Title text:
Highway engineers like Planck units because, like the speed of light, the energy capacity of a typical car’s gas tank is 1.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3289/
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http://www.rogermwilcox.com/Planck_ruler.html
I can’t believe I get to share this old website and have it be relevant for once!
Scientific notation is great and all but sometimes you just need a bunch of zeroes in the number to really hammer in how big/small something is.
I like doing a little magic trick when I have to guesstimate base 10 logarithm of a number by looking at its length. It feels like I’m doing something wrong and yet it works.
This one should be roughly 39.1. It has 39 digits after the 1, 1.39 cubed is closer to 2 than 4, and 2 has a natural logarithm 0.3 so 1.39 should have a natural logarithm of roughly 0.1.
idk why would it feel wrong tho? when the logarithm is greater than zero, the integer part of it is how long it is minus one.
It’s less about math itself feeling wrong and more about doing a string operation to get a math result
Ah, okay, I got it. I love doing string operations to get math results tho, especially when programming.
I could use logarithms… or I could len(str(n))-1
Still saner than imperial
Love the new speed limit, especially if the tolerances of +/- 3 stay the same.
But negative speeds are dangerous!
Love also CGS system for electrical related stuff…
Battery rated for 0.3836g1/2c1/2s−1, capacity 3,236,000,000,000g1/2c3/2s−1
