xkcd

9216 readers

302 users here now

A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

koraro

277

xkcd #3038: Uncanceled Units (xkcd.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/xkcd

75 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Edit: Alt Text: Speed limit c arcminutes^2 per steradian.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] pelya 26 points 2 weeks ago (12 children)

There's nothing wrong with kilowatts, it's an SI unit. The problem is hour, which is 3600 seconds, and we have ancient Egyptians to blame for this, who divided the day into 24 hours despite having already developed base-10 numerical system.

Kilowatt per kilosecond, which is 1 megajoule, would work better.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I really don't get the issue with kWh. Things are rated in W and we mostly care about the hours they're powered on. If I wanna figure out how many kWh a PC that needs 300W used in 4 hours, I multiply 300*4. If I wanna know how many joules it used, I have to do 300*4*3600. Only one of those can be done in your head in 3 seconds.

[–] LengAwaits 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

You gotta use an escape character, specifically a backslash ( \ ), when dealing with *s on lemmy.

Otherwise you end up with "stufflike this!"

When it could have been "stuff*like this*!"

ETA: Damn, you're good. Fixed it before I even finished this post!

load more comments (10 replies)