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Pham Nuwen posted:I just ordered a new iPro phone from eBay for $25. It's a Hong Kong company that makes a bunch of phones and I've never heard of them before. It should be here next Monday and I'll post pics then. If you want a phone that will actually work, get a Nokia 220. It's 40 bucks, has conversation mode texts, a camera, makes calls+texts, a calendar, calculator, and a lot more. Bet you the phone you ordered from Hong Kong won't work on the frequencies of any North America cell network.
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Aug 4, 2015 17:03
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The Sausages posted:Good ol' dumb terminals. This was pretty much ubiquitous in any library I visited (school, public, university) well into the 2000's. We'd make them do weird poo poo but I forget what or how, sorry. But I did guess my high school library's admin password - DEWEY. Those things worked great. Way better than the monstrosities they were replaced with, and man it was nice to get a list of the actual books that were actually present rather than having to check 20 boxes for "no, I don't want to see online-only abstracts, videocassettes available with interlibrary loan, or loving web searches." Just hit a number, type what you want, and bam you're there. For that matter I do miss card catalogs, if you want to see what the library has on a topic you can look at all the adjacent call numbers without having to hit the stacks.
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Sep 13, 2015 15:08
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Phanatic posted:Maybe, but for temperature it's really true, both scales are entirely arbitrary. Well, here on the Planet Earth, where Humans live, having 0 be the freezing point of water (the arbitrary substance on which we and virtually all other lifeforms rely) and the boiling point of water (you know, the most abundant compound in the universe) be 100 makes a lot of sense. See, with humans having 10 fingers and 10 toes (typically) our number system is base 10. This means that things that are in base 10 make more sense to our poorly-evolved monkey brains. I realize here that I may be talking with some kind of AI for whom everything is sharply divided into constants and variables, but for Humans virtually everything is arbitrary so the argument is kind of meaningless. I mean why "measure" things anyhow? A thing is the length it is, and it's either longer or shorter or the same as other things. Why divide a given thing into a number of other things, it's totally arbitrary. Uncle Enzo has a new favorite as of 21:10 on Oct 15, 2015 |
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Oct 15, 2015 21:07
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Wasabi the J posted:Yeah but base 2 is also really loving easy, especially when dividing things, because we can pretty reliably figure out a good approximation where "half" is, because you can compare the halves until they match. Oh agreed, if Fahrenheit went from 0 to 64 I don't think you'd see me complaining. Also temps need to be in Celsius or Kelvin for alllllll kinds of stuff in science, you absolutely can't just mix in whatever temp scale you want and expect it to work. If nothing else, a lot of formulas are related to the size of the degree increments themselves, and having them set in size by freezing water = 0 and boiling water = 100 makes a lot of sense.
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Oct 15, 2015 21:26
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Phanatic posted:Such as? Calculating in terms of Kelvin is crucial for a lot of things, I agree: if you try to do, say ideal gas law stuff with Pv=NRT with temps in centigrade, or Stefan-Boltzman or Planck's law or anything like that, your answers will be wrong. But I can't come up with anything where working in centigrade is crucial. The degree increment in Kelvin and centigrade is exactly the same, and if that degree interval is important you're going to be using K, not degrees C. In calculating thermal expansion you only need the amount of change in temperature, so it doesn't matter if you use K or C. It does matter if you use F or whatever else though. And I mean if you're trying to argue that Kelvin makes more sense scientifically then we agree, but for everyday use like "is it hot outside/ is it below freezing" C works great, plus has a simple conversion to K if needed. And earlier you were saying that Fahrenheit made just as much sense as Celsius, now you point out that Kelvin and centigrade have a ton of similarities that make them easy to substitute if needed. Look, I'm just saying that yes I do agree: water freezing being zero is arbitrary and prevents using temperature in ratio form. What I'm getting at is while it is indeed arbitrary, if you look hard enough everything is arbitrary. Using easily-measured states of a hyper-abundant and extremely important compound for endpoints makes a lot of sense. The only real problem with C scientifically is the lack of a true zero, but F has that problem and lots more. I work in mostly in metric at work (I'm in the US) and man is it nice to be able to do simple calculations in your head.
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Oct 15, 2015 22:57
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Trabant posted:This chat reminds of a technology I've never been exposed to myself but have read about : AGA stoves: I'd never heard of these things. It seems like the idea is that it runs all the time no matter what and you can occasionally heat other stuff up with it? Seems bonkers to me.
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Jan 8, 2016 20:59
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