Spyke

Replies

android

Comment on

[General question to the Android community] Have you given up on the audio jack, or do you still only buy devices that have it?

Only With the 3.5 mm audio jack. Bluetooth devices always have some delay, never are immune from connection problems or intermittent readback (especially if you have other devices you switch between), and don't last as long as they advertise. The delay thing is particularly irksome on the phone and watching videos. Much less important for music, but I'm not the kinda guy who plays music a lot. The battery thing is probably less of an issue these days, and could maybe be discarded, but I also forget to charge important devices, so that's a me thing and party of the reason.

Comment on

Despite being metric, Celsius is barely used with a prefix when describing temps high enough to warrant it

[Edited because of weird auto-formatting. Edit 2 added more pedantry. Edit 3+ is because I lost the plot and had to bring it back.]

Because the SI unit for temperature is the Kelvin, which has already been stated. It has also been mentioned that K and °C are the same but with different offsets. It has not been mentioned that °C is to K as Degrees Fahrenheit (°F) is to Rankine ( R). It would be similarly inappropriate to say "millidegrees Fahrenheit" or "kilofahrenheit". I have no idea if mR or kR would be appropriate, though.

I would offer that there are two ways to look at SI ("metric") prefixes, and these can be thought of similarly with the multipliers they represent: as a prefix to the unit, by definition; or as a suffix to the value. Let me illustrate with an example.

38,000 K could be expressed 38 kK, or "thirty-eight kiloKelvin". It could also be spoken "thirty-eight thousand Kelvin" (or Kelvins, idfk). This isn't normally important for the layperson, but suppose you have a temperature meter (and, literally, I do not mean "thermometer") that has only 4 digits of resolution. 38.00 k ("38,00 k" for the Europeans?) would be how it reads out the value in question. This would be 38 kK, certainly, due to the position of the decimal.

Now suppose that temperature meter read out in °C. 38.00 k °C would, in fact, denote "thirty-eight thousand degrees Celsius" for the reasons mentioned above.

So, because Degrees Celsius is not an SI unit, in the technical sense...

Btw, I have been explicitly using upper case letters when spelling out the units. This is incorrect. The symbols for SI (International System of Units) units should be capitalized when they respect a person (K, A). The names of the units should be all lower case because you are not naming the person, but the unit named after them (kelvin after Lord Kelvin, and ampere after Andre-Marie Ampere).

Yeah, I know. I'm being pedantic. It's literally my job. I really should be sleeping right now. Here's a source: https://www.bipm.org/en/measurement-units/si-base-units

Comment on

[Edited]Do you noticed when someone write or work with the left hand?

I don't notice which hand they use, but more often than not, lefties will write with their hand curved over (and smudging) the text they just wrote instead of from beneath (and not smudging.) That's when I notice. So when I notice, I don't say, "You know you could prevent getting graphite (or ink) everywhere..." I say, "Ah. Leftie."

I have seen righties do the same weird smudging with the arced wrist. Why do people write like that?

energy

Comment on

China constructs world's first dual-tower solar thermal plant — and it will help generate nearly 2 billion kWh annually

Reply in thread

Oh. You're talking about kilowatts. They use kilowatts because they're trying to make it relatable to individual household usage.

Sometimes I wonder how often there are translation issues between languages, and this was a false positive in my brain, so I'll leave the original (edited) comment here:

In different language systems, "billion" means 1,000,000,000,000. What we call a billion, some call a thousand million. Each "billion" meaning a group of six zeros. Now Americans and other English speakers use"short" scale. French still uses "long" scale, as do other languages. So when they say "thousand billion," they probably are talking about what we English speakers call a quintillion: 1,000,000,000,000,000. (Checked a source, this is not a recent development)