this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

farenheit isnt even that bad compared to the other imperial units, what are you talking about lmao

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We could use rankine just to confuse people more.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't think temperature works like that though lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

that's honestly less campfires than I'd expect

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

The ones hot enough for marshmallows?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

It's a fuckton.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How hot is it in Hot Pocket?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How many cubits was this sun? At least a furlong right? And how many hogsheads of fuel did it need?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The sun is 3,007,856,729.2152 cubits in diameter

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week 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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

isn't it used by science and the military already lol

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

Yeah, it's just the rest of the country that needs being brought into the 21st century.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

That temperature is hotter than anyone could really imagine to the point that any scale is meaningless

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

farhenheit makes way more sense than the other imperial measurements imo

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

yeah, I mean some eutectic brine of ice, water, and camel piss salt seems pretty scienticious to me

if anything, three barleycorns laid end to end might be more sensible lol

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

As someone that learned Celsius first, I can intuit Fahrenheit pretty easily in a day to day setting. Can't imagine doing science with it though

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 week ago (1 children)

how many football fields is this

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago

About twelve AR-15s

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 week 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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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago

cool, this is the one funded by genshin impact lol

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago (1 children)

think of the crypto mining potential!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

lol only way fusion would get funded in the US 🤣

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago

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

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week 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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Or we could use what everyone else uses

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

At that scale they're equal

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

lol yeah it's very hot

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You can divide by two and be roughly correct (÷1.8 even moreso). The offset is negligible.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Dividing 160million by 1.8 is not gonna help me understand things any better I fear.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week 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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