4 ms·
This sort of mistake is easy to make when you're mixing up your units; if they kept to one system of measure, it would've been trivial to catch, before or after
by daeken 9mo ago
This sort of mistake is easy to make when you're mixing up your units; if they kept to one system of measure, it would've been trivial to catch, before or after release.
- eterm 9mo agoIf only there were some kind of international system of standard units.
- blitzar 9mo agoOlympic swimming pools for liquids, times around the the earth for length and number of double decker busses for height.
- RobotToaster 9mo agoFor smaller lengths and radiation bananas are also acceptable.
- lostlogin 9mo agoA good physicist can calculate banana equivalent dose other head. Always ask for it when dealing with radiation.
- brookst 9mo agoDon’t forget cheetahs for velocity and elephants for weight.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- blitzar 9mo agoA horse as a measure of power and a crocodile bite as a measure of compression strength
- dredmorbius 9mo agoOr vice versa.
- literalAardvark 9mo agoYou jest, but times around the Earth is the actual origin of the Meter. Kinda. The history is quite interesting and well worth checking out. I can't recommend a book on the subject, but I do heartily recommend "Longitude", which is about the challenges of inventing the first maritime chronometers for the purpose of accurately measuring longitude.
- EA 9mo agoThe original meter (1790s France) was defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a meridian.
- literalAardvark 9mo agoNot sure if you're correcting me, but yes, that is "a" path around the Earth. It's not the most aesthetic one, but it was at the time the most able to be measured.
- jasomill 9mo agoDon't forget packs of cigarettes as a more convenient unit for measuring volumes significantly smaller than Olympic-sized pools. There is, of course, no more need to standardize on a specific brand or style of cigarette than on a specific depth of Olympic-sized pool.
- coldcode 9mo agoI thought all measurements in data centers were in US football fields.
- Nifty3929 9mo agoFor the floor area or length/width it is, but if you want the height then that's in Empire State Buildings.
- paulddraper 9mo agoThere are standard units, yes.
- testplzignore 9mo agoWe need to standardize on using Earth circumferences as the unit of length. Or better, football fields! (the type of football of course being implied by the website's ccTLD)
- Pinus 9mo agoWe _have_ standardized on Earth circumferences for length, only we divide by 40 million to make the numbers more sane, and got the measurement slightly wrong!
- crote 9mo agoWe should just redefine it to make the speed of light a nice even 300.000 km/s - we are so close already!
- SAI_Peregrinus 9mo agoBut it's already a nice round 10m/s in base 299,792,458.
- jasomill 9mo agoWhy stop there when we could just as easily redefine it to be 1 (new base unit of length)/second or 1 meter/(new base unit of time)?
- Ekaros 9mo agoHow hard would it be to fix this? Could we theoretically add or subtract enough material or make whole thing slightly more dense or less dense to compensate?
- jasomill 9mo agoPer Wikipedia, the discrepancy is approximately 74 km, so digging a ditch with an average depth of approximately 74/2π ≅ 12 km around the circumference of the Earth would theoretically fix the problem. Feasibility and geological implications are left as exercises for the reader. Regardless, I suspect a more cost-effective fix would be to redefine the meter to be a couple "legacy" millimeters longer.