Neanderpundit

Even Geeks get it.

bIjatlh ‘e’ yImev. Hab SoSlI’ Quch!

has an engineer,a long friend of mine, whose childhood was spent in Gdansk.

He walked to school daily past the birthplace of Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit. He was actually related somehow, because his last name is Fahrenheit’s middle name. I didn’t understand the explanation because it had too many polish words.
What I did get, and found amusing, was the explanation for the temperature scale Fahrenheit used; according to my friend, Fahrenheit chose as his two temperature extremes (0 degrees and 100 degrees) the coldest weather ever realized in Gdansk, and his own body temperature.

Trouble was, the temp in Gdansk at that time, in winter, was comparatively mild. And his sample only included measurements on several experimental instruments and in only one winter.

Imagine the goofy bastard bringing in his instruments out of the cold and jamming them under his armpits (or, as is reported, sometimes the armpit of his wife)

The OTHER trouble was, both of them had a mild fever at the time, so the 100 degree “Human body temperature” was a meaningless measure.

Many different sources give many differing explanations- his colleagues and those who came after them did what they could to clean up his mess, and make it all mean a little bit more (frinstance the fact that the freezing and boiling point of water are 180 degrees apart, for some ungodly reason only they understood) but it’s still a bunch of tomfoolery. And the thermometer had already been around for a couple hundred years by then, so why again are we supposed to be all in arms about Mann’s hockey puck stick?