3 ms·
But I still find the 100 a useful demarcation - especially when cooking. I find it handy to know how far away my soup or tea water is away from boiling without
by cyberferret 7y ago
But I still find the 100 a useful demarcation - especially when cooking. I find it handy to know how far away my soup or tea water is away from boiling without doing complicated maths in my head.
The equivalence to the percent scale also makes it easier to conceive - i.e. if I see my kettle on the hotplate registering 75 degrees C, I immediately think "Oh, it is three quarters of the way to boiling".
- burfog 7y agoYou have provided a fine example of why Celsius is bad when you think "Oh, it is three quarters of the way to boiling". No, 75 degrees C is not. Your calculation: 75/100 giving 0.75 which is "three quarters" Proper calculation: (75+273.15)/(100+273.15) giving 0.933 which is "fourteen fifteenths" Your tap water is probably more than three quarters the way to boiling.
- DonHopkins 7y agoYou could ask: "Three quarters" of the way from WHAT temperature to boiling? It sounds like the grandparent is trying to measure how far through the task of boiling their water is, by interpreting degrees Celsius as percentage done. Maybe they usually make soup or tea by boiling ice cubes. (Perhaps they're Siberian?) Are they saying that 75 degrees mean three quarters of the way from room temperature tap water to boiling water? Or are they talking about boiling an ice cube, so it's three quarters from 0 Celsius freezing? Interpreting degrees Celsius as a percentages is not an intuitive way of measuring time elapsed to boil tap water, because 75% between freezing and boiling doesn't mean 75% of the time required to boil has elapsed, since you're starting from room temperature when you boil tap water, not freezing.