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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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...

> Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access.

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.

Yesterday I considered writing a web scraper completely from scratch (just sockets). Without HTTPS, this is trivial. Of course, you lose out on much (most?) of the web, but I have a feeling most small / interesting sites would still be accessible.

I have found that, given a random sampling of web content, an extremely small fraction of it is interesting or useful to me (nor indeed is hardly any of it what I would consider high quality enough to use as the basis for the future governors of mankind!)

Even if you moved the entire TLS web to non-TLS, this is no longer trivial. The web requires Javascript to render, full stop. Fetching and parsing HTML alone is totally insufficient.

> The web requires Javascript to render, full stop.

Then how the fuck am I reading this let alone replying?

> The web requires Javascript to render, full stop.

A small correction: some parts of the new web require JavaScript to render.

That's why on many websites teh experience is better without JS. To be more specific, several paywalled websites can be accessed just by turning the JS off. You could even say the opposite is true in these cases: JS is being used to prevent text rendering.

A while back I disabled JS in my browser. I think I even disabled image loading. This resulted in a vastly improved experience. You'd think mere adblock would get you most of the way there, but the difference is staggering.

That's been my way of browsing for a while now and I agree it works for the most part. I have no intention of going back.

It's especially nice to have JavaScript disabled by default, so I can enable one script at a time until it becomes readable. But not so many scripts that it becomes unreadable again.

A small part of the web that was either archived already, or wasn't interesting enough to be archived in the first place.

I get your sentiment but at some point you have to let go. Many websites die every day not because of obsolescence but because the author eventually stops renewing the domain or paying their hosting provider.

It's just a part of life.

Do you still use telnet?

No, it's no longer practical for any purpose. I mostly use openssl instead, e.g. for testing if my SMTP server is up and has a valid cert:

openssl s_client -connect myhost.com:25 -starttls smtp

Telnet stopped being useful a long time ago, is no longer shipped by default, and there are better tools to do things it was used for decades ago.

Good, so you understand perfectly the reasons for us all attempting to abolish use of port 80.

I think everybody understands the benefits of HTTPS, there is no need to discuss that. But the fact remains that forcing everybody to move, even old static websites where potential impersonation and MITM attacks matter little, turned out not so painless as the advocates had proclaimed.

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.

In a local publication I follow they always round up or down to make the article easier to read. Sometimes they'll prefix the number with an "about" or "roughly" or "nearly" or whatever.

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

> 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.

The number is being reported accurately, but with only one digit of significance. Rounding 39 to 40 isn't lying and isn't deceitful.

What about being so negligent in checking your facts that any reasonable person would know they’re wrong, but continuing forward anyway?

Can’t really say based on only that.

Only a fabrication if it can't be sourced; otherwise, a source was wrong and you run a correction. When you don't have a number you're willing to point to even that far, that's when you leave it out entirely.

> My best guess for why is that it's a way to not be wrong.

It's also often used to make things seem better or worse than they actually are. "Thousands of dollars" sounds like it's far more than for example $2,108.

The Register also have one: https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...

Amazing, and so is the associated article: "In a recent piece on red-giant star Mira, we rather foolishly suggested that the "comet-tailed" body was travelling across the heavens at roughly 150,000 times the speed of the average sheep."

https://www.theregister.com/2007/08/24/vulture_central_stand...

There was a children's book, 'Half A Giraffe', which led to that phrase being used in size comparisons. https://old.reddit.com/r/HalfAGiraffe/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measu...

That's as strong as 175,000 electric eels!

The proper units for electric field would be voltage per unit length. Fortunately an electric eel has both a voltage and a length, so it could be eels per eel.

Thus we have proved that the electric field is dimensionless

what about the eelectric field?

Solid gold comment

poorly conducted

Connected in series, obviously.

Not paralleel?

You might enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywaTX-nLm6Y

Was hoping for an "Eelnado" movie.

There might be quite a difference depending on whether connected in serieel or paralleel I suppose.

Familiarity with the unit is important to gauge scale.

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 is "The largest man-made DC voltage – produced in a Van de Graaff generator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory" and gives me much better color than a "comparison" with 100 million batteries. (By the way, 100 million batteries stacked together is a bit over the length of one marathon - how many readers could easily tell you that just from the description alone? Much better to measure many lengths in marathons than 10^8's of battery lengths!)

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.

I would posit that no person on earth has personal experience of 100 million AA batteries in a single circuit.

How many have personal experience with 150 MV?

Approximately the same but now you at least use units that make sense.

Can you convert that to marathons per fortnight for me?

It's about 102 kiloTesla marathons squared per forthnight. Dimensions are weird.

Well, now I have a goal!

However voltage does not tell you how much work a battery can produce.

*Release

It releases energy, and energy performs work. The OP however wrote produce.

They need to write for an (average) 6th grade reading level - maximum. So think 4th grade most of the time.

How many 4th graders have any clue what a mega volt is? How many do you think have personal experience with 150 mega volts?

How many have experience with AA batteries these days? How many with 100 million of anything, enough to get an idea of how much bigger that is than one of the thing? Probably all about the same numbers.

Plenty of AA batteries around. And AAA for that matter. At the low end the fancy battery packs can easily be more expensive than what they're powering. Li-Ion is choose only one: cheap or safe.

