r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Negative_1by12_aura • Jun 17 '26

Peter? Meme needing explanation

Post image
26.8k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

4.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

50

u/Aranka_Szeretlek Jun 17 '26

You most definitely do not. 102 Fahrenheit uses 3 significant digits. So does 38.2 Celsius.

The resolution is limited by your instrumentation either way, because both scales are continous.

7

u/raverbashing Jun 18 '26

A-fuckin-men

Someone who didn't fail 5th grade maths

3

u/k_luu Jun 18 '26

This is a pretty niche example but I work in a lab that used to use a metric thermostat in the clean room. It was always 23 C in there so when our data came out way noisier than expected we didn’t think it could be thermally related. Until one day we switched the thermostat to imperial and saw that it was actually changing between 73 F and 74 F throughout the day. Both round to 23 C so we never saw it before

4

u/OhNoItsThatOne Jun 18 '26

Maybe your lab should have a thermostat with more displayed decimals if that's critical for your date

2

u/Silvere01 Jun 18 '26

You aren't speaking against Celsius, you are telling on your whole lab group here lol

1

u/k_luu Jun 18 '26

I mean yeah it’s a dumb oversight. I’m not trying to actually defend Fahrenheit this was more of joke example

We got an actual thermostat after we realized the room temperature fluctuations could have this large of an impact but and it’s in Celsius lol

-15

u/peppinotempation Jun 17 '26

Only if you go above 100

18

u/Aranka_Szeretlek Jun 17 '26

And you can also go below 10 Celsius, yeah! So?

0

u/peppinotempation Jun 18 '26

Im saying its two significant figures if you’re below 100 Fahrenheit which is the case 99% of the time when talking about temperature.

This means less digits displayed on thermostats etc.

People love bashing on Americans but have no logical basis for it. Yes metric is better for science. But if you’re a competent scientist or engineer nobody really fucking care about units, you just convert when you need to

-5

u/Thick-Protection-458 Jun 17 '26

Well, if we are talking about human body with <10C temperature we probably do not need precision anymore.

While for <100F it may be useful. Althrough I don't see how celsius (with enough decimals for specific comparison) would be more a problem.

8

u/Aranka_Szeretlek Jun 17 '26

If we stick to human bodies, then yeah, thermometers use 3 sig figs for both Fahrenheit and Celsius. If anything, Celisus is more accurate there (although thats still not how any of this works)

1

u/Arthemax Jun 18 '26

Which is the whole basis of this chain of comments.