I think I will try that method myself the next time I go with my wife into some large department store like Macy's. ;-)

Oh, good God. My own joke just gave me a flashback of an incident that actually was in a Macy's. There was scattered poop all over the floor near the entrance. It was probably from some child. Regardless, it was soooo nasty. Despite the announcement I heard about a need for a cleanup (right before I encountered the mess), no employees were standing around to warn shoppers! Some people were walking along not looking down and knocking the stuff around. Ugh!

As the article states, work force "participation" (e.g., willingness to employ people) is "well below pre-pandemic levels". That means a lot of jobs are also being eliminated as new ones are created, keeping true employment from growing. Good for you for sensing the incongruity here.

Beat me to it. I realize this is a good news place, but the joke just writes itself.

She may have smelled her way back. While amazing to us, for them it might be not more amazing than us heading back to a tall building we see in the distance.

Adopt her! :-D

Huh, I would have expected that from Bugs Bunny, not a rap song.

Yours is a very important comment, even if it doesn't propose the explanation for the "cooler" metal. Your comment reveals how important it is to understand the problem. The lack of understanding is a bane to the engineering field! (Though, it is a gift to some physicists who love an excuse to bust the chops of engineers, a la Sheldon Cooper.)The foul temptress of expediency of thought occasionally seduces engineers into spouting off solution methods that are associated with the problem. They can do this without actually confirming that the solution method is truly applicable. As you pointed out in this case, the solution of "explain the cooling by conductive loss to the air" could not apply since the air was hotter than the metal. (Also, eEven if the air were cooler, it would be in order to do a scale analysis to see if it was the primary issue.)

The other comments basically reveal that every physical problem we try to understand requires approaching the solution using a mental model with built in assumptions and limitations. So, perhaps when we have a question or face a challenge when something doesn't make sense, it is good to look deep down through our pyramid of assumptions upon which we place our understanding. Unless we solve the problem, then all assumptions are suspect. For example, while others point out the probable main issue here (the metal's emissivity), there are other assumptions. There is the assumption that the metal, the other parts and air should all be at the same temperature. In fact, the problem is a bit complicated when you get into the slight differences. The objects each lose energy at a different rate by emitting (mostly) IR photons at different rates (paramaterized as "emissivity"). Additionally, the objects conduct heat at different rates. Since they all lose heat via IR to the cooler environment outside the chamber (which also irradiates the same parts, but with fewer IR photons), the parts will never purely reach the temperature of the air in the chamber. What equilibrium temperature each one reaches, down to the hundredths of a degree perhaps, depends on how quickly the parts can conductively and radiatively absorb heat compared to how quickly they lose heat via the same processes to the outer environment (via) IR, the inside air (via conduction and IR), and the parts they touch (via conduction) and the parts within line-of-sight (via IR). So, the problem is actually quite complex and only simplified if we don't care about small temperature differences. Plus, if we did care about such small differences, the measuring device would have to be highly accurate.