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Comment by john_strinlai | Hacker News Reader

i know its the nytimes, so we can assume american units, but i find it sort of crazy that even throughout the body of the article it doesnt ever say "fahrenheit".

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Common sense suggests that living creatures are likely not boiling when they have a mild fever.

i am not a paleontologist and there have been many extremely weird living creatures over the time earth has been around.

and as the sibling comment mentions, i am primed for science articles to be metric.

I’m metric all the way, but if it would use metric, it still should unambiguously state: C

indeed! my "common sense" is to always state the units you're working with, no matter how obvious you think it is.

at least, that was the concept was drilled into me throughout all my schooling. perhaps that has changed in the last few decades.

Common sense also suggests using the SI units that ~95% of the planet uses, but here we are.

This is what I told my chemistry teacher in high school when he marked me down for not including units, too.

I know nothing about dinosaurs, so if you had told me that their blood was 97°C then I would've believed you

Common sense would be using metric units in science-related article.

Americans don't use Celsius when talking about their body temperatures, and that's who the audience is.

Americans don't use Celsius for anything except scientists talking with other scientists.

A lot of monitoring software defaults to displaying hardware temperatures in Celsius regardless of the locale, and I've gotten so accustomed to knowing what a reasonable temperature is for different components that I personally never change the display units.

that hasn't been my experience. Its widely used in engineering and has been for decades.

Ya, I think engineering falls under the umbrella of “scientists talking to other scientists”

It's a US-based newspaper written for the general public. Common sense would say it's using US units.

It doesn't need to. Any other unit would be either insanely cold or insanely hot.

Given that it’s a shouty headline in a major publication, that’s what I would have expected.

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