h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So named because the SI unit of radioactivity, the Becquerel, while numerically sensible (1 disintegration per second), is absolutely, stupidly TINY for anything approaching real world application. The very slightest, least dangerous detectable sorts of emissions you'd ever measure would be measured in GIGAbecquerels, and terabecquerels are common enough in the nuclear industry. Hence the slang name for the becquerel - the "bugger all".

Also, the "baud" isn't *quite* 1 bit per second, it takes into account some other complicated stuff that I'd be lying if I said I remembered...

H.

My father hates Pascal because it's so small. And Farad is too big.

But for every unit you find applications that are forced to use extreme prefixes. BTW the old unit, Curie, was a rubber unit with different definitions over the decades. The definition of Becquerel is simple and absolutely unambiguous. That the important thing. (Many don't like that organisations like Greenpeace can give huge numbers for contamination which can manipulate some people.)

And the Hertz -- related with Becquerel in a very subtle way -- is also way to small for most applications. But nobody complains.

The Baud thing has been pointed out to me already. I think the stop and parity bits are included into Mbits/s but not into Baud. I think.

Re: pascals, I tend to use bar (10^5 Pa) most of the time at work. I say most...

Re: Greenpeace - tell me about it. I used to work for BNFL.

Re: Baud. Yeah. That was what I meant. Exactly that. Honest.

H.

OOh! Ooh!

That reminds me of one of my favourite geek jokes:

What goes "pieces of seven, pieces of seven"?

H.

I don't know, what ?

A parroty error.




Ay theng yo.

H.
(I thought nobody would ever ask...)

One of my computing teachers had a parrot/parity joke, which I forget right nowl. He also likes to say "this is a local variable, for local people" lol