[Info-vax] Where is EISNER:: and who funds it?

[alanfe...@gmail.com]

On Monday, December 27, 2021 at 10:26:22 AM UTC-5, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> On 2021-12-27 15:11, alanfe... at gmail.com wrote: 
> > On Monday, December 27, 2021 at 5:53:23 AM UTC-5, Johnny Billquist wrote: 
> >> On 2021-12-26 19:36, alanfe... at gmail.com wrote: 
> >>> On Saturday, December 25, 2021 at 6:35:26 PM UTC-5, Johnny Billquist wrote: 
> >>>> On 2021-12-24 04:40, alanfe... at gmail.com wrote: 
> >>>>> On Wednesday, December 22, 2021 at 7:55:40 AM UTC-5, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote: 
> >>>>>> In article <00B6DA8D... at SendSpamHere.ORG>, VAXman- 
> >>>>>> @SendSpamHere.ORG writes: 
> >>> [...] 
> > [...] 
> > ]> 
> >> F is harder to use because all scientific work is not using it, or 
> >> anything close to it. Using C makes it very easy to do most scientific 
> >> work. Many times you are looking at temperature relatives, in which case 
> >> C and K are identical. And the times you actually have to deal with 
> >> absolute temperatures, it's just a simple addition and you are done. 
> >> 
> >> That *is* easier. 
> > 
> > OK, let me re-quote that for readability: 
> > 
> > You wrote: 
> > "F is harder to use because all scientific work is not using it, or 
> > anything close to it. Using C makes it very easy to do most scientific 
> > work. Many times you are looking at temperature relatives, in which case C and K are identical. And the times you actually have to deal with absolute temperatures, it's just a simple addition and you are done. That *is* easier." 
> > 
> > I'm not aware of anyone in science using C unless they're converting to it for ordinary daily use, like the temperature ranges for drugs. Maybe chemists do. Physicists don't, AFAIK. (Physics is a rather broad field. Maybe the condensed matter people use it, for instance. Not my sub-field.)
> I wonder if you are missing the point on purpose. I didn't say they use 
> C. I said that when you are in C, things becomes very easy, since most 
> of the work you do with temperatures are using relative temperatures, at 
> which point K and C are identical. 
> 
> How hard can that be to understand? 

You're pressing a trivial point. So things are easy in C to translate to kelvin. So what? My original point excluded lab work. How hard it that for _you_ to understand? All I said is that I wasn't aware of anyone doing such a thing. It's trivial and beside my main point anyway.

I'm not convinced that most lab work is done using relative temperatures. Maybe it is. Who cares?

Fine, C is better for that. I never said otherwise. I said I wasn't aware of it. OK, you can do that. Fine. But F is fine for ordinary everyday use by laypeople. That was my main point. 

But you and others keep trying to swing things toward scientific work, which I have numerous times explicitly excluded from my claim. And you continue to do that even now. I added the side point that even scientists (esp. astronomers) frequently use non-metric units! I'll not list them yet again.

How hard can that be to understand?

In physics, absolute temperature is primary. You've got two such scales: Kelvin and Rankine. Frankly I'm shocked that someone was using Rankine as late as, what was it, 2010? I, personally, have NEVER even _seen_ it used -- EVER.

You want to talk science? Let me add the following:

In an experiment that I was analyzing in my postdoc days, the detector blocks were 3" on a side in an array 3 high and 5 wide, IIRC. Does this mean that inches are important in physics? NO! It was trivial to deal with in my analysis. I guess I had to multiply by 2.54. That was pretty easy. I learned how to do that in elementary school. And it was the least of my problems. Barely a blip in my brain.The fact that I was told they were 3.5 inches was a problem. I finally had to go to the remote lab to help with another experiment, and I got to see the thing in person. Got an ordinary ruler. Sure enough, they were 3" on a side. I wasted a lot of time because of that. But the fact they were manufactured in inches? Not really much of a problem!!! Other fun things: Buying helium-3 and getting helium-4. That was a problem! (I don't recall for whom. Wasn't me!!!) The big magnet for the spectrometer was not even close to specs. The manufacturer apparently goofed or more likely didn't think sticking to precise specs was important. The lab couldn't return it for some reason. They had grad students shimming and sanding and whatnot. Eventually they gave up and ended up using a complicated formula to calibrate it. _That_ was a problem. You'd have to waste precious lab time taking data with the beam running to calibrate it for your particular experiment. Not F vs. C or inches vs. cm. Even in science it's trivial. (Might have been the other way around with the 3.5 vs 3, but it doesn't invalidate my point. More likely it was what I said originally.)

