More things I did not know.

Commenting over at Tam’s place led me to Wikipedia, to refresh my memory of the Rankine scale.

And a footnote there, in turn, led me to something I’d never heard of before: VSMOW. That’s Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water, “a water standard defining the isotopic composition of freshwater”.

Very pure, carefully distilled VSMOW water is important in the manufacture of high-accuracy temperature measurement reference standards.

You see, if your water doesn’t have the exact right isotopic composition, you may see errors in your calibration of up to “several hundred microkelvin”.

I prefer being a time geek, but I have to admit that being a temperature geek does appear to have some thrills.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2013 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Clippings, Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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