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"Like water, oil is able to absorb more heat — compared to the same volume of air — from the hardware before heating up itself" Am I just being picky, or shoul
by ktizo 15y ago
"Like water, oil is able to absorb more heat — compared to the same volume of air — from the hardware before heating up itself"
Am I just being picky, or should I expect better phrased physics from a hardware blog?
- sp332 15y agoI think a cursory description of the concept of specific heat might be relevant to that article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_heat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_heat But I think it's misleading to say that oil and water have similar heat capacity. Water has an extremely high heat capacity that light oils can't rival.
- ktizo 15y agoWas the "before heating up itself" that rankled, read to me as though they were either confusing the concept of heat capacity with latent heat, or were just wording things badly.
- stcredzero 15y agoAm I just being picky, or should I expect better phrased physics from a hardware blog? I think you should just expect better edited blogs than extremetech.
- mrsebastian 15y agoHey! I've updated the story now, to a slightly more scientific description (involving specific heat capacity). Sorry for any rankling caused :)
- ktizo 15y agoWow, Hacker News appears to be one of the few places where winging on an internet messageboard actually seems to have some effect. I'm going to start complaining that world-peace was promised ages ago and see if that helps any.
- mrsebastian 15y agoWell, feedback is always welcome! The main difficulty is trying to keep track of all that feedback, all over the web. I have some Google Alert things, for mentions of ExtremeTech, and I follow sites like Reddit and HN. It's pretty hard to get valuable feedback, to be honest. Open commenting systems like Disqus definitely lower the barrier to entry, which is nice -- but still, only a tiny fraction of readers bother to comment if something irks/pleases them.
- ktizo 15y agoWell, thanks for sorting that out. Have you got some spare time to get the world peace thing sorted as well, or is that not your department? Oh, and while you're at it, I'd like some donuts and a banana daiquiri. ;)
- mrsebastian 15y agoI'm a writer -- you think I have enough money to buy donuts and alcohol? :P I don't think world peace will ever be possible, not while tech blogs exist.
- ktizo 15y agoOk, in that case I'll settle for some stale bread and a bowl of thin gruel. Don't worry about the world peace thing either, I'll just take more afternoon naps instead.