> When I want to compute the energy required to heat water at 0 C to 20 C, 
> I'm looking at the energy required to heat water by 20 degrees. Don't 
> matter if it's in K or C. It turns out to be the same. 

Fine. C is easier to convert to kelvin. So what? There. I've EXPLICITLY acknowledged it. You happy? But it has nothing, zero, nada to do with my original claim that F is fine for normal everyday use by laypeople.

> But I suspect you are not going to accept that no matter how much I 
> repeat it. After having to help my daughter with her gymnasium physics 
> this last year I can tell that I'm very happy she didn't have to also 
> deal with conversions from F in addition to all the numbers she had to 
> throw around. It would *not* have helped. 

Because you are making a trivial point that has nothing to do with my original statement. And I accept it anyway. Of course C is easier to convert to kelvins. So what? That doesn't invalidate my primary point that F is fine, and in some ways perhaps better than C, for normal ordinary everyday use by laypeople. Laypeople are not measuring specific heats. 

Oh, all those conversions! You might have to use a calculator! Oh no!!! You could probably write a short program. In fact, it already exists in Excel. I found this on the web in less than a minute:

Using the Convert Function

 1. In a blank Excel document, enter the temperature in Fahrenheit in the first cell of the first column.
 2. In the cell to the right of the Fahrenheit temperature, enter the formula =CONVERT(A1,"F","C").
 3. Click the Enter key on your keyboard to complete the conversion.

I would add (4), use the Ctrl+D function to propagate the formula down the column. 

Yeah, using C saved your daughter from doing that. Must have saved maybe 5 minutes.

No one would do such a thing anyway. I've never had any such assignment. I've never had to do labs using F. Ever. It doesn't come up. Who would do such a thing? Unless you're also using Rankine, of course! Come to think of it, in one particular lab course I might have had to use a F thermometer. If so, it wasn't much of a problem. I think it was probably C. 

I SAID EVERYDAY USE, NOT THE CALCULATION OF SPECIFIC HEATS. 
I SAID EVERYDAY USE, NOT THE CALCULATION OF SPECIFIC HEATS. 
I SAID EVERYDAY USE, NOT THE CALCULATION OF SPECIFIC HEATS. 
I SAID EVERYDAY USE, NOT THE CALCULATION OF SPECIFIC HEATS. 
I SAID EVERYDAY USE, NOT THE CALCULATION OF SPECIFIC HEATS. 
I SAID EVERYDAY USE, NOT THE CALCULATION OF SPECIFIC HEATS. 
I SAID EVERYDAY USE, NOT THE CALCULATION OF SPECIFIC HEATS. 
I SAID EVERYDAY USE, NOT THE CALCULATION OF SPECIFIC HEATS. 
I SAID EVERYDAY USE, NOT THE CALCULATION OF SPECIFIC HEATS. 
I SAID EVERYDAY USE, NOT THE CALCULATION OF SPECIFIC HEATS. 

Can we please drop the science bit, for Chrissake?

This whole thing started with someone claiming some data center was normally kept at 80 deg. Someone chimed in saying something disparaging about it. 

I found it!

On Tuesday, December 21, 2021 at 7:59:48 PM UTC-5, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
> Den 2021-12-22 kl. 01:24, skrev Scott Dorsey:
> > Dennis Boone <d... at ihatespam.msu.edu> wrote:
[...]
> >> Elsewhere, Google also report that they run their datacenters at 80
> >> degrees:
[...]
> > --scott
> >
> Aha! F! Why not use a standard temp scale.
> I thought it sounded a bit high... 

So it was Jan-Erik who started this whole bit.

Obviously it was Fahrenheit. . . . Not science! Everyday usage in data centers. I suppose some use C. So what? That's limited to data center people and offers no advantage I can see anyway. Who's calculating specific heats in data centers?

BTW, fun fact: At my last job we had our own server room, mostly for QA, Dev, and Exchange and such. But my production MicroVAXes were there. Maybe about 20 of them. One day the A/C broke. Supposedly it went up to 100 deg in the room. (Yes, that's F for those of you who might have thought it reached the boiling point of water.) A co-worker mentioned I might want to check up on them. I thought about it for a few seconds and said, "They're probably fine," or something to that effect. I casually went to check anyway. My big loss? An error on a disk. Maybe the disk actually died, it was long ago. Might have died anyway. The MicroVAXes can handle it!!! 

> 
> Johnny

Alan  (^_^(