123 mm = 12 stacked CD cases. 6 miles = 30 Eiffel Towers. 5 acres = 11 ice hockey rinks.
Sensibleunits.com converts any length, area or mass into real objects.
posted by gottabefunky
on Jun 5, 2008 -
34 comments
Redefining Avogadro's Number. A mole is the number of molecules in a gram of water: ~6.022 x 10
23. Unfortunately "a gram" is defined by
a chunk of metal in
a vault in France, the last of the seven SI units still defined by a physical artifact. Since the reference mass (known as "Le Gran K") is actually
changing over time (due to cleaning, handling, etc), the definition of a gram is currently temporally unstable.
Now a new proposal has been put forward to explicitly define the number to be a known integer: 602,214,141,070,409,084,099,072, which would fundamentally change the way we define a gram. Le Gran K could become a historical curiosity like
the original platinum meter stick.
posted by dkg
on Mar 2, 2007 -
39 comments
The wisdom of crowds and
the miracle of aggregation, arguably, are the reasons why
markets and
democracy work as well as they do. As
New Yorker James Surowiecki explains in his
new book, "consider the show
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. When a contestant on the show is stumped by a question, he has a couple of choices in asking for help: the audience or someone he's designated as an expert. The experts do a reasonable job: They get the answer right 65% of the time. But the audience is close to perfect: It gets the answer right 91% of the time, even though it's made up of people who have nothing better to do than sit in a TV studio and watch Regis Philbin."
The new, new tipping point?
posted by kliuless
on May 25, 2004 -
25 comments
