7 ms·
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
by cperciva 2y ago
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?
- Lazare 2y agoI mean, you can screw it up using SI units too! Eg https://x.com/HaydenDonnell/status/1503916925713547264 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.
- mhog_hn 2y agoI agree in giving flak for using the term AA batteries in this context.
- ctoth 2y agoShots fired!
- doodlebugging 2y agoThey 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.
- shrubble 2y agoSubtly played!
- throwaway314155 2y agoFamiliarity with the unit is important to gauge scale.
- madars 2y agoBut 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) 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!)
- BobaFloutist 2y agoThat'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.
- amateurCoder5 2y agoThat's as strong as 175,000 electric eels!
- amateurCoder5 2y agoConnected in series, obviously.
- analog31 2y agoThe 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.
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- tourmalinetaco 2y agoI 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.
- idontwantthis 2y agoA voltage is not a unit of power.
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- trhway 2y agowhile 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).
- slow_typist 2y agokWh
- sandworm101 2y agoWell, 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.
- trhway 2y agoLightning takes tens of microseconds, bomb - couple hundred microseconds, so about 10 times difference power-wise.
- sneak 2y agoNobody outside of the industry knows how much a megavolt is. Megavolts are actually the obscure unit, for normal people.
- SoftTalker 2y agoMost people don't even really understand "million" and "billion" other than as "a lot".
- nozzlegear 2y agoThey certainly understand that billion is "a lot" more than million.
- labster 2y agoIf 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.
- lazide 2y agoHow heavy do you think they’d be in elephants and/or Volkswagen beetles (up to you to pick 70’s era or newer).
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- k4rli 2y agoSquare meters yet surely you mean American football here. Further confusion ensues.
- jfoutz 2y agoI 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.
- Kon-Peki 2y ago> 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.
- xeonmc 2y agoThus we arrive at a new unit: electric-football-fields
- hinkley 2y agoHow many libraries of Congress could you light with that power?
- consf 2y ago[dead]
- liversage 2y agoIn 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-styr-paa-stoerrelserne https://ing.dk/artikel/lynch-nu-kan-ogsaa-journalister-faa-s...
- BurningFrog 2y agoThe 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.
- beAbU 2y agoIn 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
- throwanem 2y agoOnly 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.
- nkrisc 2y ago> 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.
- beAbU 2y agoHow many tesla superchargers is that?
- teeray 2y ago“Americans will use anything but the metric system”
- DCH3416 2y agoAnd there's nothing wrong with that. Pick the best unit for the job and move on.
- tempodox 2y ago[flagged]
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- thanatos519 2y agoWhy 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!
- nickpsecurity 2y agoOne 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.
- jajko 2y agoYes, 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoI 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.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoFlorida units.