> Then I found out that in farhenheit that water froze at 32.
There is a reason that water freezes at 32.
The Fahrenheit scale was designed as follows:
Zero degrees was the coldest you could get water, saturated with salt,
before it would freeze (you might remember that you add salt to ice
when you're making ice cream because salty ice water is colder than
non-salty ice water). Fahrenheit set the temperature of his own body
at 96 degrees (not 100... 96 was able to be divided into more fractions
than 100... similar to how clocks have 24 hours and 60 minutes because
you can easily divide into quarter hours, one-third of a day, etc.).
On his scale, water boiled at 212 degrees and froze at 32 degrees. It
was later determined that his original thermometers were not linear,
and later more linear thermometers pegged normal body temperature at
98.6 degrees.
An interesting fact about the Celsius scale is that it originally had
the boiling point of water at 0 and the freezing point at 100. Yes,
the scale was originally "upside down". It was reversed after
Celsius's death.
See this page for a longer description:
http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52561.html
Pretty "cool" stuff.
Now, no "Fahrenheit!" "Celcius!" wars, please.
And, if you were to ask a British person their weight, of course they
would answer in stone. Kilograms, after all, are a measure of mass,
not weight. How many newtons do *you* weigh?
-jan-
--
Jan L. Peterson
Unemployed "Computer Facilitator"
http://www.peterson.ath.cx/~jlp/resume.html
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