131–140 of 352 posts
As a physicist, this makes sense. Pi = 3, pi^2 = 10, which is g Not sure why everyone is surprised. Ah, and a year is pi*10e9 seconds (IIRC)
I assumed the pi / g connection was because cows that accelerate in a vacuum are spherical .
This is interesting, but I have to quibble with this: > If you express this value in any other units, the magic immediately disappears. So, this is no coincidence Ordinarily, this would be extremely indicative of a coincidence. If you’re looking for a heuristic for non-coincidences, “sticks around when you change units” is the one you want. This is just an unusual case where that heuristic fails.
I'm surprised at the number of people disagreeing with your quibble. I had the exact same thought as you! If pi^2 were _exactly_ g, and the "magic" disappeared in different units, THEN we could say "so this is no coincidence" and we could conclude that it has to be related to the units themselves. But since pi^2 is only roughly equal to g, and the magic disappears in different units, I would likely attribute it to co…
In almost all cases any apparent phenomenon specific to one system of measurement is clearly a coincidence, since reality is definable as that which is independent of measurement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or the speed of light being almost a sweet 300 million m/s. Or after-atmosphere insolation being somewhat on average 1kw/m2.
I always find insolation and insulation to be such an interesting pair of words I guess the equivelent of "change the units" is "change the language". French: insolation et isolation German: Sonneneinstrahlung / Isolierung Spanish: insolación / aislamiento Chinese: 日照 / 绝缘 I guess coincidence
insulation insula, -ae f "island" (apparently nobody knows where this one comes from)
isolation isolation isolare isola isula insula, -ae f
Spanish aislamiento aislar isla isula insula, -ae f
Oh and the English island never had an s sound, but is spelled like that because of confusion with isle, which is an unrelated borrowing from Old French (île in modern French, with the diacritic signifying a lost s which was apparently already questionable at the time it was borrowed), ultimately also from Latin insula.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a computer scientist this is not surprising either. After all there are only three numbers: 0 1 and n.
One of my old physics professors said something similar - there are only three numbers in the world - 0, 1, and infinity. No wait, zero is just one divided by infinity, so there are only two numbers, zero and one. So if the answer is not zero, it must be one. (ie, how to justify dimensional analysis and ignore any dimensionaless constant). Hysterical, especially for the fact that he quotes 'two' and 'three' in the se…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Martian meter defined by martians should relate their average size, the number of fingers they have on their hands and some basic measure of the planet. I mean, one meter is defined as 1/10^7 of the distance between the equator and the poles which leads to a round number in base 10. A unit system is not just something that matches objective reality but something that has some cognitive ergonomy.
> A unit system is not just something that matches objective reality but something that has some cognitive ergonomy. Beautifully stated! And that's one reason why I like the US units of measurement better than SI. I mean, the divide-by-ten thing is nice and all. But _within a project_ how often are you converting between units of the same measurement (e.g, meters to centimeters)? You pick the right "size" unit for yo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
32 meters is 35 yards, to within about an eighth of an inch. How's that grab you ?
My favorite is 1 mile = phi kilometers with <1% error
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 …
21 km is ~13 miles, 13 km is ~8 miles, etc.
A 26 mile marathon? Must be ~42km.
Same for speed limits too; 34 mph is ~55 kmh
This is interesting, but I have to quibble with this: > If you express this value in any other units, the magic immediately disappears. So, this is no coincidence Ordinarily, this would be extremely indicative of a coincidence. If you’re looking for a heuristic for non-coincidences, “sticks around when you change units” is the one you want. This is just an unusual case where that heuristic fails.
This is neat, but still something if a coincidence. It appears the first definition of a metre is in fact around 1/4e10 the circumference of Earth, and the further coincidence is that a 1m mathematical pendulum has a period of almost exactly 2 seconds. So there's still a neat relationship between mass/radius of Earth, its diurnal rotation period and the Babylonian division of it into 86,400 seconds.
According to the article the 1/4e10 circumference definition came second
Also my reading of TFA is that the pendulum definition was in fact a redefinition that didn't catch on.
I've got a related one I like. Why are the Avogadro's number and Boltzmann's constant inverses of each other N ~ 1/k? The statement doesn't make sense because the units don't work out, but it is true in mks. It's because they multiply to the gas constant which is ~1. They both are numbers to transfer from the microscopic to human scale units and they cancel for the gas constant, which is about human scale experience…
Funnily Avogadro's constant is actually equal to 1: it's defined as Avogadro's number times mol, but mol is itself a dimensionless quantity equal to the inverse of Avogadro's number.
Does this mean in 400 years it's possible we no longer disagree about how to evaluate things? i.e. we converge on one totalitarian utility function that everyone basically accept answers every possible trolley dilemma?
In 1600, people just took the world as that: measurements are sloppy, and vary culturally and based upon location etc. But we eventually came upon tools and techniques that are broadly accepted as repeatable and standard.
Would this sort of shift be possible? Or desirable?