Conversion Degrees Celsius Fahrenheit

Feature: A numbers game

At some point in my youth, I decided to make peace with the fact that I, like so many people in the arts, am ruled overwhelmingly by the right side of my brain. I got through my maths and sciences courses (barely) with the belief that if I chose to pursue a career in the arts, I’d rarely have occasion to use that knowledge. As long as I was able to do the basics—add and subtract—I’d be fine.

For the most part, I was correct; my days have primarily been spent with words. From morning until suppertime I read and I write, the words exploding like supernovas through the various galaxies of the imagined worlds I encounter. But living in Ghana is changing all that, and I find myself truly regretting having not paid more attention to mathematics while I was in school.

Whereas once I rarely noticed the presence of numbers in my life, now it feels as though my days are mired in them, as though I am always counting, counting, counting. Especially where cash is concerned.

It has been years since the new currency was introduced but people are still calling out prices using the values of the old currency. And to really make it even more confusing, when they speak they drop the 0s, completely leave off the word “thousand.”

“That is 50, this is 40, and we also have 60 and 70,” the woman behind the counter at the chopbar said to me yesterday when I inquired about the price of the snails in one of the soups.

“That’s thousand, right?” I asked, knowing for certain there was no way those shrivelled up slugs could cost 40, 50 or 60 of the new Ghana cedis I had in my pocket. The woman nodded and shot me a look that asked, “What’s your problem?,” as if I, rather, was the slow one to catch on.

One source of my daily quandary with numbers is the fact that I don’t know the Metric system; most people who received their early education in America don’t.

Temperature Scales and Conversions: Fahrenheit, Celsius ...

The Fahrenheit Temperature Scale

The Fahrenheit temperature scale is the most common in the United States. This scale was proposed by Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit in a paper published in 1724.

The Fahrenheit temperature scale sets the freezing point of water at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Water boils at 212 degrees in this scale. Hence a Fahrenheit degree is 1/180 the temperature difference between the boiling and freezing points of water.

The Centigrade or Celsius Temperature Scale

The Centigrade and Celsius temperature scales are two different names for the same temperature scale. This scale was developed by Anders Celsius in 1742.

In the Celsius temperature scale the freezing point of water is defined as 0 degrees Celsius. Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Hence a Celsius degree is 1/100 the difference between the boiling and freezing point of water.

A Centigrade degree is 100/180 or 5/9 times the size of a Fahrenheit degree. That is why the factors 9/5 or 5/9 appear in the formulas to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit or Fahrenheit to Celsius.

The Kelvin Temperature Scale

The Kelvin temperature scale is sometimes called the absolute temperature scale, especially in older books. It was developed by William Thomson, also known as Lord Kelvin, in 1848. A Kelvin degree is the same size as a Centigrade degree. This temperature scale however uses absolute zero, rather than the freezing point of water, as the zero point. In this temperature scale water freezes at 273.15 Kelvins and boils at 373.15 Kelvins. The Kelvin temperature scale should be used in thermodynamic calculations .

Absolute Zero

When an object's temperature increases its internal heat energy causes the random motions of individual atoms and molecules to increase. Random molecular motions are faster at higher temperatures. As the temperature decreases, the random atomic and molecular motions decrease.

The lowest possible temperature is when these random atomic and molecular motions are at the minimum possible energy. This temperature is absolute zero. It is zero in the Kelvin temperature scale. Absolute zero is -273.15 degrees Celsius and -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit.

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