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The most official water costs $120k a gallon

signoregalilei.com

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Re: The most official water costs $120k a gallon

#101

Post by wiml »

cyral wrote: post #50
kccqzy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a biased view that leads to a scale only convenient for people living in particular latitudes. Now talk to someone living near the equator like Singapore, and 0F is unimaginably cold (even 40F is basically unheard of), and 100F is very hot but not extraordinarily so. Then you talk to someone living close to the arctic and the converse is true. All this talk about 0F to 100F being frequently encountered probabl…

Now I'm imagining some kind of timezone-like temperature unit that varies around the world, and a "100 things programmers should know about ___" post about all the intricacies and special cases.

Ooh, and it could shift seasonally so that summer temperatures and winter temperatures can both be in the convenient range. And every locality could shift a different amount and at different times of year according to their local climate.

Next, we can look into reforming those pesky mass and volume units…

Re: The most official water costs $120k a gallon

#103

Post by gerdesj »

throwup238 wrote: post #42
tshaddox wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only $508 per cigarette: https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=1196a&cclcl=e...

That’s $508 for two cartons for 400 cigarettes total, so $1.27 per cigarette. They’re not characterized like the peanut butter, they’re just manufactured to a specific QC standard. California/New York prices are easily $0.75/cigg so it’s not that much more expensive.

Fags in the UK are around £13-20 per 20!

https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/search?query=cigarettes&inp...

Re: The most official water costs $120k a gallon

#104

Post by ameliaquining »

thayne wrote: post #39
rwmj wrote: post #17

Interesting article but left me wondering why they don't use ¹H₂¹⁶O as the "standard water"? Surely you can make that (relatively) easily in a centrifuge by spinning out the lightest fraction of water.

At the very least that has the advantage that it's possible to make more of it, so you aren't dependent on a limited sample of standard water.

The article doesn't mention this, but they actually did make more. Or rather, they put together a new sample, VSMOW2, in 1999. It's exactly the same as VSMOW, to within measurement error. Like the original, you can buy it from the USGS. Documentation (including how it was prepared): https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/AnalyticalReferenceMaterials/...

This actually goes both ways; VSMOW itself was carefully made (by mixing in small amounts of water from other sources) to match the composition of an earlier reference water sample, NBS-1, which came from the Potomac River (one supposes it was a convenience sample). NBS-1 is no longer used as a point of reference, since everyone's agreed to use VSMOW instead, but the USGS sells it too.

Re: The most official water costs $120k a gallon

#105

Post by ameliaquining »

sandworm101 wrote: post #7

As specialized world-class lab supplies and reagents go, that is not very expensive. Stuff like pure Xe (for space thrusters) can be more by mass.

Yeah, but people find it perfectly intuitive that things like xenon are expensive because the material itself is rare; that kind of scarcity is a thing humans have dealt with since the Stone Age. Whereas this stuff is just water.

Re: The most official water costs $120k a gallon

#107

Post by tdeck »

Timpanzee wrote: post #56
al_borland wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has always been my primary argument in favor of Fahrenheit. It makes sense for humans, which is all a majority of the population really cares about. In addition, it's more granular. Sometimes turning the thermostat up or down by 1C could be too much, where 1F is just right. In science and math, I can see where having round numbers for commonly used temperatures would be useful, but if 0C and 100C are the only pl…

You only think it makes sense for humans because it makes sense for you, where you live the same way you feel changing a thermostat by 1F is perfect but 1C is too much: that’s true for you, not universally. Fahrenheit functionally requires you to be biased in order for it to seem like a good system.

> you feel changing a thermostat by 1F is perfect but 1C is too much: that’s true for you, not universally.

I've noticed that here in Japan all the AC units seem to be adjusted by half a degree Celsius at a time, so I do think 1C is a bit much even for people who never used fahrenheit.

Re: The most official water costs $120k a gallon

#108

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

rwmj wrote: post #17

Interesting article but left me wondering why they don't use ¹H₂¹⁶O as the "standard water"? Surely you can make that (relatively) easily in a centrifuge by spinning out the lightest fraction of water.

I at first thought you meant taking hydrogen gas and burning it in O18, which seems even simpler than bulk processing water.

Re: The most official water costs $120k a gallon

#109

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

inigyou wrote: post #52
BizarroLand wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me want to go to the ocean and start filtering out water somehow.

You can centrifuge it. Heavier molecules move closer to the bottom. Repeat until you reach the desired purity. You need shitloads of ordinary water to extract a liter of heavy water. And I'd be surprised if there's any superheavy water in that, because tritium radioactively decays. Fun fact: Heavy water is slightly toxic to humans. If you only drank heavy water, you'd die as it shifts the chemical reactions in your b…

Emphasis on the slightly. I believe it would take weeks of only consuming heavy water. You could certainly drink a single glass of it without ill effects.

Re: The most official water costs $120k a gallon

#110

Post by Timpanzee »

strictnein wrote: post #85
Timpanzee wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except 0F being “really cold” and 100F being “really hot” is a personal bias of yours based on where you’ve lived. It’s not true for everyone or everywhere. And even if it were true, it still wouldn’t work. 100F in a dry environment is nice while, in a humid environment, 100F is awful. Same for 0F, a dry and static 0F is fine while a wet and windy 0F is killer.

What's a "wet and windy" 0F? It's more or less a physical impossibility. 0F air can't hold much moisture. Also, it's not a killer.

Experience 0F wind in central North America or Central Asia vs 0F wind on the coast and tell me it’s not different. Also, it’s killer, not a killer, as in it sucks a lot.
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