Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Cursed Units by Joseph Newton

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  • เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.พ. 2025
  • Original Video ‪@josephnewton‬ • Cursed Units

ความคิดเห็น • 302

  • @tfolsenuclear
    @tfolsenuclear  7 หลายเดือนก่อน +53

    Thanks so much for watching! If you would like to hear more about obscure units, please check out: th-cam.com/video/9tQGGNk04tA/w-d-xo.htmlsi=PluiAfN-HSR4Uidy

    • @callumfarmer3132
      @callumfarmer3132 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

      You should watched the linked video, the Numberphile one, it’s about nuclear bombs I believe. It’s got neat history and cursed units

    • @HrLBolle
      @HrLBolle 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

      I think Veritasiums video on how we used to calculate PI would be a good candidate for a reaction sometime in the not yet present time, otherwise termed future

    • @TedDanzig
      @TedDanzig 6 หลายเดือนก่อน

      Thanks, new subscriber here. Could you do a video sharing your insight on the new Chinese Pellet Bed Reactor being built?

    • @lasarith2
      @lasarith2 27 วันที่ผ่านมา

      3:08 in uk British Gas is charging 24.31pence or 30 cents a KWH .

  • @StormsparkPegasus
    @StormsparkPegasus 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +1054

    A lot of people have trouble wrapping their heads around the fact that a watt is not an amount of energy, it's a rate. So to get amount, you have to multiply it by a time.

    • @bami2
      @bami2 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +81

      Here they "solved" that problem by using kWh/1000hrs unit and putting that on all appliances, so if you have a 50 watt appliance, it will consume 50kWh for every 1000 hrs used.

    • @CoolAsFreya
      @CoolAsFreya 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +44

      I think that's at least partially because the watt doesn't explicitly show its time unit unlike other rate units we commonly use. If we called it "joules per second" more people might understand (and we could just use megajoules for amounts of energy instead of cursed kWh)

    • @CoolAsFreya
      @CoolAsFreya 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +23

      @@bami2oh no! Energy / Time * Time / Time 😵‍💫

    • @Fish-bt4c
      @Fish-bt4c 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +16

      explanation: a watt is 1 joule per second
      a kilowatt is 1000 joules per second
      a kilowatt being sustained for an hour is 3600s*1000 joules/s, or 3.6 million joules
      which is about 830 food calories- most people run on about 100 watts then.

    • @Wavy_Gravy
      @Wavy_Gravy 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

      Sparkies 'ill tell ya.

  • @MarsJenkar
    @MarsJenkar 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +374

    A lot of these are "cursed" in the sense that they contain uncancelled units, but some weird things can happen _with_ cancellation as well. Take the specific impulse of a rocket, which is used to measure performance. Basically, it's the force gained from burning a propellant divided by the weight of the propellant. (Yes, the weight, not the mass.) Since weight is a measure of acceleration toward a massive object (force over time), you essentially have two "force" units that cancel each other out, leaving only the time measurement. As a result, specific impulse is measured in seconds, with a higher number for a better performance.

    • @gavinjenkins899
      @gavinjenkins899 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +50

      That's not weird at all though. It simply (and usefully and intuitively) refers to the number of seconds that the rocket engine + any amount of its matching fuel can accelerate its own mass at 1G before running out. Efficient fuel or better engines can accelerate their own mass at 1G longer than inefficient ones.

    • @idris4587
      @idris4587 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

      Yess took me some time to get this one love it tho

    • @idris4587
      @idris4587 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

      Yup so a rocket lifting off from Earth will always burn for less time than its specific impulse and you can work that out from the thrust to mass ratio​@@gavinjenkins899

    • @NoNameAtAll2
      @NoNameAtAll2 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +7

      iirc, isp is measured in seconds because everyone got too tired with metric-imperial translations
      seconds are universal

    • @aggonzalezdc
      @aggonzalezdc 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

      ​@@NoNameAtAll2 never heard that. Got a source?

  • @Dabbleatory
    @Dabbleatory 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +356

    For some truly cursed units, I suggest the video "a joke about measurement" by jan Miseli, where he creates an alternative to the SI system.

