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Localization Failure: Temperature Is Hard
- masklinn 3y ago> it is not immune to errors They’re pretty much part of the guardian’s dna: > Frequent typographical errors during the age of manual typesetting led Private Eye magazine to dub the paper the "Grauniad" in the 1970s, a nickname still occasionally used by the editors for self-mockery
- marcus_holmes 3y agoMy father still refers to it as The Grauniad
- denton-scratch 3y agoc.f. Private Eye's "The Getelarph".
- perilunar 3y agoHard? So is using the degree symbol apparently: not a single one in the whole article. (68F is not a temperature — it’s a seat number.) https://degreeswhat.com/?68 https://degreeswhat.com/?68
- eviks 3y ago"To be fair", there is ASCII in the name
- brucedawson 3y ago"To be fair..." (chorus of Letterkenny voices) I appreciate the ASCII-only excuse, but I've corrected the omission anyway. Non-ASCII characters in randomascii - what will they think of next?
- perilunar 3y agoThanks for that!
- MayeulC 3y agoPssst... You over-corrected > 278 °K to 283 °K, There's no ° symbol before the kelvin unit, just a regular non-breaking space if you want to be SI-compliant.
- algas 3y agoYou may have overcorrected a bit; 300 Kelvin is written 300K, not 300 °K. (The system is a mess.)
- Moru 3y agoTo be double fair, the page says in the bottom "And worry about whether this blog should have been called randomutf-8"
- avgcorrection 3y ago68:degrees:F
- pwdisswordfishc 3y agoNo, 68 farads is a capacitance. Pretty massive one, too. It's another question how they obtain that from coulombs...
- Rygian 3y agoThat would be 68 F [1]. I agree with parent, 68F is a seat number. [1] https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/checklist.html https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/checklist.html (number 15).
- delta_p_delta_x 3y agoAfter using siunitx[1], I have taken great care to ensure the spacing of measures and their corresponding units. [1]: https://ctan.org/pkg/siunitx?lang=en https://ctan.org/pkg/siunitx?lang=en
- danbruc 3y agoThat would be 68 F, not 86F.
- bawolff 3y agoThis is taking being a grammar nazi to a whole new level.
- jjgreen 3y agoThat's grammar Nazi
- pwdisswordfishc 3y agoI don't know how to tell you, but language prescription is not actually morally equivalent to genocide.
- Amorymeltzer 3y agoWay back in high school precalculus, I had a particularly hard (and hard-ass) teacher. I generally scored in the 85-95 range, but one exam I was shocked to get a grade in the 60s. When I asked the teacher about it they pointed out that since I hadn't written my angles with the degree symbol (e.g. 45˚) that meant they were in radians, and thus very (very) wrong. Never did that again.
- mikewarot 3y agoIf you want "twice as hot" to be meaningful, you have to use an absolute scale, either Kelvin or Rankine. (1 K = 1.8 °R) Doubling absolute temperature doubles the pressure (at constant volume) or volume (at constant pressure) of an ideal gas. This gets really important when it comes to compressing and expanding air and other gasses. Room temperature is approximately 293 K, twice that is 586 K / 595 °F / 313 °C. Hotter than your typical oven cooking temperature. We often don't realize how warm the world we live in truly is, from a physics standpoint.
- benhurmarcel 3y agoThe Python package "pint" (to manage units) implements that with different units for absolute temperature vs delta temperatures. https://pint.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user/nonmult.html https://pint.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user/nonmult.html
- usui 3y agoKelvin doesn't use degrees
- psychoslave 3y agoWhy do we use degrees for other temperatures by the way? Is that related to some kind of absolute vs relative metric? (Kelvin, I guess, is based on absolute zero as a reference point, doesn't it?) Incidentally, why is the degree immune to disappearance in division unlike all other units? That is, if I divide a distance (m) by a speed (m/s) I get a duration (s). From sheer memory, degree doesn't work like that. Any clue why?
- ordu 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement I learned this relatively late in my life, but it was so an insight. From one hand it is just obvious facts, but from the other hand they are nicely categorized and so feels like you have learned something completely new.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- matsemann 3y agoA bit related, but I hate how many errors I get because I want my system language to be English instead of my native language (Norwegian) on my laptop, phone etc. Because I don't want a badly translated experience. However, I still want units in meters, Celsius, dates written sensibly, time in 24h format etc. But not all apps understand this, which is quite annoying. It's like they only look at the language and make a decision, even though on OS level there's more fine grained locale settings.
