Comment by Waterluvian
1 year ago
Or the speed of light being almost a sweet 300 million m/s.
Or after-atmosphere insolation being somewhat on average 1kw/m2.
1 year ago
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
insolation < Latin sol, solis m "sun"
insulation < Latin insula, -ae f "island" (apparently nobody knows where this one comes from)
isolation < French isolation < Italian isolare < isola < Vulgar Latin *isula < Latin insula, -ae f
Spanish aislamiento < aislar < isla < Vulgar Latin *isula < Latin 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.
> Oh and the English island never had an s sound, but is spelled like that because of confusion with isle
So the German cognate (I assume) Eiland probably hasn't had one either. Makes sense, since the Nordic Eya / Øy / Ö never felt like they should, and they must be just northern variants that lack the -land (literally the same in English) suffix.
Usefully, the speed of light is extremely close to one foot per nanosecond. This makes reasoning about things like light propagation delays in circuits much easier.
I really wish we had known this back before it was way too late to seriously change our units around. It would mean that our SI length units wouldn't have to have some absolutely ridiculous denominator to derive them from physical constants, and also the term "metric foot" is pretty fun.
I use the term "natural foot." It's very useful in simulations.
Fun, and poetic too
See, the issue with "foot" is that different people use different body parts to measure length. Germany used the "Elle", which is the distance between wrist and elbow, or roughly one foot. Other regions used the foot or the cubit instead.
The primary advantage of the SI system is that it has only ONE length unit that you add prefixes to.
2 replies →
> Or after-atmosphere insolation being somewhat on average 1kw/m2.
I’m kind of inclined to say that this one isn’t so much of a coincidence as it is another implicit “unit” in the form of a rule of thumb. Peak insolation is so variable that giving a precise value isn’t really useful; you’re going to be using that in rough calculations anyway, so we might as well have a “unit” which cancels nicely. The only thing that’s missing is a catchy name for the derived unit. I propose “solatrons”.
units(1) calls it `solarconstant` or `solarirradiance` but that's the quantity above the atmosphere. the same term is sometimes used for the quantity below the atmosphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant and of course that depends on exactly how much atmosphere you're below
in that sense, oddly enough, the solar constant is not very constant at all