    • @joeshmoe4207
      @joeshmoe4207 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +17

      This is a great video. Plus there is a new Curseder Units video out as well

    • @NerdFromDenmark
      @NerdFromDenmark 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

      It's a great video! Terrible joke tho, no great punchline and i cried a bit

    • @minotaur470
      @minotaur470 3 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

      Small correction, Mitch uses they/them pronouns iirc :)

    • @PamellaCardoso-pp5tr
      @PamellaCardoso-pp5tr 3 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

      ​@@minotaur470for fucks sake. Not even i who am a bissexual gender fluid cis-woman care about pronouns. It just makes communication much harder as you need to be always caring about which pronouns you should use or not.

    • @minotaur470
      @minotaur470 3 หลายเดือนก่อน +3

      @@PamellaCardoso-pp5tr You're absolutely entitled to your own opinion about pronouns. If you have no preference, that's totally okay. I don't understand where this mindset comes from that it's okay to disregard others' wishes, especially when, as in my own case, they've explicitly asked for specific pronouns to be used to signify respect. It's the same deal as addressing someone as "doctor" in a professional setting if they have a PhD. Maybe they'll tell you it's fine, or maybe they'll ask that you call them doctor even in informal settings. Either way, they'd probably take offense if you disregarded their wishes. (And for context, I'm a trans woman, and if I knew someone personally that refused to use the right pronouns for me I'd consider that the same thing as using my birth name. Which is to say, they would no longer be present in my life after that)

  • @brutester
    @brutester 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +124

    There are a lot of those in electrical engineering. We measure op-amp noise in “Volts per root Hertz”

    • @seraphina985
      @seraphina985 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +13

      It makes sense it would come up a lot in measures relating to noise and such simply because roots show up a lot in probability functions for statistically distributed randomness. Noise is literally defined by such a function unique to the type of noise and the physical properties of the system.

    • @DrDeuteron
      @DrDeuteron 2 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

      @@seraphina985 exactly. Brownian motion grows linearly in root meters, or if you square it: acres-Hz per second is constant.

  • @noobymaster6980
    @noobymaster6980 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +352

    Now you need to check out part two aswell, just as cursed

    • @williamkane
      @williamkane 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +4

      I support this request!

    • @tempy2440
      @tempy2440 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

      He did!

  • @jercos
    @jercos 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +82

    The real cursed unit on your electric bill goes a step further: your average power consumption is given in kilowatt-hours per day. There are 41.67 watts in a kWh/d.

    • @jercos
      @jercos 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +6

      G is a unit of volume/mass*time^2... density acceleration. Woah.

    • @chrisd1746
      @chrisd1746 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +11

      When I was working on automotive control software some of the variables were in units of rpm/s. It makes sense if you're a calibration engineer trying to tune a shaft acceleration since you think of the speed in rpm and the acceleration is on timescales of seconds, but the fact that it was using two different units of time in the same unit always seemed amply cursed.

    • @joetheprogrammer0
      @joetheprogrammer0 2 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

      Displaying the average rate of power consumption in W makes a lot of sense. Not only in terms of unit simplification, but also in terms of being able to visualise how much you were using

    • @DrDeuteron
      @DrDeuteron 2 หลายเดือนก่อน

      kWh/day is satanic.

  • @0000Sierra117
    @0000Sierra117 6 หลายเดือนก่อน +34

    This channel makes me feel ... something ... about my life choices. Nostalgia? Regret? I don't know. I got my bachelor's in Physics with a mind towards a graduate degree in Nuclear Engineering. A severe concussion at the end of my senior year put that plan on pause, and well, it's never unpaused. I started working in electronics fabrication and have held various technician-type jobs in industry and academia ever since. The pay's well good enough to sustain myself and the work is usually interesting, but I always feel like I could have made more of myself. Especially since nuclear power is so valuable and important, would I be more fulfilled if I had made it into that field? I don't know.
    Sorry for the angsty ramblings, but the TL;DR is that you make compelling and interesting content, and I'm glad you do it.

    • @zachb1706
      @zachb1706 5 หลายเดือนก่อน +3

      You’re acting like you can’t study part time and get yourself into that field.

    • @olivergro7105
      @olivergro7105 2 หลายเดือนก่อน +7

      ​@@zachb1706 yeah not everyone has the capabilities in his mind/pocket/time to do that. Its not like thats stress free to do.

