(Untitled)

[sayceman]

This is why I love technology - I drove myself up to San Francisco this weekend with naught but a few sets of clothes and my trusty laptop. I had made no plans ahead of time; I did not even have a map of the San Francisco area to guide me. As soon as I left greater L.A., I was flying solo into the darkness. Upon arrival, I found the nearest Days

Comments

Interesting

[seamonkey314]

So, not only is the earth lumpy (although if the Nautical miles are measured at sea it should be pretty smooth) but it isn't actually a sphere. The water on the surface is affected by tides from the moon, sun, other planets and things like that, and worse, the entire shape is somewhat oblate because it is a plastic body (which means it deforms slowly and non-elastically over time) so it is oblate. Imagine spinning a water ballon around an axis and seeing it bulge perpindicular to that axis. The earth does the same thing. This makes metric things (which are defined by speeds of light and time involved in the decay of cesium atoms and some metal rods in france, all well known universal constants) more accurate than anything based on the complex ole earth

Re: Interesting

[sayceman]

I understand the earth is not just a lumpy sphere, but I didn't want to write a long paragraph about oblation and such and I didn't have the handy analogy of a spinning water balloon at my fingertips in order to illustrate the point. I don't see how time is metric, or the speed of light for that matter (miles per second or kilometers per second is still distance over time). My point is, first and foremost, that a meter is, like you said, a bar in France, and a foot is - who knows, let's say a bar in England, or something equally arbitrary - while the nautical mile is at least an attempt to combine abstract mathematics with the world we live in. There are no loose ends to pick up once you are 24,901 miles around the globe. It is a whole system, which means it is not messy; or at the very least, it is less messy than either English or metric, which do not even attempt to clean up after themselves, globally speaking

Re: Interesting

[seamonkey314]

Seconds aren't metric (well, they are, but they're also used by the english system) but meters aren't just an arbitrary bar, they're the distance light in a vacuum travels in a certain amount of time (defined by the cesium decay). And since the earth can change, while the decay time of Cesium and the speed of light cannot, meters wins that one. The weight things are the arbitrary part of the metric system.

Interesting discussion. I was planning to write something vaguely Eggers-ish, semi-fake-autobiographical, which means I can write in the first person as if I'm telling a story (which can also cover up some of my weakness at writing dialogue), and keep it funny since that what I like best. Thus my charecters can be loosely based on real people intially, although obviously my imagination little brother can't be that similar to the real one or people would call it fantastic-realism and I aint no Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Re: Interesting

[sayceman]

But picking cesium as your element that radioactively decays is totally arbitrary. Why not plutonium, uranium, carbon, or any other decaying element? What relevance does cesium have to the world we live in? My point is that nautical miles are relevant. Yes, they are arbitrary because they have been selected as 1/60th of a degree and we decided circles are 360 degrees, but at least those arbitrary selections have been selected out of our real world experiences.

You can write anything you want, and if any part of it comes from your imagination, you get to call it fiction. Just remember that the closer you come to reality the more likely you are to piss off the people who realize you are writing about them. Remember, Frank McCourt didn't write Angela's Ashes until after his mother died, and for good reason.

[exitleft]

NACHOOOOOOOOOOOS.

[sayceman]

Indeed. Who knew that he would somehow still be with us.

[exitleft]

I missed him!

[nirgendwoman]

I do not at all.
P.S. this is Sayce