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.

Sex Myths | Original Sin: Sex

Before MARS: Behind the Scenes | MARS

View All

Lawless Longliners | Lawless Oceans

KARSTEN VON HOESSLIN: At this stage, I’d love to board a working Taiwanese longliner to see what they make of the murder videos. But they rarely come into Port Victoria, and they’re not exactly keen to talk. Instead, I’ve been invited onto a local longlin…

First Fish of the Morning | Wicked Tuna: Outer Banks

I was dozing off. I was so comfortable last night. Oh yeah, the life foam down there, mother’s arm. Oh, it is. I know it is. When we stayed out here last night looking for a bite, now if we could get a bluefin tuna, we’d be closer to doing what we came do…

Functions defined by definite integrals (accumulation functions) | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

You’ve already spent a lot of your mathematical lives talking about functions. The basic idea is: give a valid input into a function, so a member of that function’s domain, and then the function is going to tell you for that input what is going to be the …

Rare Look Inside the Secret Passageway to London’s Lost Crystal Palace | National Geographic

You don’t know it’s there, so literally I can stand on that road up there and say, “Do you know what’s under your feet?” and people don’t [Music] know. This subway was a pedestrian footway from the railway station into the Crystal Palace. The Crystal Pal…

Once You Stop Caring, Results Come | The Law of Reverse Effect

Once, there was a writer who happened to specialize in crafting thought-provoking essays on various subjects. Through hard work and seemingly endless creativity, she managed to publish numerous pieces that captivated her readers. However, one day, she fou…

Moderating content with logical operators | Intro to CS - Python | Khan Academy

Let’s design a program with compound Boolean expressions. We’re working on an automated content moderation system for our site. We want our system to automatically flag posts that seem questionable so our team can investigate further and decide which one…

This Is A Light-Nanosecond!

More Articles