  • @Zych.Grzegorz
    @Zych.Grzegorz 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +143

    The 12 parsecs Kessel Run in Star Wars is there because it sounded science-fictiony. The Expanded Universe added an explanation: the planet Kessel is located near a giant cluster of black holes (sic!) so everyone takes a long way around. Han Solos flex in that scene is now about how much shorter his run was - the Millenium Falcon is so fast it can get close to those black holes and not get sucked in.

    • @Wavy_Gravy
      @Wavy_Gravy 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +11

      Good old Black hole sling shot.....or is it time dilation? I'd assume the sling shot. Because Han Solo, although he doesn't recognize the force, is plot armored by such.

    • @ahettinger525
      @ahettinger525 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +39

      While it was obviously written someone who didn't know what a parsec was, I'd treated it as a sarcastic mock-brag... like saying you ran the Daytona 500 in 500 mi.

    • @MarsJenkar
      @MarsJenkar 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +22

      I wanna say that the discrepancy was actually intentional; apparently there was a stage direction for Obi-Wan to express that he knew that Han was BSing, but it wasn't really shown in the final product.

    • @darkcerabrate
      @darkcerabrate 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +5

      I heard it wasn't speed but how advanced the navigation computer was. It was able to calculate a safe shorter route

    • @Marcel-yu2fw
      @Marcel-yu2fw 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +6

      But it can go at light speed (or even faster?) anyway, just like all the other ships in Star Wars. Shouldn't that make black holes easy to escape for ANY ship? (as long as you stay above the event horizon)
      I think this shows that trying to make sense of Star Wars "science" is never a good idea...

  • @gwalla
    @gwalla 6 หลายเดือนก่อน +30

    14:20 Google reduces the Hubble constant to 2.3×10^-18 Hz because Hz is the most familiar inverse second, but strictly speaking it's incorrect. Hertz is specifically cycles per second, a measure of frequency of periodic phenomena, but the Hubble constant doesn't describe a recurrence, so instead we should use an inverted second for aperiodic phenomena. That's right, the Hubble constant is 2.3×10^-18 becquerel! (Or 2.3 attobecquerel)

    • @DrDeuteron
      @DrDeuteron 2 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

      you are correct. I hate Bq, what is it in Ci?

    • @McDonalds-Empty-Cup
      @McDonalds-Empty-Cup 2 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

      @@DrDeuteron 6.2162e-29Ci

    • @DrDeuteron
      @DrDeuteron 2 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

      @@McDonalds-Empty-Cup that works out to like one decay per lifetime of the unive……..oh wait. Ok.

  • @velvetgrimm
    @velvetgrimm 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +14

    This content is definitely your sweet spot. I love how you can really show off your unique knowledge in this hard science and math context. Great stuff!

  • @neotericrecreant
    @neotericrecreant 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +117

    CHERENKOV RADIATION!! everybody take a drink!

    • @esupton783
      @esupton783 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +8

      Don't drink the reactor blue gatorade!

    • @Merennulli
      @Merennulli 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +5

      Which, under US regulation, that drink is 23 feet of water.
      Gonna need a REALLY narrow glass.

  • @Merennulli
    @Merennulli 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +11

    I'm glad he goes over the derivation of these. Yes, it's weird and frustrating to have units in situations where they don't independently make physical sense, but we use all these units because the universe interacts with itself in ways that makes them useful.

  • @gavinjenkins899
    @gavinjenkins899 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +46

    There is a reason for the hubble numbers to be similar. Yes sure the universe's expansion changes over time, but things tend not to change that far from their typical rates. The only "coincidence" is that the current expansion rate happens to be near the AVERAGE expansion rate over time. Which doesn't sound far fetched or overly coincidental at all to me. It's like if you take a random person's current height and find that it's very close to their average height during their life. Okay... and? Not that weird.