- leshenka 3y agoYour browser doesn't give away this information. It's inconvenient in cases like yours but on the other hand it would be yet another signal in browser fingerprinting
- avereveard 3y agoBrowsers always send the accept language you configured. It drives me nuts, most sites are geolocating me instead and serving me Spanish content. My browser is always sending accept language, and it's most often ignored than not, even frommthe big old web players (Google and Wikipedia to name a few)
- codeflo 3y agoThis used to work back in the old days, but more and more sites decides to ignore this a few years ago. The reasoning is that the percentage of users with misconfigured browsers (who don't know how to fix this and also don't know how to click a "change language" button on the website) is bigger than the percentage of users who intentionally use a language that's different from their geolocated one. So the ad-revenue maximizing choice is to ignore the user's configuration.
- Scoundreller 3y agoThat’s why I like travelling: I’ll get all my web content in English (the language I do know) and the ads in a language I don’t know (perfect).
- brtknr 3y agoLooks like the Guardian have already amended the temperature differences in the article in question according to the footnote: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/17/malawi-swelters-in-record-heat-with-temperatures-nearly-20c-above-average https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/17/malawi-swelter...
- School-Cotton 3y agoIt says 20C for me and I’m in the US/have everything set to US English. Is my browser telling it I prefer Celsius somehow (I do have the weather app on my phone set to Celsius) or did they change it to Celsius for everyone?
- shaky-carrousel 3y agoGPT-4 correctly converts the difference to 36F. GPT-3.5 on the other hand gets crazy and decides that the difference is 154.4F. Same prompt. At this point I'm starting to believe GPT3.5 is dangerously stupid.
- banDeveloper 3y agoI worded the question as: "What's the temperature difference between 43°C and 23°C in Fahrenheit?" and GPT3.5 answered correctly.
- Moru 3y agoI put in the original sentence and got 122°F first. If I tell it to rewrite and correct C to F I randomly get 20 and 68 every time I ask it. If I say "recalculate the celcius to farenheit rewriting as little as possible in this sentence: Malawi swelters in record heat with temperatures nearly 20C above average" Attempt 1. Malawi swelters in record heat with temperatures nearly 36°F above average. Attempt 2. Malawi swelters in record heat with temperatures nearly 68°F above average.
- js2 3y ago> “The temperature is 20 °C” translates to “The temperature is 78 °F” Correction, 68°F. > So 20 °C is either 78 °F It's still 68°F.
- quintussss 3y agoOne thing that really annoys me is youtube translating video titles - why would I ever want the title of an english language video to be translated?
- orlp 3y agoIf I didn't speak English, I'm sure I would appreciate it. E.g. to swap the roles, while I'm sure some wouldn't mind but I'd guess that the majority of people who watch anime appreciate the anime titles have English translations, even if they watch in Japanese (with subtitles).
- serial_dev 3y agoIt does annoy me when I see it at my sister's computer, but I speak English. I can see how somebody who doesn't speak English would enjoy seeing some video titles in their own language. Some videos really only need the title translated and can be now enjoyed by more people: Top 5 Mike Tyson KOs, amazing woodworking techniques, best trick shots of 2023 compilation, dash cam accidents. If you visit YouTube with your account logged out, these videos are popular and always show up as a recommendation. Also, some language combinations have pretty good "auto translate captions" experience, so you can turn on the subtitles, too, then you can even enjoy a bit more sophisticated content.
- aib 3y agoAt least you get English videos. A couple of times I've gotten videos in... Hindu, I think, by searching in English and clicking on a video with an English title. And it was a technical video, not much language-independent content.
- mgaunard 3y agoIt's not hard at all, the localization team just made a mistake. The solution is to not localize for Americans.
- School-Cotton 3y agoYes just ignore the vast majority of native English speakers. I wonder why an English-language newspaper (which heavily markets itself outside the UK) didn’t think of that.
- chungy 3y agoOr we can just use a calculator. I'm sure most people's phones can even translate it by a voice command "What's 20 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit?"
- School-Cotton 3y agoThat will give the same wrong answer this post is discussing.
- gus_massa 3y agoYep https://www.google.com/search?q=%22What%27s+20+degrees+Celsius+in+Fahrenheit%3F%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22What%27s+20+degrees+Celsi...
- recursive 3y agoThere's a decent chance that the author of the incorrect headline did exactly that.
- mgaunard 3y ago"vast majority" is a bit of a hyperbole; there are more English speakers outside of the USA than in it, though it's close to 50/50, and it's indeed the country with the most English speakers.
