There’s an old story about that. Possibly apocryphal, but here goes:
IBM mainframes used to come with documentation in ring binders. Some pages might indeed be marked “This page intentionally blank”. And they would from time to time send out update packages to their customers, with instructions to replace pages so-and-so with the included replacements. On the replacement pages, text that had been altered would be marked with a change bar in the margin.
Lo and behold, one day an update package was received, replacing one completely blank page with one bearing the text “This page intentionally blank”. Complete with a change bar in the margin.
You can't know. However, it is a consequence of the axiom of choice (AC). You can't know if AC is true either; but mathematics without it is really really hard, so it usually assumed.
Heh. To borrow an idea from xkcd (measuring gas consumption as area): The kWh measures energy, right? And energy is force times distance. So energy divided by distance is force!
Let’s all start measuring EV consumption in newtons, folks.
It even makes intuitive sense: It correlates well with how hard you need to push the car to get it going at the usual travel speed. But it sucks if you need to figure out how far you can travel on a given charge.
Even worse with just two digits for the year! 01/02/03 could be 1 Feb 2003, or 2 Jan 2003, or 3 Feb 2001. Let’s just be thankful no one ever uses any of remaining three permutations.
71. So far, the oldest to respond.
Only a tiny minority of readers are likely to respond, though. And all you will learn from the responses is the age disribition of that tiny minority! Who knows how well that correlates with the totality of HN users?
Yeah i was thinking that, but at least I have some idea that the age is different than I thought here, most responses are 40 and above apparently which I never would have guessed. I also would never have thought people in their 70's would be here !!!!
If you’ll excuse a bit of trivia: SI units named after people are not capitalized. So we have newton, joule, weber, kelvin, named after Newton, Joule, Weber, and Kelvin. (But their abbreviations are capitalized: N, J, Wb, K.)
Correct. The parent of your post should have written "10 trillion kelvins", "10 terakelvins", or "10 TK". The article wrote "Temperatures there reach an astonishing 30,000-50,000 kelvin" instead of "kelvins" (or better yet, 30–50 kK).
The only exception regarding capitalization is that the person Celsius is capitalized in the multi-word unit "degree(s) Celsius", and the pluralization is on "degree".
Good point about pluralization. I tend to be confused about that because we don't pluralize units in Norwegian (except the equivalent of degrees). But confusingly, in English, you sometimes see people trying to pluralize the abbreviations, such as kgs for kilograms. Or (even worse) ms for meters. That way madness lies.
I could have sworn it was Asimov, but now I’m not so sure. As I remember it, the problem was communication with astronauts in the outer reaches of the solar system.
Now you have me wondering too. I'm still inclined to think it was Clarke because he was much more concerned with scientific and technical plausibility.
But now I'll have to dig into it to find out for sure.
I was wrong, not an infrequent occurrence. It was Asimov, as others suggested:
Here's the ChatGPT question and answer:
Which SF author wrote a story in which communication speed over astronomical distances was made faster by sending messages continually instead of waiting for a reply? In the story it was pointed out that this is how women exchange news on the telephone.
ChatGPT said:
The story you're thinking of is “My Son, the Physicist” by Isaac Asimov (1962). In it, a communications engineer struggles with the long delays of radio messages to Pluto (about 12 hours one way). His mother suggests what women do on the telephone: “Just keep talking”—transmit continuously rather than wait for a reply—effectively creating a live conversation despite the latency
en.wikipedia.org+1tvtropes.org+1
.
This clever idea highlights a real aspect of human communication—especially on the phone—where continuous exchange helps bridge delays, and adapts it to an interplanetary scale. So yes, Asimov used that domestic analogy to demonstrate a practical solution to astronomical message delays.
Of course you are quite right about the loo. In my defence I was unable to look at it to check as I'm out of the country on holiday. :-)
I have been remiss in searching for evidence about the Clarke vs Asimov question. Perhaps I'll try delegating it to ChatGPT.
I don't think that it was sexist in a pejorative anti-woman sense, in my (possibly faulty of course) memory it was said approvingly that women had solved a problem that men were struggling with.
That makes no sense, and is not consistent with video evidence. Max flaps (40 degrees or so) are typically used only for landing. That is very obvious when you see it! Usual flap setting for takeoff is on the order of 5–15 degrees.
They have a RAT (ram air turbine) that deploys automatically under specific conditions. It’s basically a turbine providing electric and hydraulic power. It was almost certainly deployed on the accident flight. It will only power the most critical equipment, though. Possibly, that does not include the ADS-B transmitter (which broadcasts position and related data).
IBM mainframes used to come with documentation in ring binders. Some pages might indeed be marked “This page intentionally blank”. And they would from time to time send out update packages to their customers, with instructions to replace pages so-and-so with the included replacements. On the replacement pages, text that had been altered would be marked with a change bar in the margin.
Lo and behold, one day an update package was received, replacing one completely blank page with one bearing the text “This page intentionally blank”. Complete with a change bar in the margin.