- I am really bad at
dressing for the weather. And I blame Celsius. In this video, we finally settle the
Fahrenheit/Celsius debate. - It's not even that polarizing. - [Host] Make a portable weather station, and solve my problem for good. Thank you to 3M for sponsoring this video. While role models inspire young people by showing they belong
in the science community regardless of gender,
ethnicity, or ability, champions take it a step further by directly offering support and guidance. 3M knows that the world
needs more champions to create equitable
access to STEM education, so they wrote a short
guide on how to become one. I linked it in the description. It's totally free and easy
to read, check it out. So the other day, the
Celsius/Fahrenheit debate reemerged on my Twitter timeline, and
it hit all the usual beats. But as somebody who was
being firmly team Celsius all these years, yes, I'm Canadian, I sometimes wonder, is
Fahrenheit actually better? I think the problem is that I am really bad
at guessing the weather. This is the hottest
day, I am so, so sweaty, and I am absolutely convinced
that it is 40 degrees. It's 26. There's like this fundamental
disconnect in my brain between this number and this feeling, which means that when I
get dressed in the morning, I often pick the wrong clothes. Obviously, if it's like
extreme temperatures, I can usually figure it out. But it's those in between temperatures like 12 degrees Celsius,
what does that mean? So my hypothesis is that
Celsius does a bad job at communicating temperature intuitively. Now the Fahrenheit squad claims
to have solved this problem. And I think it has something
to do with brine, is this good? Now this might be a galaxy brain move, but I think to figure this out, I need to learn how
temperature was invented. Back in 300 BCE, people believed that hot and cold were two distinct metrics. Temperature as we know it didn't exist. If something felt warm, it was warm. If it felt cold, it was cold. But we know that sensations
can be inconsistent. Like how after a cold winter,
10 degrees may feel warm, but in the middle of summer, you might need a sweater
or like how two people in a room can feel totally
different depending on their build, metabolism,
or even menstrual cycle. It was only in the early 1600s when scientists really began to use math and machines to separate
sensation from science. So the quest to capture
temperature as we know it had finally begun. Early thermometers were poorly designed and inconsistently calibrated,
leading to two big problems. You couldn't rely on the same thermometer to give you the same reading
for the same temperature. And it was difficult to compare with others who were using
different thermometers. Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit
tackled consistency by using mercury, leading to more stable results
compared to other options. However, he used a scale with calibration points
that were difficult to recreate, leaving
comparability unsolved. Luckily, around the same
time, other scientists were emphasizing reproducible
calibration points, including Anders Celsius, who suggested the phase transitions of water, which only made sense because of the discovery that water purity
impacted freezing points. And maybe it was the convenience
this discovery brought, or some other reason, but the French chose adopt
Celsius into their metric system, which carried it across the
globe, except for these places. So what's the best temperature scale? Unsurprisingly, it depends. Fahrenheit is probably the most intuitive when it comes to the weather, because most of us are already familiar with a zero to 100 scale. So if you pretend that
zero degrees Fahrenheit is like one of the coldest
days you've experienced, and 100 degrees Fahrenheit is one of the hottest days you've experienced, You get this logical
bridge between a number and how you might actually feel. Celsius is probably the best for communication because
almost everyone uses it. If you're traveling and talking about the weather, chances are
you'll be better understood if you say 18 degrees Celsius over 65 degrees Fahrenheit. So if we're looking for the best measure to
tell us how we'll feel, should we use Fahrenheit or Celsius? Trick question, none of the above, because temperature as a concept was created
explicitly to remove sensation from the equation, which is probably why your
weather app might look like this or this, or this. They may vary in levels of detail, but they all carry key metrics
beyond just temperature that can impact how you feel outdoors. The most important ones I've
found are temperature, wind, precipitation, humidity,
and solar intensity. Temperature offers a
magnitude that we can treat as a starting point. Wind and precipitation
can make us feel colder than the temperature
suggests by carrying away the heat generated by our body. But humidity can make us feel warmer by making it more difficult
to evaporate our sweat. Finally, the sun is hot, so being in the sun makes us feel hot. Do you like this educational content? Anyway, I get all of that in concept. The problem is that I still
don't know how to use it. At a dead end, I decided it was time
to talk to other people to see how they solved this problem, but I quickly realized it wasn't
a problem anyone else had. - You just look at the big number. You see this big number? If it's sunny and cold,
I'm still happy-ish. But if it's warm and wet, then that's like a totally different, you just look at that number. - Will I die from type hypothermia? No. Will I die from heat stroke? No. We're fine. - I don't even think people who live here in the US who grew up with Fahrenheit particularly like Fahrenheit. It's just what we all learned. - Soon as it got up to 100 and I experienced
