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Discussion (30 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The only illustration in this article is a photo of a bee, not the cemetery, and when I turned my adblocker off the white spaces I thought might be images are all the same advert about apnea with a guy lolling around in bed with his mouth agape.
Why do we want to measure this in dry weight? Water is also a resource, one that takes a good amount of work to supply to a beehive.
Is this more of a situation where...
- We believe that differences in water allocation are significant to the question, but we also believe that all bees receive allocations proportional to their dry weight;
- We believe that differences in water allocation are not significant to the question, because there is effectively unlimited water available and every bee can have as much as they want without affecting any other bees; or
- We believe that differences in water allocation are significant to the question, but we're measuring something else because we don't know how to measure the water allocation?
So my guess is that including it would increase variance and error without offering any benefit.
(Are you a hobby beekeeper, by chance? I notice those pretty reliably fail to attend or care about the existence of any Hymenoptera, save their own invasive livestock.)
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Pet peeve: When the original source had only one significant figure ("20 degrees", probably the scientist rounded to the nearest 10 because it's approximate), but the reporter translates it to another unit with more ("68 degrees", makes it sound more exact).
This shows up all over the place. Temperatures quoted in Fahrenheit always seem more exact, just because naturally whatever science they originate from was inevitably done in Celsius and then someone else converted the number without understanding significant figures.
68°F in particular shows up all over the place (like, it's the recommended thermostat setting in the winter to save energy), and it sounds like it's some sort of exact thing, but usually "about 70°F" would be a more accurate representation of the original source.
Also we say that human body temperature is 98.6°F, and a fever is 100.4°F or higher. Wow those numbers are so exact! Four significant figures on the second one! But actually these just map to 37°C and 38°C. Americans are constantly unsure if 99.0°F counts as a fever but the rest of the world probably understands 37.2°C is not...
Also don't significant figures only work within the same units? I believe for conversions you have to explicitly propagate error. You can skip that when moving between power of 10 units (as is typical when working in metric) using base 10 numbers but if the conversion doesn't match the base then the shortcut breaks.
> 68°F in particular shows up all over the place (like, it's the recommended thermostat setting in the winter to save energy)
I thought the recommended minimum setting to save energy was 55? Because any colder than that and you start risking pipes in enclosed spaces freezing due to temperature gradients.
If you need to save money you want to lower the thermostat as much as possible and then use blankets or if that won't work for whatever reason then a space heater in a small room.
However, converting something like 21°C to 69.8°F is indeed silly and should just be 70°F.
And later the article contradicts this by saying they go above ground.
I'm confused.
HIVE of the DEAD!!!