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What is the smallest hill you would die on? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 3 days ago by Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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[–] chaosCruiser@futurology.today 29 points 3 days ago (19 children)

Time units are just as cursed as American units.

Conversion between days, hours, minutes and seconds is a total mess. If you never have to do anything with those numbers, you don’t need to worry about it. The moment you need to do calculations or compare devices you run into completely unnecessary problems that would have been easy to avoid. Just think of pumps and fans with units given in l/min or m^3/h.

Just pick the standard time unit and stick with it. Use prefixes to deal with big or small numbers.

[–] isyasad@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This also reminds me of something I realized recently: 24 hours is NOT the amount of time it takes for the Earth to rotate 360°. Because the Earth (assuming North is "up") rotates counterclockwise and orbits counterclockwise, each day is slightly more than 360°, probably close to 361°.
So if we assume a year is about 365.25 days, Earth actually spins 366.25 times. One rotation is just kinda "eaten" by orbiting counterclockwise.

[–] chaosCruiser@futurology.today 5 points 2 days ago

Also known as a sidereal day. Check the animation. It’s pretty cool.

This topic also touches upon the concept of reference frames. When people say that the earth takes 24 h to make a full revolution, it’s in relation to the sun. From a universal perspective, the heliocentric reference frame moves and rotates. From the heliocentric perspective, the usual earth based reference frame also moves and rotates. Nothing is truly stationary, and measuring revolutions is impossible unless you define your frame of reference.

If you say a full revolution takes 24 h, it’s not wrong, but it’s only true in one reference frame.

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[–] Sal@mander.xyz 17 points 3 days ago (14 children)

The split between "Today" and "Tomorrow" is at midnight, not when one sleeps/wakes up.

This comes up often after midnight when my girlfriend asks me about "tomorrow". Why discuss breakfast for tomorrow when we still haven't had breakfast today??

[–] call_me_xale@lemmy.zip 14 points 3 days ago

Some computer nerd friends and I came up with a solution for this:

Computer architectures typically provide separate instructions for "logical" and "arithmetic" bit-shifts. The details as to why aren't important, but we can borrow the nomenclature.

When referring to "tomorrow" in the sense of "when I wake up from my next sleep cycle", use "logical tomorrow". When referring to "tomorrow" in the sense of "after midnight tonight", use "arithmetic tomorrow" (or "chronological tomorrow", if you really want to be pedantic).

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[–] sunbeam60@lemmy.one 16 points 3 days ago (3 children)

People who don’t eat the pizza crust have no backbone and won’t survive the zombie apocalypse. And even if they do, they won’t be let into my post apocalyptic fortress, because they have no backbone which they have proven by not eating their pizza crusts.

In every job there is pleasure and pain. If you cannot stomach some doughy stumps or find a way to interleave the crust of your slice with the center of your next slice, you and I won’t be friends.

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