"Quick! Climb to 300 meters above sea level and the trex will boil and we will be safe!"
"Quick! Climb to about 1000 feet above sea level and the trex will boil and we will be safe!"
"climb to FL20 and the flying dinosaur thing will break" could work though
Since, annoyingly, international altitudes are done in increments of 1000 feet (ish, handwaving)
> To take the body temperature of a long extinct, school-bus-size predator, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, used a clever geochemistry technique on fossilized teeth, including two from “Thomas,” a famous T. rex in the collection of the National History Museum of Los Angeles County.
fascinating
we've also learned more about the air at the time via teeth, https://nautil.us/the-data-in-a-dinos-smile-1229729
Of course, for me Celsius is more natural and intuitive, but again - that's because I'm used to it.
It's pretty well calibrated as a 0-100 scale for human temperature perception.
So in other words Fahrenheit is a western centric measurement (or at least, temperature climate centric), while Celsius is universal.
Calling Fahrenheit "western centric" is nonsensical. Every other country has a narrower temperature range that fits within the US temperature range.
I'm used to the idea that 0C is what splits the year between cold season and warm season. Obviously people from California will see it differently, for example.
So where I live it is like this:
30 or more - hot
15..30 warm
0..15 chilly
-15..0 calendar winter
-30..-15 real winter
..-30 - freezing, kinds younger than 12 don't go to school
Judging anything on a scale from 0-10 (or 0-100) is very common.
As you said: it's what you're used to. I know 100F is a very warm day, but if someone said it was 50F I wouldn't intrinsically know how warm or cold that is. My brain works in Celsius, so someone saying its 20C I understand instantly.
Similarly length in US football fields - I don't know what that is, but it's second nature to someone who did grow up using them as a measurement.
It is not.
273.15 Kelvin doesn't roll off the tongue like 0°C or 32°F.
For serious scientific and engineering applications the freezing and boiling point of water isn't actually 0°C and 100°C in most real scenarios.
As a european: F is the only american system that is easy to use and reason with (considering its 0-100 range is spanning the "doable" temp range of too-cold to too-hot), unlike other imperial systems for lengths and whatnot.
Weight, mass and considerable distances, I’ll grant you, though.
https://afs.mgcafe.uky.edu/poultry/chapter-7-air-temperature
and as the sibling comment mentions, i am primed for science articles to be metric.
at least, that was the concept was drilled into me throughout all my schooling. perhaps that has changed in the last few decades.
It is correct to say that we don't know they were warm blooded, just that their body temps were likely the given observed temperature.
you know, like religion.
Young engineers sometimes fall into this trap - that there is absolute truth, and everything else. It would be nice if true, but it's wildly out of line with reality.
"Believing" something is not the same as having a dogmatic faith in something. We (ideally) change our beliefs with every new piece of input. That's good.
is the opening line to a great song i'll never get to hear.
> Write a song about the T-rex. First line "Hotter than a crocodile, cooler than a chicken". Format for aisonggenerator.io.
Then I copied the output to aisonggenerator.io (1 free song per day), and used Audacity/Tenacity to record the MP3 because they make you pay to download.
Internet says the inspiration for Alan Grant is Robert Bakker, and his first writings on it were in 1968:
(Even the NY Times gift link requires a login.)
He's a paleontologist and the talk starts with some pretty interesting statistical analysis aiming to estimate T rex clutch sizes (66 eggs) and hatchling weights (1.5kg) as well as T rex parental care. It ends with looking at evolutionary history trends in increasing parental investment in radically different animals.
He talks a little slow, so a little playback speed bump won't go amiss.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/climate/united-nations-cl...
Edit: Removed the headline quotation because the search listing and article heading differ.
Most conversation about climate change has been around global average temps raising in C. Further, switching that back and forth and doubling it for F would be seen as manipulative by people that don’t want to hear it.
On the contrary, the Times’s US audience (probably their main audience) thinks of body temp, which this is, in F.
To add further, the audience and writers that want to share cool, new dinosaur fact and the group that does an update on global warming are different people and operate and think differently around these specific things in these specific contexts.
Of course it would be easier to add the letter, but I can definitely see why it wasn’t included.
It also turns out, as someone else in this thread has noted, NYT's style guides say to not include the unit in headlines, so here we are :)
By the way, Google Fit's body-temperature entry is cool, but when it comes to "Location", why is "mouth" in the middle of the list and next to some other, unrelated parts? How is the list being sorted?
