Rest In Peace US Survey Foot

Posts are tagged by the quantities measured, such as time, temperature or mass

I think in retrospect the ottoman empire's "batman" is pretty funny. Like you'd think it's some nerdy unit named after the comics. But no! Old as fuck mass.

Take some arbitrary measurement from your environment. I for example picked 230kcal, the amount of energy stated on the label of a random box in the pantry.

Then, generate a random number. 1-9 is easy mode, 10-99 is harder etc. Try to then find a value of the form X*10^Y where X is your random number, which you can represent by converting the measurement you chose to different weird units, then rounding to any power of 10. So, for example, if your number was 14, a possible win is 14392. Another would be 0.000013842.

Everything with a standard, consistent value is allowed, as long as it is reasonably a unit of measurement. (e.g. meter - absolutely allowed. Football fields - sure, I guess. Eiffel towers - getting questionable. How tall my dad is - not allowed.)

You are also allowed to express units with different ones, e.g. turn joules to milliwatt days.

You are not allowed to use units that don't have dimension, a.k.a. simple conversion factors, such as mol, dozen, gross, pi, phi, etc.

You are not allowed to use multiple different units of the same type of measurement, e.g. foot per meter. You must always simplify to a form without this. Joule/second is allowed, kilowatt hour / second is not. Square mile is allowed, yard kilometer is not.

You are not allowed to use rounding errors (e.g. 1 hour = 1E2 minute = 1E-1 day = 2 hour)

The closer you get and the more elegant your solution is, the better! Here's my attempt:

Starting point: 230 kcal

goal: 89

My path: 230 kcal = 962320 joules = 962320 newton meter = 8.91653889E-7 newton lighthour = 89E-8 newton lighthour

π Van de Graaff Breakdown† roughly equals 3.5 horsepower hour coulomb⁻¹ kilometer⁻¹

1 horsepower roughly equals 2.98 donkeypower

1 year roughly equals 8.79E3 sidereal hour