Kethal

joined 2 years ago
[–] Kethal 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I see what you mean. That is just as arbitrary as using the Earth's size or any other reference. There's nothing special about a year.

[–] Kethal 11 points 2 years ago (4 children)

It's already defined that way - from Wikipedia "From 1983 until 2019, the metre was formally defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second. After the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units, this definition was rephrased to include the definition of a second in terms of the caesium frequency ΔνCs. "

[–] Kethal 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The mole is defined based on the gram and not the kilogram, even though the kilogram is the coherent unit of mass. I don't have an example, but it probably results in a bit of extra math somewhere. Again, who knows why. Apparently the mole has had conflicting definitions in the past, and one of them was based on the kilogram, so it seems like this would have been easy to do. Again, the gram is involved - maybe the two things are related?

[–] Kethal 1 points 2 years ago

There are no longer any base units as of the 2019 SI redefinition, but prior to that the second was the base unit for time. Hour and minute we're defined based on that. And now even though a second isn't a base unit, hour and minute are still defined based on the second, not the other way around. It's been that way for several decades now. Maybe you're thinking of some no-longer-used system.

[–] Kethal 3 points 2 years ago (6 children)

This is one of two "warts" that I know of in SI. They wanted a coherent set of units, coherent meaning that no nuisance constants are required to convert between dimensions in the set. The system at the time was gram-centimeter-second. To expand things to all dimensions I suppose it was simpler to use the larger units, like J = kg m^2 / s^2 rather than trying to make a new unit for energy, etc. You'd think they'd have just come up with a new name for mass units and defined it as 1 kg, something like 1 prot = 1 kg, then all of the coherent units would be ones without prefixes. Someone must have really being going to bat for the word "gram" though, because now we have this pretty stupid rule that the coherent units are all of the ones without prefixes, except mass, which has the coherent unit of kg. And then also, prefixes are used to scale the coherent units by appending the appropriate letter to the coherent unit symbol, except for mass, for which g is treated as the coherent unit, even though it's not.

It's not the worst thing, but it's pretty stupid to explain.

[–] Kethal 1 points 2 years ago

I was going to ask where you banked.

[–] Kethal 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Why do you think a savings account would pay $7k a month on a $200k balance?

[–] Kethal 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

The general idea is not nonsense, but it's unlikely he's making a 10% return. Although, maybe he has some high interest loans out there, and he's better off putting his money in those. That too would indicate a crappy financial position though.

[–] Kethal 49 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

This is inside-out programming. I want my code to read data files, not my data files to contain code.

The first example is how to take cells in the sheet and make a data frame in an Excel equation. That's easy, pandas.read_excel(): no clound needed, no need to hunt through cells of a sheet to find your code.

[–] Kethal 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Then this screen itself is misleading, because it gives no indication that you don't need to do the stuff. It should have the X to close the screen, like every other window that isn't malware.

[–] Kethal 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I have used both Windows and Linux extensively, and although Linux used to be a serious amount of nonsense to get stuff to work, it's not like that any more. I spend similar amounts of time troubleshooting on each. Help for Linux sometimes is better. If you end up on the Microsoft answers forum, good luck to you, because it means the real answer is buried somewhere on the Internet, if it's there at all.

[–] Kethal 1 points 2 years ago

I looked into this and didn't find quite what I wanted, but it did lead me into a whole world of small computer assemblers I didn't know about.

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