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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • turdas@suppo.fitoScience Memes@mander.xyzFictional
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    5 days ago

    Nature doesn’t care about anything. It is not a conscious thing. The size of the Earth, however, is a natural phenomenon, just like the speed of light. It just isn’t a universal constant, relatively unchanging though it may be.

    A multiplier is obviously going to be necessary whatever the base measure, because there’s no universal constant that happens to be of a useful, human scale. Or I guess you could use something like the wavelength of the hydrogen line – about 21.1 cm, a fairly useful length – but that isn’t really inherently a special wavelength, it just happens to be useful in radio astronomy.


  • turdas@suppo.fitoScience Memes@mander.xyzFictional
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    6 days ago

    True, but it was the 18th century. They could measure earthly things well enough, not so much photons.

    It’s a bit of a shame it wasn’t redefined as 1/300,000,000th of the distance light travels in a second when it was redefined, but the redefinition was about 50 years too late for that to happen. A difference of 0.07% in the base unit of measurement used by all science would’ve been far too much for 2019, given all the precision measurements we do these days.


  • turdas@suppo.fitoScience Memes@mander.xyzFictional
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    6 days ago

    The meter isn’t really arbitrary, even when you ignore the redefinition posted by @jumperalex. It was originally defined as 1/10,000,000th the distance from Earth’s pole to the equator, which is a pretty reasonable basis to use by 1791 standards.



  • turdas@suppo.fitoLinux@lemmy.mlMy experience with Arch
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    12 days ago

    The reason people say that Arch is unstable is that you are expected to read the news on the website before every update or else your system is liable to be broken – and sometimes it will break in spite of that. Oh, and the expectation is that you’ll be updating multiple times per week, and if you don’t, you will soon be in a situation where to install any package you must update your entire system.

    Most other distros place no such expectations on the user.