It is meant to read 350°F. The point is that the temperature is too high to be a useful domestic thermostat. I have changed the sentence to make this clear (and added a ° symbol ). The passage now reads:
Scholten gives the evocative example of a thermostat which steers the temperature of a room to 350°F with a probability close to certainty. The entropy of the final distribution over room temperatures would be very low, so in this sense the regulator is still ‘good’, even though the temperature it achieves is too high for it to be useful as a domestic thermostat.
(Edit: I’ve just realised that 35°F would also be inappropriate for a domestic thermostat by virtue of being too cold so either works for the purpose of the example. Scholten does use 350, so I’ve stuck with that. Sorry, I’m unfamiliar with Fahrenheit!)
Apparently, Daniel Farenheit was the inventor of the mercury thermometer (a significant improvement over the liquor-filled thermometers of the era), and his original procedure for calibrating it defined three points on a temperature scale: a solution of ammonium chloride in ice water should be zero degrees, the freezing point of water should be 30 degrees, and human body temperature should be 90 degrees. (That last one was a bit off—holding the other two points constant, it should have been 95.)
People soon noticed that there were very close to 180 degrees between the melting and boiling points of water, so the scale was changed a bit to redefine the freezing and boiling points of water to be exactly 180 degrees apart. In the current version of the Farenheit scale, the boiling point of water is 212 degrees, the freezing point of water is 32 degrees, and the standard value for human body temperature is 98.6 degrees. It’s not an elegant system, but by coincidence it does happen to be a pretty good scale for outdoor temperatures, which tend to range between 0 and 100 degrees (instead of between −20 and 40 degrees on the Celsius scale.).
350 degrees Farenheit, incidentally, happens to be a common temperature for baking food in an oven. 😆
35°F, surely?
It is meant to read 350°F. The point is that the temperature is too high to be a useful domestic thermostat. I have changed the sentence to make this clear (and added a ° symbol ). The passage now reads:
(Edit: I’ve just realised that 35°F would also be inappropriate for a domestic thermostat by virtue of being too cold so either works for the purpose of the example. Scholten does use 350, so I’ve stuck with that. Sorry, I’m unfamiliar with Fahrenheit!)
::looks up Farenheit the person on Wikipedia::
Apparently, Daniel Farenheit was the inventor of the mercury thermometer (a significant improvement over the liquor-filled thermometers of the era), and his original procedure for calibrating it defined three points on a temperature scale: a solution of ammonium chloride in ice water should be zero degrees, the freezing point of water should be 30 degrees, and human body temperature should be 90 degrees. (That last one was a bit off—holding the other two points constant, it should have been 95.)
People soon noticed that there were very close to 180 degrees between the melting and boiling points of water, so the scale was changed a bit to redefine the freezing and boiling points of water to be exactly 180 degrees apart. In the current version of the Farenheit scale, the boiling point of water is 212 degrees, the freezing point of water is 32 degrees, and the standard value for human body temperature is 98.6 degrees. It’s not an elegant system, but by coincidence it does happen to be a pretty good scale for outdoor temperatures, which tend to range between 0 and 100 degrees (instead of between −20 and 40 degrees on the Celsius scale.).
350 degrees Farenheit, incidentally, happens to be a common temperature for baking food in an oven. 😆