• Ook the Librarian
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    19 months ago

    It’s the only way this meme makes sense. It’s a complaint that humans don’t like the average of the temperates that produce the feelings of extreme hot and extreme cold. You’d have to change math, change physiology, or lose linearity.

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      English
      19 months ago

      Nonlinear measures are used for

      1. Brightness of lights
      2. Loudness of noises
      3. Magnitude of earthquakes

      Why not temperature?

        • @[email protected]
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          fedilink
          English
          19 months ago

          Actually, earthquake magnitude can be projected to negative numbers. It’s well defined but it stops describing earthquakes. For instance, a -3 magnitude earthquake is the energy released by a cat knocking your cell phone off of a nightstand. (see page 290 of this book). Pretty sure the others are also logarithmic scales which are well-defined for any negative number. It just so happens that those negative numbers don’t describe anything we care to describe with those scales.

          • Ook the Librarian
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            19 months ago

            That negative number comes from taking a logarithm of a number less than one. Not from a negative scalar.