dang parent
[stub for offtopicness]
That seems rather uncharitable. I looked through the comments as soon as I saw there wasn't a Celsius figure in the headline or first paragraph.
One conversion comment is on-topic, even though any replies to it are most likely to be off-topic.
I hear you, but it's a classic generic tangent—in fact a classic generic flamewar tangent. HN commenters are asked to resist those - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - even though it borders on irresistible.
Edit: but I've put the Celsius number in the title now as well...hopefully that will reduce the swelling.
I noticed it didn't have the Celsius value at the beginning, and a while later I noticed it was there. But "minus 280 F / 173 C" is terrible formatting, it looks like it's positive in Celsius...
Considering the conversion between the 2 temperature scales can flip the sign (e.g. -10C is 14F), "-280F/-173C" would've been a lot clearer.
-280F = -173.33333C
+280F = +137.77777CI refuse to believe anyone knows how cold -280F is.
When you have such extreme temperatures you think in Kelvin or at least Celsius.
Or you can think that way - you at 36 C radiate 900 W away while from our usual environment you get 800+ W radiated (and also transferred by air) at you (with your body producing that 50-100W difference), and at 280F you’d get only mere watts radiated at you from the environment while you still would start radiating at 900 and going quickly downhill from that as you surface quickly cools down (that is supposing you don’t have some performance enhancing stuff Expanse style to generate 900 watts boiling you blood to bring those 900 watts non stop to the skin) until coming into equilibrium with the environment.
It's not like using Kelvin or Celsius helps you grasp these temperatures. -173C is very, very cold, but how cold? What can you compare it to? Not many humans have any experience with something of this scale
Liquid nitrogen (boiling at -196 C) is a semi-common substance that people would have heard of, though not everyone would have seen or interacted with it.
I've seen liquid nitrogen, briefly, as it was sprayed out of a hose. It immediately boiled into a (quite cold) gas, of course. I was told not to play with it too much because they would have to evacuate the building. Oh the joys of "bring your kid to work" days in manufacturing facilities
Fair, but in Celsius or Kelvin I know how close it is to absolute zero. In Fahrenheit I have no idea!
You compare to 0 kelvin, you know where it's on the Celsius scale, not on F
I know I'm a snob... but I can't read science news using the imperial system.
You would think either they could parameterise all units or a plausible browser extension could convert elephants to swimmingpools and King's thumbs to badly measured fractions of a diameter.
I made this, but have not tested it yet with this website:
Everyone knows feet and British stones is the way to measure things in space. Just ask any scientician:
Speaking of "feet" as a measurement - Randall Carlson has an AMAZING video[0] on the source of the 12 inch foot.
And how its all related to the measurement of the precession of the earth. And yes - its specifically how to measure things in space. And its all from Sacred Geometry.
Well, the definition of 0ºC is based on the freezing point of water at one atmosphere of pressure, which isn't super relevant on the Moon. You could give it in K but that's not very relatable.
I agree, especially scientific articles should just stick to metric, period.
At least inside the article both units are actually used, just the title is imperial only.
-173°C.
100K
This actually puts it into perspective, knowing it's closer to absolute zero than room temperature.
It’s roughly a third of room temperature.
Which is hard to grok since a third of something warm doesn't seem to be extremely cold.
Ars has been one of the best publications across my whole experience with the internet, going on 20+ years. Without them I wouldn't have been clued into how broken the internet is.