paranoid linux sadgirl with impostor syndrome

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Interestingly, if you have your meter measure you could use that to measure atmospheric pressure by seeing how far you could raise water in a column by suction. At standard atmospheric pressure you should be able to lift fresh water 10.3m.

    Oh yeah! I should have remembered that actually, since I was just rewatching an episode of Connections 2 that mentions this height limit in the context of vacuum pump history (I think it’s detailed more in season 1 but I forget which episode). So 10.3 m is another key measurement that you want at least one human to have memorized :]

    Gravity is altogether too unreliable and should be abolished.

    This reads like a Douglas Adams quote and I love it.



  • I hadn’t even thought about getting HH:MM from a sundial, that’s brilliant! Then getting seconds and the meter from a pendulum is just straight up elegant.

    By careful geometry you could reduce tge size of your first container to make this easier, but keeping it big and then dividing the result minimises measurement errors.

    I thought this was worth a callout for being a really important consideration in this thought experiment. Understanding that larger scale measurements generally reduce error, and perhaps also repetition with averaging of results, would be incredibly useful in fast tracking the redevelopment of precision.

    If you have accesd to ice, letting it just melt gives you 0c.

    This one I wondered about more because of the effect of atmospheric pressure(?) on melting point, such that I wondered if it would be worth using Fahrenheit’s Weird Brine ice slurry to get ~ -17.778 ° C instead. But that’s ofc also subject to air pressure influencing melting point so I’m unsure if it’d be worthwhile.

    Relatively constant 9.81 m/s² gravity is also useful for deriving force as you mention, though it reminds me of learning, to my abject horror, in undergrad physics that gravity does vary quite a bit by geolocation :'D 9.81m/s² is a better starting point than nothing though


  • Re Celsius 0 °: the reason I thought perhaps Fahrenheit’s Weird Brine might be a more absolute thing to take de novo temperature from was because I don’t actually know the answer to “how can you ensure water is exactly freezing temperature?” If it’s solid ice it could be colder, if it’s liquid it’s probably warmer, and even if it’s a bucket of cold distilled water with distilled water ice in it, isn’t it still likely hotter than 0 ° C? I feel like there’s probably something involving equilibrium between solid and liquid water that would be difficult to sus out

    Not that Weird Brine is any better really 🤦‍♀️