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[–] 65 points 2 years ago* (6 children)

It's charming that the article uses Fahrenheit as a scientific temperature scale, perhaps they should adopt bananas for distance in scientific reports too.

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  • [–] [S] 35 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    you gotta admire the dedication to using the most absurd measurement system though

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    At least it wasn’t measured in campfires or number of hotcakes.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Damn now I kinda wanna know how many campfires this is equivalent to

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    A full burning campfire can hit 2000 F, so this would be about 90,000 of those

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don't think temperature works like that though lol

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    180 million Fahrenheit converts to almost exactly 100 million Kelvin, so I imagine the journalist just converted from Kelvin to get that number. Anyway, using 2000 F ≈ 1,366.48 K gives about 73,000 bonfires.

    Temperature does kinda work like this. The Boltzmann constant k_B has units of Joules per Kelvin (energy / temperature). An energy E can has an equivalent temperature T given by setting E = k_B*T. I think it’s good enough to state that 73,000 bonfires would be collectively 73,000 times hotter than one bonfire.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Could be a communication thing. As much as I love the metric system, for frontfacing stuff like articles, scientists have to sometimes use freedom units.

    At least that was my experience with school.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    And that is precisely why the Mars Polar Lander failed.

    https://everydayastronaut.com/mars-climate-orbiter/

    Face it, the USA has defined the inch as 25.4 mm. It did so in 1933. The country is already metric, it's been metric for 92 years.

    It's time.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    farhenheit makes way more sense than the other imperial measurements imo

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago* (5 children)

    how so?

    arbitrarily setting the freezing point of water to 32 and the boiling point to 212 and then filling in the rest from there isn't what I'd call "making sense"

    I guess they're 180 apart but why 32, why not 0 and 180?

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    the freezing point was set to the freezing point of brine, not water. doesnt make a lot of sense, but it makes more sense than inches -> feet -> yard -> mile (not to mention league etc.) what the fuck is an inch? who fucking knows, maybe the distance between your knuckles on one of your fingers??? the point is not that farenheit is good, but that the rest of the imperial measurements are even worse

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  • [–] 44 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    how many football fields is this

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  • [–] 39 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I want to see a demo where they approach it with all the trepidation and seriousness that such an advancement deserves, and pull out a perfectly golden toasted marshmallow.

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    [–] 33 points 2 years ago

    cool, this is the one funded by genshin impact lol

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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    dead-dove-2 all the comments are about the temperature units

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    think of the crypto mining potential!

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  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago

    Every time a headline comes out of China reporting major progress in fusion power generation I'm like lt-kitsuragi "God, please."

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I feel like in the millions of degrees it is fine to use america numbers. Seeing it in C isn't gonna give anyone a more accurate understanding.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Or we could use what everyone else uses

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    At 160 million we may as well just be using kelivn.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Have you considered that it's never okay to use America anything including numbers?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    Fahrenheit does have a wider range of whole numbers to express the temperatures in our daily climate. Unfortunately the digital thermostats I had for years, even one in Shanghai, would step in 0.5 deg increments regardless of it being in F or C. I assume it was using K internally throughout the system, so keeping it in F meant more granularity (68, 68.5, 69 being more specific temps than 20, 20.5, 21 could dial in). And it was noticeable enough to where I'd keep it in F (except one time when I was sick and wanted in between the two possible F setpoints).

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  • [+] 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)
    [–] 10 points 2 years ago
    [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    The 1,000-second mark is considered a critical threshold in fusion research. Sustaining plasma for such extended durations is essential for demonstrating the feasibility of operating fusion reactors.

    More doubling the previous record is impressive, so I'm not being cynical, but what's special about 1000 seconds? It's not as if the reactor achieved ignition.

    This includes providing a clean and abundant energy source to address global energy demands and enabling ambitious endeavors such as deep-space exploration.

    I hate how people about Fusion as if it is guaranteed to be some silver bullet to human energy problems. Fusion reactors use pretty exotic materials to build and are very large. And even when the first commercially viable fusion reactor goes online, it will still take a long time for fusion reactors to spread, since solar is so cheap and fossi fuels have an entrenched political regime behind them. Not to mention getting fusion to the global majority will be much harder than getting them solar energy.

    As Song Yuntao, director of the Institute of Plasma Physics, emphasized, “Fusion reactions need to reach the order of thousands of seconds to sustain themselves. The latest record marks the first time humanity has simulated conditions necessary for operating fusion reactors in an experimental setup.”

    So getting to ignition is based on sustaining the reaction for long enough? Or by "sustain" commercial sustenance is meant?

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