Celsius

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Make men’s shorts socially acceptable 

From our UK edition

For a country which loves to talk about the weather, we do not do it very well. They order these things much better in the United States. It helps that the US resisted the wholesale adoption of centigrade. Celsius, while fine for performing nerdy scientific experiments, is insufficiently granular for everyday use. I favour a uniquely British measure of temperature known as the tabloid scale, where very low temperatures are denoted in Celsius but high temperatures are given in Fahrenheit. (No Sun journalist should be made to write ‘Temperatures are set to soar into the low- to mid-30s’; it simply doesn’t work.) But the other American practice we need to adopt is the ‘feels-like’ temperature.

Thursday

Ross Anderson

Tales from the crypto

I don’t gamble. But in October 2016, I made a bet. It was obvious Trump didn’t just have skeletons in his closet but a walk-in necropolis. As we stumbled toward November, the question wasn’t whether one of these skeletons would break free, but just how bad the October Surprise would be. It was supposed to be a polling-shifting, election-sealing, reputational nuclear bomb. And if you read the press, that’s what the “Pussy-Grabbing Tape” was. But to me, it was just another example of Trump being vulgar. And Trump had always been vulgar. And voters liked that he was vulgar, or didn’t care that he was vulgar, or liked that he was so unlike other politicians that he could be vulgar.

crypto

Thursday

Lynn Barber

What we owe to the self-taught genius Carl Linnaeus

From our UK edition

Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon were both taxonomists, born in the same year (1707), but apart from that they had little in common and never met. Buffon was French, Linnaeus Swedish. Buffon was suave, elegant, tall and handsome (Voltaire said he had ‘the body of an athlete and the soul of a sage’), whereas Linnaeus was a bumptious little man (under 5ft), who was widely regarded as uncouth. Buffon’s funeral was attended by 20,000 mourners but Linnaeus died almost forgotten, after suffering from a brain disease for 15 years. Yet the Linnaean system of taxonomy has survived much better than Buffon’s, which was hardly a system at all.