SMBC Comics Forum

Put on these ear rings! Fusion is the only way we'll beat Cell!

that fucking fusion dance

If the temperature this morning is 0 degrees and the Weather Channel says, "it will be twice as cold tomorrow", what will the temperature be?

Around 273° Celsius, or about 460° Fahrenheit.

That... that would physically cook our flesh wouldn't it? The last thing I smelled would be my own succulent juices sizzling.

It's too hot to cook a pizza with, even!

Apocalyptus wrote:It's too hot to cook a pizza with, even!

actually no that's about the proper temperature to cook pizza

assuming those are positive numbers which i doubt seeing as how those two are only equivalent in the negative side of the scale

and also absolute zero, more or less

That's because zero Fahrenheit isn't the same temperature as zero Celsius. The question didn't specify what the original temperature was measured in.

It would make a lot more sense to define coldness as the inverse temperature, though.
So twice as cold as 0F would be -230F, and twice as cold as 0C would be -137C.

Well if you really want to pick nits, "cold" is not a thing and you can't have twice of it. It is the absence of heat (or energy in general depending on how you are using it)

There is a word for concepts like cold, dark, etc. Something we treat as a thing with existence even though it is the lack of existence of another thing... I wish I could remember it.

But if you say that, you're letting the question win!

Edminster wrote:

Apocalyptus wrote:It's too hot to cook a pizza with, even!

actually no that's about the proper temperature to cook pizza

assuming those are positive numbers which i doubt seeing as how those two are only equivalent in the negative side of the scale

and also absolute zero, more or less

Well I usually cook pizza at 200 C, or else the bottom is likely to burn. Maybe I have some sort of super oven, though...

Kaharz wrote:Well if you really want to pick nits, "cold" is not a thing and you can't have twice of it. It is the absence of heat (or energy in general depending on how you are using it)

There is a word for concepts like cold, dark, etc. Something we treat as a thing with existence even though it is the lack of existence of another thing... I wish I could remember it.

Admittedly I failed that unit in ninth grade science, but my impression was that it really all just measures the rate at which the particles vibrate. If they're going fast that's hot, if they're going slow that's cold. It's not really the absence of heat until you hit absolute zero. Until you hit that it's just a sliding gradient. It's not like light and dark where just removing the photon rays provides us with darkness. Cold is as much a presence as heat.

Once again, I failed that unit, so if I'm wrong I'm wrong, but that's the impression I got.

You really have to consider the semantics of "cold". What is "cold" relative to? We might consider setting a "neutral temperature point" where the temperature is neither hot or cold, at, say, room temperature (approx. 20 degrees celsius). Therefore, if the current temperature is 0 degrees celsius, then "twice as cold" would be -20 degrees celsius. We could have easily defined cold some other way as well to provide a different result.

You know... If you wanted to, you could create your own scale of temperature, assign measurements to it, find room temperature on your scale and double it, producing a number which you could then legitimately claim it is 'twice as hot'. It would only actually be twice as hot if your scale started from absolute zero.
If you really wanted to double the heat of an object or environment you could technically suffuse it with an amount of heat energy equivalent to that which it already contains, but I doubt this would have any effect which could be described linearly; that is, it would have twice the heat energy overall but it would not necessarily transfer twice as much. Thus it would not seem twice as hot or have twice the effect upon your cooking, which I gather to be the point. Halving its heat would act likewise. Especially since a change in heat means a change in the structure, state and expansion/contraction of the object!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAAAAHAHAH HAAAAR HEHEHEAHAAAAAH HAHAHAHAH
Note: We describe things as 'cold' when we notice that we are transferring more heat to them than they are to us. Cold is matter of human perspective based on the body heat of the tactile senses of the part of our body an object touches! Fooooooooools!

GUTCHUCKER wrote:Note: We describe things as 'cold' when we notice that we are transferring more heat to them than they are to us. Cold is matter of human perspective based on the body heat of the tactile senses of the part of our body an object touches! Fooooooooools!

Not necessarily. There are two common exceptions; when a human reports being cold when they actually aren't (ex. in the case of fever chills, when the body temperature is actually rising), and also to describe something that we are not actually actively losing heat to. Ex. "that room is cold, I'm glad we don't have class in there today"; we are not actually losing heat, but we are aware of the fact that the room is of a below-normal temperature (all relative to the speaker).

I dislike conversations like these because they all assume people use language in a very different way than they actually do. I liked studying semantics because it is way more precise according to how people actually speak. In the logical interpretation of things you can't just assume "this is cold" means the same thing as something being cold without a little more rigor (and, of course, we are aware of cases in which the meaning of a sentence cannot be taken for granted like this).

When your body temperature rises you feel cold because your hypothalamus sets your intended body temperature higher than normal. It then goes: oh shit, you're not hot enough! Better raise your fur to trap air for insulation, cut off some blood to your extremities and save body heat for your organs. Oh shit, your environment is colder than your extremities and they aren't getting enough heat from endothermy! Go find somewhere warmer!
Then if you go somewhere warmer, you feel warmer.
We get used to losing heat at certain rates too. Our body can deal with the problem without bothering our consciousness with it.
I would continue my argument but I have to go now ciao!
Edit: You know what, fuck all this, it's too complicated a system to describe/argue over without researching it deeply. My point is that 'hot' and 'cold' are relative and generally perceived by humans via rate of heat transfer.