Something Deep Inside Pluto Is Replenishing Its Atmosphere | Hacker News Reader

Something Deep Inside Pluto Is Replenishing Its Atmosphere

wired.com

48 pointshappyscrappy23 comments

Ug. Article is terrible. I quote: "Considering that Pluto has been around for more than four billion years, the odds are pretty friggin’ slim that humans would meet the dwarf planet during its brief phase of atmosphere-having. No, something is replenishing the supply. Scientists, you got some ‘splaining to do."

What is this, third grade. Here's the actual science: http://iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205/808/2/L50/pdf/2041-8205_...

Not directly relevant, but we did come close to meeting Pluto after it lost its atmosphere, due to seasonal variation (which was one of the motivations for launching New Horizons when we did). Of course, in that context, we are not talking about atmospheric escape, but condensation, and the atmosphere will come back in a few hundred years when Pluto's orbit takes it close to the sun again.

It's Wired. Calm down.

The abstract of that states:

>We conclude that either the escape of N2 from Pluto’s atmosphere was on average much lower than the predictions for the current epoch, or that internal activity could be necessary to bring N2 to the surface and resupply escape losses.

Isn't the second part of that sentence pretty much what Wired is trying to get at?

> What is this, third grade.

What are we, in a retirement village?

As long as the science is good, I don't care how it was written. Could we at least get the reporting to be factual before we worry about proper style.

And I thought it was kinda novel unlike the research paper which is a pretty hard read for someone not researching this topic.

>As long as the science is good, I don't care how it was written.

That's a bad attitude to have. Sloppy writing messes the science the same as sloppy measurements. Science is not some inate quality, it stands by how well it's communicated.

I can't help it but.. do you have any science to back up that this no-nonsense style is harmful? I much prefer it to the style of long, winding sentences full of jargon and old, uncommon words.

My feeling is that the former is more encouraging of critical thinking, since the errors stand out more. The latter style can make you think that maybe it is just me that is too stupid to understand. What the more complicated style has going for it I guess, is that it can exclude the uneducated, and it may also serve as behavioural cue to put you in a scientific state of mind. Clothes are known to do this [0].

Personally, I still prefer the casual style.

[0] http://spp.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/04/02/194855061557...

I appreciate you linking an actual paper, but I fear there may be a misunderstanding regarding the article quote:

> > Scientists, you got some ‘splaining to do."

> What is this, third grade.

I suppose it may sound that way, but actually that is a dated quote from the 1960's "I Love Lucy" show. That's what her husband said every time he discovered her hijinx.

As such, anyone might like or dislike the quote as a matter of taste, but it is intended to simply be a bit of lighthearted phrasing.

As for Pluto, I find this phenomenon interesting but not deeply startling. Lots of things could produce outgassing, particularly considering the very long Plutonian "summers" and "winters".

Wired editors should investigate a valuable technique for clarity of expression: scientific notation.

It's journalism. It's not about accuracy or clarity, but the impression it makes on the reader. All those zeroes make a bigger impression.

And I thought analogies in scientific journalism were annoying. I certainly prefer them to this.

What's biggest:

  7000000000000000000000 grams
  
  700000000000 gigagrams
  
  70000000000000000000000000 milligrams
  
  The mass of Ceres
  
  The mass of the water currently in the Pacific Ocean
  
  The mass of the Earth's atmosphere

  The mass of Mt Everest

The one about the ocean takes up the most bytes. It's biggest.

57900000000000 refrigerators

http://recoveringphysicist.com/23/journalistic-units-of-meas...

Well then! It's settled.

now we know how many holes it takes to fill the albert hall

Yikes, the two of these that are largest seem to be well within the same order of magnitude, and I'm not sure how to be sure which is bigger!

It's true, but the article almost sounds like "Lol Pluto shouldn't have nitrogen anymore but it has. Santa Claus?"

That's not journalism, that's poetry.

-> Pluto has been around for about four billion years, and according to the best math, it should have lost about 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grams of nitrogen (give or take a zero) since then.

What is "the best math"? Is it better than "the good math"? I get the whole writing for pop-sci thing that's in vogue right now, but being cavalier with significant figures or being imprecise with language leads to a shallow understanding of the topic presented. Especially when writing about space, where it's already difficult to convey the scale of what's described.

I'm not debating the whole "cavalier with significant figures or being imprecise with language" bit, but "the best math" seems to mean "the most likely guess given current information."

What is clear to me is that we don't have the best math. We only have the good math, and the journalists aren't sharing. Want better math? Contact Kelsi N. Singer and S. Alan Stern.

Unreadable.

Aliens.

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