51–60 of 136 posts
Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end. Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my neck of the woods it's called "journalist units": three soccer fields, five blue whales etc. Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access. Article in Danish: https://ing.dk/artikel/lynch-nu-kan-ogsaa-journalister-faa-s...
The worst are the money units! Instead of writing "40 millions dollars", they often omit the number, like "millions of dollars". This means they only use three values: millions, billions, and thousands. My best guess for why is that it's a way to not be wrong. If you print "40 millions", and it turns out to be 39, you've lied, which is considered far more bad than being vague.
The actual number (if it's available as a fact) will be printed in the article somewhere, but headings, pull quotes and other call-outs will have some rounded number.
For example, recent article's first paragraph:
"Justice Minister Thembi Simelane took a loan of more than half a million rand from a company that brokered unlawful investments into VBS Mutual Bank by the Polokwane Municipality while she was mayor of the city in 2016. Pauli van Wyk explains what happened."
Further down in the article the "half a million rand" is revealed to be R575,600
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my neck of the woods it's called "journalist units": three soccer fields, five blue whales etc. Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access. Article in Danish: https://ing.dk/artikel/lynch-nu-kan-ogsaa-journalister-faa-s...
The worst are the money units! Instead of writing "40 millions dollars", they often omit the number, like "millions of dollars". This means they only use three values: millions, billions, and thousands. My best guess for why is that it's a way to not be wrong. If you print "40 millions", and it turns out to be 39, you've lied, which is considered far more bad than being vague.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my neck of the woods it's called "journalist units": three soccer fields, five blue whales etc. Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access. Article in Danish: https://ing.dk/artikel/lynch-nu-kan-ogsaa-journalister-faa-s...
The worst are the money units! Instead of writing "40 millions dollars", they often omit the number, like "millions of dollars". This means they only use three values: millions, billions, and thousands. My best guess for why is that it's a way to not be wrong. If you print "40 millions", and it turns out to be 39, you've lied, which is considered far more bad than being vague.
That’s not what lying is. To tell a lie is to intentionally state as fact something you know to be false.
Being wrong isn’t lying.
Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end. Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
In my neck of the woods it's called "journalist units": three soccer fields, five blue whales etc. Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access. Article in Danish: https://ing.dk/artikel/lynch-nu-kan-ogsaa-journalister-faa-s...
This is one of the main arguments I was using in discussions with people advocating unconditional use of HTTPS everywhere. Yes, in theory it's a good thing. Yes, in theory it should be a solved problem and you wouldn't see any broken websites anymore. In practice, we lost a small part of the Web.
Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end. Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
while the field is strong, the actual energy seems to be not much - a lightning bolt is few billions of Joules, i.e. about 1000 KW/h (100kg gasoline).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The worst are the money units! Instead of writing "40 millions dollars", they often omit the number, like "millions of dollars". This means they only use three values: millions, billions, and thousands. My best guess for why is that it's a way to not be wrong. If you print "40 millions", and it turns out to be 39, you've lied, which is considered far more bad than being vague.
> If you print "40 millions", and it turns out to be 39, you've lied That’s not what lying is. To tell a lie is to intentionally state as fact something you know to be false. Being wrong isn’t lying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But familiarity gets more remote as you need larger and larger (or, smaller and smaller) multipliers. It's far more illustrative to say "the volume of a typical gas tank" than "the internal volume of hundred million poppy seeds", even though the volumes are in the same ballpark. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(voltage) says that high voltage substations are in 100 kV range and 25.5MV i…
That's fair but the average person kinda knows how much (work/light/heat) a single AA battery can do/produce, but not what a substation can do.