Comment by jon_richards | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jon_richards | Hacker News Reader

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This reminds me of one of the hardest lessons I ever learnt from college worksheets. We were asked whether a cell’s ribosomes fit in the cell normally or if they required compression of some sort. Subtracting the total volume of ribosomes in a cell from the total volume of the cell itself, we got a negative number, and indicated there must be some sort of compression.

Almost everyone got marked wrong. A simple difference, lacking context, is not a useful measure. What we should have calculated was a ratio.

It seemed arbitrary, but the entire class was a crash course towards scientific writing and everything was graded as if up for review. Picking the right metrics, assumptions, and descriptive language was crucial.

  Vc - Vr < 0 <=> 1 < Vr / Vc

What kind of information the ratio gives you that the difference doesn’t?

Yeah, this doesn't make sense to me. If you're trying to go for good scientific writing, you want to use detail where it's important. A ratio is great if you're describing the compression. If you're simply saying it doesn't fit raw, noting which number is bigger is effective and simple.

This is interesting but...

how does it remind you of that? i don't follow in the slightest

The headline just didn’t convey any sense of scale to me. I found this metric much more interesting:

> 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II.

which is funny, because 10 megatons intrinsically conveys scale. it's equivalent to 10 million tons of TNT.

I never bothered to look it up, but that still tells me nothing. Is everyone into what's the destructive power of one ton of TNT but me? All I can think of when I read TNT is some old cowboy movie where they threw TNT cartridges around, or some cartoon.

I was expecting an explanation as how to ribosomes fit in a cell despite having more volume.

And thus leading to the creation of the most powerful thermonuclear weapons known to man... ?

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