it as like, oh yeah, okay, 100's really hot. - We relate it to past experiences when it's been 10 degrees. We know what that feels like. - Part of the problem is that
you don't have a commute, because when you're
commuting in the morning, checking the weather
is part of your routine and you have to kind of
dress accordingly to walk to the train station. - So the problem isn't Celsius, it's me. And the fact that I don't have enough
experience going outside. So dumb. So here's the plan. Go outside, record the weather, track how comfortable I feel, and use that data to figure out whether I should wear pants or shorts. You know, this stuff everyone else learned when they were 12. but first, I need to
build a weather station. - That's what people ask me, you know, ask me what the weather's gonna be, and then look at the sky. And like, I'm gonna get some kind of epiphany of what
the weather's gonna be. - [Host] This is Dr. Samantha Ballard. She's a meteorologist, an ocean physicist, a data scientist, and I'm hoping that she can tell me how the
pros turn weather into numbers. - We really need as much data as possible. So they're using everything. I like to break them up into temporal measurements and spatial, because temporal is a point like a buoy or a weather station. You're collecting data
at one place over time. And with the satellites,
we can collect over time, but it's over a series of distance. So, you know, spatially. - [Host] So these observations are used to inform weather models, which are basically formulas based on physics related to things
we care about over time. By combining observations
with model output, we can do things like
approximate weather conditions in location without a measurement device and forecast weather
conditions into the future. But it still has its limits. - The model will output, one measurement for that entire grid space. You know, hundreds of kilometers squared
or at best, you know, tens of kilometers. We don't have the computer
power right now to output this higher resolution. - But if the goal is to
calibrate myself to the weather, I should probably know the
weather exactly where I am. So my idea is to build a weather station to bring around with me. I just don't know how to do that. You see, circuits and wires
have always freaked me out. Like, I don't know how this Raspberry Pi that I finessed with
Twitter is a computer. Everything on it is so
little and it seems fake. This can apparently sense temperature, humidity and barometric
pressure, but I could eat this. It looks crunchy. This is an IR sensor, not
fully confident what an IR is. I know it's infrared,
but like, what is that? And this is a light meter. I don't know how we measure light. This just seems like
stuff that isn't for me, which might sound kind of surprising, since I was a young
Filipino woman growing up in the mid-2000s, so it was basically force fed
women in STEM role models, posters and videos and hashtags. I think the idea was that if I saw a poster of an
engineer that looked like me, I'd know that I could also be an engineer. But I always found that
idea kind of silly, because I wasn't the person speaking at some sort of empowering seminar. I wasn't the person on the poster. It felt like they had it all figured out where I didn't even know where to start. So I just didn't. Wait, why isn't this turning on? I need a battery. So I'm just gonna plug it in
and see what happens, ready? It's turning on. This is the computer, hold up. So like last year, 3M
emailed us and was like, we wanna pay you guys to talk about this, the difference between
role models and champions. I read the article and asked
them to clarify some things because the whole thing made me revisit this existential crisis that I thought I resolved a while ago. It's why I didn't ever seriously pursue a career in science,
technology or engineering despite being the kind of person that's clearly interested in it. Look at the videos I've
made, lots of STEM. I guess I always just thought
that it was a me problem. Kind of like why I need to
calibrate myself to the weather. I figured that I was just too stupid or too scared to figure it out. But this article made
me consider being kinder to my past self. Maybe the reason I didn't do all of that stuff was because
I didn't have a champion. You see, while a role model
shows you where you can go, a champion actively helps you get there. It sounds small, but the difference in effort and therefore impact is massive. It goes beyond telling people
to believe in themselves. Instead, it's informing them of what they should do and expect, and where to find support. For somebody like me whose
parents were immigrants and didn't go to school in
Canada, 15 years ago something or somebody being a champion for me, that would've been life changing. Okay, I'm gonna plug this back in and see if it senses stuff. Power. That's telling me the temperature. Anyway, it is still possible to get to where you want to
go without a champion. I ended up here with you making stuff, terrible music generating
machines, cat loving AI, and sketchy little weather stations, all in our little corner of the internet where it feels kind of safe
to mess up and learn together. For example, I can't wait for one of you in the comments
to tell me that the idea of calibrating myself using a
local weather station is moot since the margin of error
on this $3 thermometer and the margin of error on
this $12 sensor that I got off the internet is probably
