This Is A Light-Nanosecond!

less than 1m read

·Nov 10, 2024

I trimmed my beard yesterday, so I'm feeling a bit like a baby today. But look at the trimmings! Specifically this one that is 2.4 fortnits worth of beard growth. How do I know? Well, because of this tool I made. This about 5 years ago to free people from the tyranny of standard units. It measures in weird units like beard fortnits, the typical length of beard grows every 2 weeks.

It's also got light pico seconds, how far light travels in a trillionth of a second. If you didn't get one 5 years ago but you're subscribed much later this year, three boxes from now you'll get one in a special Legacy box we're making. The entire ruler is exactly one light nond long. This is how far light travels in a vacuum in 1 nond.

Everything I see from this distance, I'm seeing as it was a billionth of a second ago. It's a reminder that you live in the past because light has a finite speed. You do not see things as they are; you see the universe only as it was. Also, you're going nowhere if you fall asleep tonight in the same bed you woke up in this morning. Your average velocity for the day will be zero.

Expressing decimals in multiple forms

Everything Wrong With The NEW X1 Credit Card

View All

Citizenship in early America, 1789-1830s | Citizenship | High school civics | Khan Academy

In this video and the one that follows, I’m going to give you a brief overview of citizenship rights in early America. Who was considered a citizen? Did having citizenship mean that you had the right to vote? How did citizenship and voting rights change…

Representing systems of equations with matrices | Matrices | Precalculus | Khan Academy

I’m a big fan of looking at the same problem in different ways or different ways to conceptualize them. For example, if I had a system of three equations with three unknowns, let me just make one up: Three x minus two y minus z is equal to negative one. …

Bringing Power to Villages | Years of Living Dangerously

[Music] I want this. Who drove in? In this, find out what it’ll take for let’s just see if we can’t close this deal. [Music] Now, David Letterman is visiting a village that has no power. The number that we hear about Indians living off the grid is usually…

Changing equilibria from trade | APⓇ Microeconomics | Khan Academy

In this video, we’re going to think about how trade can alter the equilibrium price and quantity in a given market. So, what we see here, as we like to do, are very simplified examples of markets in various economies. First, we have Country A, and let’s …

Rival and excludable goods

In this video, we’re going to do a bit of a deep dive in classifying different types of goods. Before we even get into the thick of things, I’m going to make some definitions. So the first definition is that of a rival good. Now, a rival good—one way to …

Calculating correlation coefficient r | AP Statistics | Khan Academy

What we’re going to do in this video is calculate by hand the correlation coefficient for a set of bivariate data. When I say bivariate, it’s just a fancy way of saying for each x data point, there is a corresponding y data point. Now, before I calculate…

This Is A Light-Nanosecond!

More Articles