she told us sometimes. An example? "Whales swim upriver to eat trout". We also listed in our notebook the phrase: "The earth is hotter than the sun, because it has clouds". She probably saw this on the news, but did not know that the sun is MUCH hotter than 670 F.
    The worst teachers are the ones where you have to match your answers with the back of the book...

    Since water boils at about 212 and freezes at 32, we need to get rid of the offset.

    670 - 32 = 638

    Now we just divide: 638 / 212 = 3.0

    Which indeed matches the 3 in the back of the book for problem #3. No sense in arguing, the same textbook has been used for 25 years, so it must be right. And don't you dare write in the book, that'll cost you 20 cents per page, and you can't get your diploma until you pay all your fines!

    fun times.

  • Glenn Lasher (unregistered) in reply to ssprencel
    How is 670 F anything like "three times" 212 F?
    Are you kidding?

    No.

    212F, times three, is not 636F, because the zero, on the Farenheit scale, is in the wrong place. The zero should be at -459.67F, hence 212F is 671.67 degrees from where zero should be, and 670F is 1129.67 degrees from where zero should be, making it closer to twice the temperature of boiling water than it is to three times.

  • Glenn Lasher (unregistered) in reply to Romeo
    The real WTF (Worse Than Failure) is that no one started a flame war about thermal metrics in Europe, USA and latin America.

    That's because, in measuring temperature, they are technically both wrong.

    Measuring temperature in kelvins, you still have the relic of centigrade (by virtue of there being 100 units between water freezing and boiling), but you do end up with a number that, for any fixed quantity of matter, will be proportional to the amount of heat embodied in that matter.

    Of course, there is the practical matter, that measuring temperature in kelvins results in numbers that are necessarily large at any normal surface temperature. This makes centigrade a bit more practical, because it is anchored to events that are familiar to everyone.

    Fahrenheit, on the other hand, is just fucked up.

    Happy now?

  • (cs) in reply to Glenn Lasher
    Glenn Lasher:
    How is 670 F anything like "three times" 212 F?
    Are you kidding?

    No.

    212F, times three, is not 636F, because the zero, on the Farenheit scale, is in the wrong place. The zero should be at -459.67F, hence 212F is 671.67 degrees from where zero should be, and 670F is 1129.67 degrees from where zero should be, making it closer to twice the temperature of boiling water than it is to three times.

    Thank you. I've been googleing around for a little while looking for an explaination. That is, Googleing around when the boss isn't walking by ;) Makes perfect sense...in a pedantic sort of way.

  • ChiefCrazyTalk (unregistered) in reply to ssprencel
    ssprencel:
    ben:
    How is 670 F anything like "three times" 212 F?

    Are you kidding?

    Considering Farenheit is not an absolute scale (like Rankin or Kelvin) then I'm guessing no - he's not kidding. 300F is NOT three times 100F.

  • scooter (unregistered) in reply to Jimbo
    Jimbo:
    Wow. The real WTF is the number of people that know thermal physics, but can't do 4th grade math or get a joke.
    We all went to MIT and now wear powder blue leisure suits with cowboy boots.
  • ben (unregistered)

    I know that 212 X 3 is close enough to 670 for government work, thanks. 670 meters is roughly three times 212 meters, 670 hogsheads is roughly three times 212 hogsheads, 670 acre-feet is roughly three times 212 acre-feet.

    670 degrees F is not roughly three times 212 F.

    This has nothing to do with SI vs obsolete units. It's about the nature of degrees vs units.

  • Duston (unregistered)

    Whopping 34 C last night, even though the show falling is >quite visible.. And this is not human entry..

    I wish I had taken a picture of the thermometer here which consistantly showed the temperature to be +266F. At least the clock was right!

  • ewww (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward:
    The real WTF is using such a stupid scale. Fahrenheit, pfff...
    Yep. Squares use Fahrenheit. Us cool cats use Rankine!
  • (cs) in reply to Dwayne
    Dwayne:
    Edowyth:
    Wow, you guys are nuts...the point is the stupid graphics. The fact that numerically 212 is about 1/3 of 670 is all he's trying to point out, not that the actual amount of heat is 3x greater...
    It's actually temperature, not heat. :P

    Sorry, this kinda made me mad...

    Temperature is a measure of heat (in physics they would say a measure of the amount of movement of atoms)!

