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Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
kentpitman@climatejustice.social ("Kent Pitman") wrote:

For anyone who's curious, the screenshot accompanying the haiku upthread was from a DuckDuckGo news summary yesterday. The original article from the World Meteorological Organization used a superscript "0" instead of a degree-sign, and it got reformatted without the superscript in the news summary.

The thing is, we're all going to look at it and say "Phew, all is well, the 380 was a typo." But 38C (104F) is already bad enough!

All is, in fact, not well.

https://public.wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-recognizes-new-arctic-temperature-record-of-380c

This is a visual on a light red background that is comprised of three boxes. The first box shows a clip from a web news page at the World Meteorological Organization (WM). It has a headline that looks visually as if it were "WMO recognizes new Arctic temperature record of 38°F" except that the degree-sign (°) character is not used. Instead, a superscript 0 is used, as in 38⁰F. These look almost the same but semantically are quite different. Visually 0 is oblong and a degree sign is a circle. Semantically, one is a number, the other is a special symbol. The second box is irregularly shaped because it has a DuckDuckGo logo attached like a tab in the upper left. The rest of the second, or middle, box is an explanation of the wrongly chosen character, explaining that indeed this is a Superscript 0. The final box is the way DuckDuckGo has chosen in its search results to summarize what one would read if one clicked through to this article. The summary says "WHO recognizes new Arctic temperature record of 380C" because it is choosing to interpret superscript 0 as a 0 without superscripting it, and instead of "38°C" we see "380C".