- raldi 3y agoAs far as I can tell from googling, nobody ever says it’s “twice as hot” except as the figurative name for something or to say that it’s wrong to say “twice as hot”.
- pests 3y agoIsn't ths following incorrect.... somehow? Something doesn't line up. ---- Reading the article I found this: parts of Malawi saw a maximum temperature of 43C (109F), compared with an average of nearly 25C (77F) As I expected the actual temperature increase was 32 °F, not 68 °F. --- Except the error should have been 32 (which you go on to explain, because we add 32 to start a conversion) and the correct temp difference should have been 36 (20 * 1.8) which is shown later in the article. I can see getting that wrong, but the actual temps quoted seems to correctly portray 32 opposed to 36 like we would expect. Just rounding errors or some other oddness?
- recursive 3y agoThe original article started by rounding an 18 degree difference up to 20.
- brucedawson 3y agoYeah, I was a bit imprecise there. I didn't expect a difference of exactly 32, but I did expect something of that magnitude.
- gillesjacobs 3y agoDelta's like temperature are standard issue to resolve in globalization. Another fun one are complex units that are a combination of more base units like luminance (nits = candela / m*2 or mph. I worked on a package to globalize a consumer-oriented fintech reporting product. With ESG reporting this has become increasingly important to get the unit conversions and Delta's right. You end up mapping the data source units to locale targets. In Python, the Pint framework plus Babel locales are excellent.
- shalmanese 3y agoHow do frameworks deal with the miles/gallon -> liters/100km conversion? I've always found that one particularly interesting as one that requires inverting the units also.
- gillesjacobs 3y agoIn Pint you can define custom units in a unit registry. So you make your complex unit out of predefined units and the underlying unit conversion is built-in. Pint also works with pandas/numpy so you you get vectorized operations too for performance.
- shalmanese 3y agoWell, I get how mathematically you do it, I'm talking about how to make it contextually aware like the OP. A sentence like "The latest generation doubled MPG from 15 MPG to 30 MPG" should be localized to "The latest generation halved L/100km from 16 L/100km to 7.8 L/100km".
- gillesjacobs 3y agoThe unit registry maps units to locales (eg EN_US, DE_DE, NL_BE) you pass the configured locale to your getter call for the unit. If you need unit strings, you can pass the locale to the string formatter.
- Sharlin 3y agoAn affine space is a tuple (𝗔, 𝗩) where 𝗩 is a vector space and 𝗔 has the same structure as 𝗩 but has "forgotten its origin"; ie. unlike a vector space, has no privileged zero point. As such, multiplication by a scalar is not meaningful, and neither is the addition of two elements of 𝗔. The elements of 𝗔 are called points, and the elements of 𝗩 are translation vectors, or simply translations. The fundamental operations are: (−): 𝗔 × 𝗔 → 𝗩 — gives the translation from a point to another point, and (+): 𝗔 × 𝗩 → 𝗔 — applies a translation to a point. (For convenience we can also write 𝒂 − 𝒗 = 𝒂 + −𝒗 for all 𝒂 ∊ 𝗔, 𝒗 ∊ 𝗩). The Celsius and Fahrenheit scales are affine, and technically should have separate units for temperatures and temperature differences so that mishaps like in TFA would be less likely to happen.
- amelius 3y agoFrom a software engineering perspective, this shows that physical units are not a fool-proof typesystem, and you need alternative units (types) for differences.
- grey_earthling 3y agoA useful habit (which I think I picked up while studying physics at sixth-form) is to describe temperature intervals in “Celsius degrees” (and specific temperatures in “degrees Celsius”). So a temperature of 43 degrees Celsius is 18 Celsius degrees hotter than 25 degrees Celsius. 32 Fahrenheit degrees are equivalent to 18 Celsius degrees; but 32 degrees Fahrenheit is equivalent to 0 degrees Celsius. (There's no real need to do this when using absolute units, but I'd still pluralise the interval and not the absolute value: 316 kelvin is 25 kelvins hotter than 291 kelvin.)
- pwdisswordfishc 3y agoTemperature difference used to have a separate unit with the symbol ‘deg C’ in an old edition of the SI system. Modern SI no longer bothers, and just calls the unit ‘kelvin’. Why should you?
- daoboy 3y agoThe book Inventing Temperature by Hasok Chang is a wonderful account of how hard it has been to grapple with temperature scientifically. My favorite anecdote is the scientist who carried arround and shook a bottle for two weeks to distill the water for experiments in finding when water boiled. When the water exploded after heating he found that not only did he not know when water boiled, but now he wasn't even sure what boiling was.