True, but at least get the units right.

A "stack of AA batteries" as described would be a measure of electrical potential (i.e. voltage), not electric field strength (Volts / unit-length in the applicable dimension(s)).

It's been known for quite some time that high density static electric field "break-downs" generate electromagnetic radiation all throughout the spectrum--look at any wide-band antenna's reception next to any spark-gap generator. It doesn't take much--even the piezoelectric igniter on a grill wand will do it.

One can also generate X-rays by rapidly unrolling Scotch tape. It the same phenomena on a _much_ smaller scale. What's "new" here are the two distinct types of gamma discharges indicating (likely) very different field breakdowns--not that these gamma rays themselves are being produced.

I agree in giving flak for using the term AA batteries in this context.

They could've made it easier for laymen and laywomen to grok if they simply would've defined the volume of batteries in terms of how many Olympic-sized swimming pools one could fill with all those batteries.

Subtly played!

Shots fired!

If all of those 100M AA batteries were laid out flat, they would cover over 13 football fields (70000 sq m), including the Chargers home stadium.

Thus we arrive at a new unit: electric-football-fields

Square meters yet surely you mean American football here. Further confusion ensues.

I don’t know what readers are aware of this. American football fields are all the same size, but soccer fields can vary.

That little bit of trivia makes this extra funny. For me anyway.

> American football fields are all the same size

American American football fields are all the same size. But American Canadian football fields are all the same, different, size. And American Arena football fields are also all the same, different, size.

How heavy do you think they’d be in elephants and/or Volkswagen beetles (up to you to pick 70’s era or newer).

I think they should have said 150MV regardless of the comparison, but some sort of "intuitive" illustrations is useful for non-specialists. But as other commenters have pointed out, millions of batteries is also unintuitive because you're trading an intuitive voltage for a completely unintuitive quantity.

I would have gone a different direction by making the voltages and quantities "almost intuitive" - say the electric field is as strong as hundreds of high-voltage substations (500 or so). Laypeople don't have an intuition on substations' physics but they do have an intuition on the economics (tons of homes and businesses depend on that thing) and therefore at least some appreciation for how powerful that voltage is. Likewise we can't visualize hundreds of anything, but we can (sort of) visualize a 20x20 rectangle and appreciate how many 400 is. So I think 400 HV substations is at least vaguely graspable.

Why use AA batteries? It's so hard to zap yourself with them. At least with a 9V battery you can lick it to get a sense of how much power is in them. Not that you could extrapolate that other than to get the sense that the electric field of the storm could vaporize you!

One form is stating hey, scientific fact that the audience may or may not understand. The other form uses language the audience understands specifically to build up their knowledge. Reducing their confusion also helps them enjoy the article.

So, the journalist are optimizing their writing style For the majority of people to understand and enjoy the writing. That’s probably the best way to write.

Yes, but that's only because societies basically gave up on trying to get better in such ways and laid back very deep in their 'comfort zone' for the lack of better words, laziness and fear of challenge may be another. You know, the place where ossification happens, be it in individuals or in millions.

Sweden switched to right hand driving in 1967, I don't think if they postponed it till today they would still dare (not bashing swedes in any way, happy to be wrong here). Now that's a brave move, and everybody gained from it. Imagine US switching say to left hand side if whole world would be driving like that... nope.

It doesn't matter if metric (of Celzius based on freakin' H2O states for fucks sake) system is vastly simpler, especially the less intelligent/educated one is (since we have 10 fingers in our face 24/7 and we learn counting on them), ego is too big, thus you guys measure in washing machines, football fields etc. You guys even fail to realize that whole US population would benefit, scientists don't care they will use whatever suits them and they are smart enough to not be slowed down by units used or their conversion.

Nice summary via great Nate Bargatze in this SNL sketch [1]. Its fun to make fun of but its also sad, because it really is pure ego game, nothing more and those are always childish and immature at their core, throttling the potential for greatness in hard to measure ways.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk

How many tesla superchargers is that?

How many libraries of Congress could you light with that power?

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).

Well, 100kg of gas along with a similar ammount of oxygen. Even then, burning through 100kg of gasoline in the few microseconds of a lighting bolt would probably be more powerful than any non-nuclear bomb ever dropped.

Lightning takes tens of microseconds, bomb - couple hundred microseconds, so about 10 times difference power-wise.

kWh

I assume they wanted a way to make it sound massive when it’s really not. Like, that’s about enough to run the average American household for 10 years, but we have power plants that supply multiples of that daily.

A voltage is not a unit of power.

Florida units.

I mean, you can screw it up using SI units too! Eg https://x.com/HaydenDonnell/status/1503916925713547264

> A strapping newborn baby boy is understood to have set a New Zealand record, weighing in at a whopping 6.85kg (15lb 1oz) - the equivalent of nearly seven 1kg blocks of cheese.

I mean, the kilogram is an SI unit, but uh, I do not know if clarity has been added here.

Nobody outside of the industry knows how much a megavolt is.

Megavolts are actually the obscure unit, for normal people.

Most people don't even really understand "million" and "billion" other than as "a lot".

They certainly understand that billion is "a lot" more than million.

“Americans will use anything but the metric system”

And there's nothing wrong with that. Pick the best unit for the job and move on.

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