going to make the reading so inaccurate that using my phone would've just been better. I can't really. Okay, so now we have
the right temperature, relative humidity, and a light meter. And speaking of seeing the light, after two years, answering
progress is finally in a position to be a champion for others. So here are three ways
that we are going to try and become champions. We're gonna be using the
advice that 3M listed in their article. So if you find yourself in
a similar position to us, maybe check out that article and see if you can become a champion. But here's a summary. Step one, share your platform. If you're in a decision making position or have a platform, make space for folks who haven't always
been heard, and listen to them. So in our upcoming newsletters, we are going to be
promoting other creators. People we just think are
criminally underrated. You can recommend people you
think we should check out in the form down below. Yes, you can include yourself. Okay, so when the wind makes this spin, it rotates this disc which
is made out of a paint chip. It's mostly black, but it has this little white stripe on it. See, when it spins, it's going to do that over this IR sensor. Basically this thing is able to tell whether something above
it is white or black. So we can count the number of times this thing spins and
then back out the wind speed from there. It's gonna take a little bit of math, I'm just gonna copy the
formula from the internet. This kind of leads me to step two, ignite and share the spark. Using your experience and passion, you can show people what the
journey can actually look like and guide them as they start their own. This is an easy one. We're just gonna keep making videos showing you where our questions come from and how we get through them. Finally, step three. Invest in discovering
the next STEM champions. Use your resources to
support programs and people. Answer in Progress wouldn't exist. I wouldn't still be making
videos if we weren't lucky enough to receive the Super Patron Grant and the Vlog Brothers
Scholarship to keep making stuff. And we're now in the
position to pay it forward. Thanks in part to sponsors like 3M. So Answer in Progress is
going to be giving away $1,000 each to these
three amazing creators. They're just real cool and you should check them out. After you finish watching this video, because I finished my weather station. I did put electronics
for something designed to measure the weather in a cardboard box. I will not be taking further questions. It's probably not gonna rain anyway. I don't know what is sweat
and what is rain anymore? So at risk of putting myself on blast, I went outside more times
this week than I have ever. I went on errands, did exercise,
regretted the exercise. The whole time, I had my
little weather station with me through sun, shade, rain, wind. I tested different outfits
in those different conditions to see how they impacted my experience. And now, I should have a
bunch of timestamped data on weather conditions to
compare against my experiences. I just need to now, huh. I may have messed up. So the way this whole thing worked, right, when I plugged this
thing in, it turned on, then it would run this program that recorded the weather conditions and then saved it to a spreadsheet. After that last line in the
program, turned the machine off. I don't need it running all of the time. I'll just have it shut off
when I don't need it to be on. I thought I was a genius. Wrong, because now I find
myself in the circumstance where I want the data inside of here and I need to turn it on and then copy the file from inside of it. But it turns itself off automatically. Do you understand why I'm stupid? My keyboard isn't working. I can't do the thing that fixes the thing. I'm genuinely worried I
might need to restart. Could you look at the video run time? Does it look like it's almost over? please tell me I figured it out. Just need to use a different keyboard. Sorry for being so dramatic. So I was considering writing a program that would text me a recommendation based off the daily forecast. However, I can't keep going
off the deep end like that. I don't think that I could
be the person who gets a text every morning telling
them, "Hey, wear shorts today." At that point, I feel like
a caricature of myself. So instead we're gonna
make an infographic. I'm thinking like a flow chart or maybe like a graph. So I'm drawing out the icons
for the outfit recommendations. And now that I look at the
outfit recommendations, it's funny because all of my
choices are basically based off of my absolute hatred of feeling
my clothes when I'm sweaty. Now, before anyone in
the comment says, "Oh, you should just wear layers," here's my thing. I hate carrying things, so if I'm layering and
then I don't need all of the layers and I have
to carry the extra layers, I would rather be cold
than inconvenienced. That is no one's fault with my own, which is kind of like the
overall theme of this video. (host laughs) Say hello to my Outdoor
Guide for Indoor Kids. It's a bunch of outfit
recommendations based off of temperature, relative humidity, wind, precipitation,
activity level, and sunlight. So basically in the morning when I need to figure out what to wear, I just need to look at
the weather, find the fit, and recreate it. Hard to believe this
video was about Fahrenheit versus Celsius, but either
way, have a lovely day. Thanks again to 3M for
sponsoring this video. Learn how you can become a STEM champion for the people around you
using the guide linked in the description. And check out our grant recipients
while you're down there.
