Imagine being told that your TV had an aspect ration of ":16"

We kind of have that with people talking about a screen or image being "2k" and then expect you to infer what the actual resolution and aspect ratio is from context.

4:3 only makes sense to you because you know which is length and width a priori. I for example, always have to recheck that. So if it was written as 1.33 or 4/3 it makes the same difference to me, and is similar in that way to dB

Ratio is just a single number. 4:3 can be expressed as 1.3333~ and it just says how much bigger one number is compared to another.

RE: Yes, I was able to read and understand the article. I also have 8 years of EE. Ratio is still a single number in the end. You can have an actual size of a monitor 1600 x 1200 and the ratio of sides is 1600/1200, which is just a single number. You can express it in multiple ways. You still need at least one size + understanding of what the aspect ratio is used to describe in a particular situation (units (mm, px, ...), ...) to be able to calculate the complete dimensions of a monitor screen.

Same issue with % or ppm, or whatever.

You always need a defintition to understand what the numbers are abstracting in any particular situation.

Nothing better than spending hours encoding something, only to discover you got one of those wrong.

Yep you have dB for a ratio, and dB SPL as a physical unit. Just as the article says.

And yeah, the issue is when people forget to use physical units, like if they say it's 30 degrees outside amd not saying C F or K or latitude.

The historical context is a bit meaningless as well since the main application for the OG dB is 101 classes.

Stop saying "one of two possibilities". It isn't. A dB is a power ratio. The fact that you can describe that in terms of voltage ratio is a simple reflection of the fact that power ratios can be described as a voltage ratio squared. When talking about voltage ratios directly from dB you're just short circuiting the necessary square root.

Coulomb? In a discussion about units, leaving out the degree word or symbol made me initially try to parse it as that you must mean it literally, though context quickly makes clear that isn't the case ^^'

> Look at Fahrenheit, for example. I’m American, and I still think it’s absurd, but because I’m extremely used to it, it feels natural.

What do you find absurd about Fahrenheit?

If it is that its 0 point is not absolute 0 then I think you can make a good case, at least for scientific work. It's a bit harder to make the case for absolute 0 being the 0 point a scale for ordinary day to day use since all temperatures most people deal with will be 3 digit numbers (and making you degree large won't help because people will still need 3 digit number--they just won't be integers any more).

If you find it absurd compared to Celsius then I think it is hard to make a convincing case. They are both scales with a 0 point way above absolute 0, differing only on where they put their 0 point and the size of the degree. (They originally differed on direction, with Celsius putting 0 at the boiling point of water and setting the degree size so that water froze at 100, but Celsius soon came to his sense and flipped so the numbers went up as it got hotter).

Fahrenheit set 0 at the coldest temperature he could make in his lab and tried to set 100 at body temperature. Celsius (once he got the direction fixed) set 0 at water freezing and 100 at water boiling.

That gives Fahrenheit a smaller degree and puts the range of temperatures most people deal with most of the time above 0.

Celsius made it easier to memorize two temperatures that are very significant in many human activities, namely the freezing point of water and the boiling point of water (although the latter is probably less important...generally most people only deal with boiling water when they are trying to boil water and don't need to care about the temperature. It's not like freezing which can happen naturally and so people often need to monitor temperature to find out if there is danger of freezing).

But that 0 point in Celsius means that a lot of people have to regularly deal with negative temperature which is a little annoying.

The metric system chose Celsius, but I've not been able to find any compelling technical reason for that. A metric system with Fahrenheit would have fine too.

Note that unlike mass, length, area, and volume units pre-metric systems generally only had one temperature unit. There was nothing in temperature like miles, yards, inches, feet, furlongs, etc. for length and gallons, pints, cups, etc. for volume. A system that went with one single length unit (the meter) and one single volume unit (the liter) and then derived larger and smaller units from those using consistent ratios and prefixes that were the same across different types of units was a massive simplification.

I asked an LLM why metric went with Celsius and got a lot of circular reasons. For example it cited that various thermodynamic forumals would not work with F degrees because the Boltzman constant is defined in the SI system using K. But the Boltzman constant is defined that way because SI uses the metric system. In an F based metric system the Boltzman constant would be defined in R and everything would work fine.

The non-circular reasons it suggested were also not satisfactory. One was that C was more common than F in Europe at the time the metric system was created, which technically does answer the question I asked but then raises the question of why C became more common pre-metric.

It also suggested that having water freeze at 0 and boil at 100 fits in better with a decimal system which doesn't really make a lot of sense.

As for why C became more popular than F pre-metric it suggests that the 0 and 100 points were easier to reproduce. Fahrenheit's choice of body temperature for the 100 point was definitely a mistake as it is too fuzzy (it was even dumber than metric's initial choice for the meter as 1/10000000th of the distance from the distance from the North Pole to the equator along the meridian passing through Paris).

Freezing and boiling of water do take some care to use (you need to control pressure and contaminants) but are going to be more consistent that body temperature.

But there is no reason I can see that the fuzziness in Fahrenheit's 100 point couldn't have been fixed by simply changing the defining points from 0 and 100 to water freezes at 32 and boils at 212. Yes, it is not as easy to memorize as 0 and 100 but does let us have a scale where most temperatures dealt with by most people most of the time are 2 or 3 digit positive integers.

this

if a TV seller went bonkers and only said "it's 10:16", can you guess the actual size of that TV?