The key part about this is the consistent theme of the day that many parts of UK infrastructure, both public and private, were not engineered to withstand 40 degree Celsius.
No.
Why should we encourage this kind of inaccuracy in Journalism? As a profession, fewer and fewer are taking it seriously and please can we just have accurate framing of what's going on here? It's really not hard. How about this:
"Google & Oracle data centers are facing cooling-related outages in the UK heat wave"
or
"Google & Oracle data centers face outages in the UK heat wave"
or
"Google & Oracle data centers face outages caused by heat wave in the UK"
Nothing is melting here. So why say that it is?
>The key part about this is the consistent theme of the day that many parts of UK infrastructure, both public and private, were not engineered to withstand 40 degree Celsius.
Okay.
"Key UK Infrastructure at risk of failure in prolonged 40 degree Celsius heat wave"
What is hard about this?
Oh no! A journalist used a figure of speech in a headline! This is unacceptable!
When there is a clear and accurate way to describe an event and you deliberately don't do that it is, clearly, unacceptable.
Using figures of speech in headlines is hardly new; here on Earth, it's indeed quite common, and most of us Earthlings have no trouble understanding that "melting" ain't meant literally.
>and most of us Earthlings have no trouble understanding that "melting" ain't meant literally.
Do you actually mean this? We've spent the last couple years lamenting the rise of fake news and how easily influenced people are now because of social media. If you write a headline that says "data centers are melting" don't be surprised when 20% or, hell, 50% of people think that's actually what's going on. Not everyone is an engineer who understands this stuff.
That statement is not really true.
On the one hand, those parts of the city which normally concerned themselves with, for example, selling vegetables, shoeing horses, carving exquisite small jade ornaments, changing money and making tables, on the whole, slept. Unless they had insomnia. Or had got up in the night, as it might be, to go to the lavatory. On the other hand, many of the less law-abiding citizens were wide awake and, for instance, climbing through windows that didn’t belong to them, slitting throats, mugging one another, listening to loud music in smoky cellars and generally having a lot more fun. But most of the animals were asleep, except for the rats. And the bats, too, of course. As far as the insects were concerned…
The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honesty into reporting. Thus, if a legend said of a notable hero that “all men spoke of his prowess” any bard who valued his life would add hastily “except for a couple of people in his home village who thought he was a liar, and quite a lot of other people who had never really heard of him.” Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like “his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,” and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.
Quimby was eventually killed by a disgruntled poet during an experiment conducted in the palace grounds to prove the disputed accuracy of the proverb “The pen is mightier than the sword,” and in his memory it was amended to include the phrase “only if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp.”
In my opinion, it's just uninteresting. journalists make bad figurative word choices in technical articles every day. Lots of repetitive HN comments labouring the fact make for much less interesting threads.