You need shitloads of ordinary water to extract a liter of heavy water. And I'd be surprised if there's any superheavy water in that, because tritium radioactively decays.
Fun fact: Heavy water is slightly toxic to humans. If you only drank heavy water, you'd die as it shifts the chemical reactions in your body out of balance. A moderate amount is fine though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Production_methods
(There is a reason it is common to drop the century when talking about years, humans are less skilled at numbers over 100)
And I know temperatures in Fahrenheit go higher but it is common to refer to Phoenix as "over 100" even when it's high can peak over 120.
Yep.
> humans are less skilled at numbers over 100)
No, the reason is that the century is constant and therefore carries no information. Where the century isn't constant, it never gets dropped.
All this talk about 0F to 100F being frequently encountered probably reveals your local climate conditions more than it helps define a useful global standard for all humans. We should accept that humans live in more diverse conditions than we intuit and such a scale probably won’t be useful for all.
Also, having 100C as water temp for black tee and 80 for green tee is nice to remember
In science and math, I can see where having round numbers for commonly used temperatures would be useful, but if 0C and 100C are the only places that happens, it's not that hard to memorize 2 numbers.
Fahrenheit functionally requires you to be biased in order for it to seem like a good system.
0F is cold, 100F is hot. I experience both of these temperatures outside where I live every year.
-20C to 40C seems much more arbitrary as a way to measure the zone humans mostly live in.
I would wager that the outdoor and room temperature are an overwhelming majority of human use for temperature. It seems like it would make sense to optimize for how temperature is more commonly used at a population level.
I would say those who see Celsius as a good system are also biased, because they grew up with it and it’s what they’re used to.
Most people never experience anywhere near 0F in their lives.
> -20C to -40C seems much more arbitrary as a way to measure the zone humans mostly live in.
The zone most humans live in does not routinely (if ever) get anywhere near -20, to say nothing of -40.
Millions do experience 0F, and it’s ok to not use the full range. At or around 0F is cold, as you move closer or beyond it, it’s cold. As you move closer to or beyond 100F, it’s hot. Most people would likely prefer to never deal with <0F or >100F.
For drinking and bathing, people go by feel. In the kitchen, the freezer makes water freeze, and the stovetop will make it boil into steam, but exact temperatures aren’t really relevant here either. The same goes for ironing clothes, the iron just does it.
When I think about where explicit temperatures are needed in the home, the oven and thermostat are the two things that come to mind. Water is pretty irrelevant for both of those. For cooking or frying someone may monitor meat or oil temps, but those aren’t water. A hot tub might have an actual temp on it, but those tend to be around 100F, not 100C, as they are meant for humans, not boiling.
Water is an amazing liquid, but I still struggle to see how measuring all our temperatures based on it makes sense.
It inspires the following idea: A nonlinear scale where ~72F is 0, and +X represents the same level of heat discomfort as -X represents cold discomfort.
450F vs 230C does not feel like anything gets easier there. Maybe in some highly technical baking there are some nice deltas that appear?
And even if it were true, it still wouldn’t work. 100F in a dry environment is nice while, in a humid environment, 100F is awful. Same for 0F, a dry and static 0F is fine while a wet and windy 0F is killer.
The other day I heard an American talk about a TV being 65 inches. Took me a while to understand they had a 165 centimeter diagonal television.
So a tire size is expressed in inches, millimeters, and ratios.
[1]: https://youtu.be/esQyYGezS7c?t=226
https://www.gardco.com/product/pencil-hardness-test-kit-astm...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103
https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2020/02/nist-releases-...
Perhaps you would prefer some standard issue meat.
https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/sial/nist1546a
Thinking of a concept for a restaurant meal along the lines of a calibrated fried spam dinner, that costs ~2k for about a can worth, fried like they do in Hawaii.
Come to think of it, would love to see an “iron chef- calibrated foods” edition.
https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/sial/nist2781
https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=1196a&cclcl=e...
California/New York prices are easily $0.75/cigg so it’s not that much more expensive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crjxpZHv7Hk
I have recently realized we imported the western world in the most superficial ways.