3 ms·
In all seriousness, parsec is a horrific unit of measurement. It's really annoying how many non-SI units are used in Astrophysics literature. For me the most in
by cyphar 10y ago
In all seriousness, parsec is a horrific unit of measurement. It's really annoying how many non-SI units are used in Astrophysics literature. For me the most insane one is that some Asteroseismologists (study of variability in stars) use cycles per day as a unit of measurement as opposed to uHz (the conversion factor is around 11).
- H4CK3RM4N 10y agoI think most of it arose from the idea that astronomy is about logging as much of the sky as you can in the most efficient way you can(there's a lot of it), and everyone else can put in the work to use their measurements in other disciplines. Sadly, that mindset went on to astrophysics where it's not too helpful.
- austenallred 10y agoFrom mocking Pepsi advertisements to discussing astrophysics in three comments.
- cyphar 10y agoI think it's more about the insane devotion to backwards compatibility (which rivals Linus Torvalds). I mean, the whole object colour thing (where the community discovered that their classification system was completely wrong) was handled by just reordering the classification (but keeping the names) so that old papers and catalogs could be used verbatim is true devotion.