    Now, let's assume that we don't know where absolute zero is, or even that there is an absolute zero how'll we tell each other how HOT it is? Oh, I know, let's fix a zero somewhere on the part of the range we can measure and fix a step size for measuring from there... what you get is Fahrenheit in one part of the world and Celsius in another... when we all find out about absolute zero, somebody decides that we should base a scale off of it, but what to use as the step size Fahrenheit's step or Celsius'? Well, because the person who thought of it worked in Celsius they decided to use that as the base step size thus we have (approx) 273.15 Kelvin == 0 C.

    So if you're going to flame scales, you'd better be flaming both Fahrenheit and Celsius because they are both attempts to do something at a time when we had imperfect knowledge and, thus, are imperfect attempts...and, if you really want to get into it: why doesn't the step size for Kelvin ensure that from absolute zero to freezing water at sea level is 10, 100, or 1000 digits? The rest of the international measurement system is strictly base 10...but here we have something which is base 273.15: "Oh!, well", you say, "it is base 10 just between freezing and boiling for water at sea level"

    Hmm...this could go on forever. The point is that ALL measures created by man are arbitrary to a point. We can't eliminate that factor because we don't know everything and even if we did that wouldn't guarantee that there would be a forced (or even natural) way to measure things. So don't start screaming because you see something arbitrary in measurements.

    This post escaped me...it started so small and went way off topic! ;)

    Addendum (2007-02-26 16:31):

    Dwayne:
    Edowyth:
    Wow, you guys are nuts...the point is the stupid graphics. The fact that numerically 212 is about 1/3 of 670 is all he's trying to point out, not that the actual amount of heat is 3x greater...
    It's actually temperature, not heat. :P

    Sorry, this kinda made me mad...

    Temperature is a measure of heat (in physics they would say a measure of the amount of movement of atoms)!

    Now, let's assume that we don't know where absolute zero is, or even that there is an absolute zero how'll we tell each other how HOT it is? Oh, I know, let's fix a zero somewhere on the part of the range we can measure and fix a step size for measuring from there... what you get is Fahrenheit in one part of the world and Celsius in another... when we all find out about absolute zero, somebody decides that we should base a scale off of it, but what to use as the step size Fahrenheit's step or Celsius'? Well, because the person who thought of it worked in Celsius they decided to use that as the base step size thus we have (approx) 273.15 Kelvin == 0 C.

    So if you're going to flame scales, you'd better be flaming both Fahrenheit and Celsius because they are both attempts to do something at a time when we had imperfect knowledge and, thus, are imperfect attempts...and, if you really want to get into it: why doesn't the step size for Kelvin ensure that from absolute zero to freezing water at sea level is 10, 100, or 1000 digits? The rest of the international measurement system is strictly base 10...but here we have something which is base 273.15: "Oh!, well", you say, "it is base 10 just between freezing and boiling for water at sea level"

    Hmm...this could go on forever. The point is that ALL measures created by man are arbitrary to a point. We can't eliminate that factor because we don't know everything and even if we did that wouldn't guarantee that there would be a forced (or even natural) way to measure things. So don't start screaming because you see something arbitrary in measurements.

    This post escaped me...it started so small and went way off topic! ;)

    EDIT: The reason the USA still uses Fahrenheit is because it would simply be too expensive and time consuming to work our minds around another scale. (I like it better than Celsius or Kelvin anyway because the step size is smaller giving a much greater feeling of change between 90F and 100F than between 32.222C and 37.777C.)

  • (cs) in reply to Edowyth

    sorry, tried to edit and then the time limit ran out and I just clicked submit and it appended the whole message again...

  • Chris (unregistered) in reply to Glenn Lasher
    Glenn Lasher:
    but you do end up with a number that, for any fixed quantity of matter, will be proportional to the amount of heat embodied in that matter.

    Not quite. As from the enthalpy changes involved in phase changes, heat capacities are function of temperature.

    The distiguishing feature of the kelvin scale is that there is physical meaning to the ratio of two absolute temperatures as opposed to two temperature differences.

  • (cs) in reply to Edowyth

    Don't forget that technically/officially, the freezing point of water is 0.000089°C and the boiling point is 99.9839°C at 1 standard atm. so much for logical.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius#The_melting_and_boiling_points_of_water

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