    • @Thomas.P.C
      @Thomas.P.C 6 หลายเดือนก่อน

      This. And if you have particularly cosmologies (i.e. the composition of the universe (matter, radiation, dark matter, dark energy)) the age of the universe is inversely proportional to the Hubble Parameter (possibly exactly).
      Source/Fact Check: Ryden's Introduction to Cosmology

    • @kukuc96
      @kukuc96 5 หลายเดือนก่อน +5

      The problem with that is that it's current value is not close the average rate of expansion so far, it's current rate is actually the maximum observed so far. At least according to current best modeling, that says the universe's expansion is speeding up, it was always speeding up, and it will continue to speed up forever. The more accurate height analogy would be if people continued to grow in height from birth to their death at a roughly uniform rate and never shrunk with age. You would be very surprised to find them to be close to their average height (as measure up until now) in that case.
      The concept you are thinking about is mean reversion, but it doesn't apply to a value that is only increasing with time.
      So it is complete coincidence. That's part of the reason why it's off by 200 million years.

    • @gavinjenkins899
      @gavinjenkins899 5 หลายเดือนก่อน

      @@kukuc96 if it's not close to the average, then I don't see how the statement is true to begin with. It should be mathematically impossible unless its near the average. Seems like probably just a error in that case. It can't be just a coincidence because they are actually closely related and bound to one another by third variables

    • @gavinjenkins899
      @gavinjenkins899 5 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

      @@kukuc96 Also looking it up briefly shows everyone completely disagreeing or showing 4 or 5 totally different models that they find plausible, many of which show slowed growth later on (which is enough for this. Always growing is fine, only the derivative of growth need be near average), and some even show reversal and contraction. Where are you seeing some broad consensus

    • @olivergro7105
      @olivergro7105 2 หลายเดือนก่อน

      But isnt a person growing different compared to a galaxy?

  • @forgottenfamily
    @forgottenfamily 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +36

    Apparently, in an earlier draft of Episode IV, Obi-wan was supposed to react to what was clearly a lie by Han Solo. It appears to have disappeared from the final draft of the script and the EU added an explanation to it which was adapted by the Disney canon - highly modified but the core rational of it being an impressive navigation feat remains.
    But when you look back, it makes way more sense for it to have been Han bullshitting. First off, it's Han Solo. Second, he's saying it while claiming the Millennium Falcon is fast so to give a navigation achievement (which speaks to the pilot) when trying to sell how awesome his ship is is just weird. And then there's the fact that just a few minutes later, the Falcon is getting overtaken by Star Destroyers and Luke explicitly calls out Han for claiming the ship was fast.

    • @Ralph-yn3gr
      @Ralph-yn3gr 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +6

      It's kind of still in the final movie. If you look closely you can see Obi Wan make this exasperated head movement/expression after Han says that.

  • @knutritter461
    @knutritter461 3 หลายเดือนก่อน +3

    M. Sc. of chemistry here: In IR-spectroscopy we used the weird unit of wavenumber. The amount of waves fitting into a certain length. But it even gets weirder.... we did not use the meter but the centimeter instead.... Somehow this must be of historical origin! 😂 So the unit is waves/cm or better 1/cm = cm^-1 whereas the real SI-unit would be JUST µm (wavelength).
    About the parsec: In chemistry we use the unit of Ångström equal to 0,1 nm = 100 pm = 1 Å. It's pretty handy because one Å is about the radius of an atom and it's even about the standard distance between atoms and thus often equal to the length of bonds. It makes calculations easier as you can 'feel' it better😉

  • @hii-people2245
    @hii-people2245 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +55

    You should watch part 2 of the cursed unit series

    • @garr_inc
      @garr_inc 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

      Absolutely. The guy is incredible.

  • @judybassett9390
    @judybassett9390 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +29

    A barn is a strange unit.

    • @DrDeuteron
      @DrDeuteron 2 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

      not really, a uranium nucleus has a cross section of 1 bn. It was originally a nuclear physics dis, as in, "You couldn't hit the broadside of a barn".

  • @kirkula
    @kirkula 3 หลายเดือนก่อน +5

    2:00 I'd like to see a power plant that puts out a steady 1,210 MW. Great Scott!

  • @lordlightspeed
    @lordlightspeed หลายเดือนก่อน +3

    15:30 sort of a coincidence. If the Hubble parameter was constant throughout the evolution of the universe, then this would be the expected result.
    However, it hasn't been constant, so the coincidence is that we are alive at a time for which it does predict the age of the universe.
    Edit: curses, I should have watched the next few seconds.

  • @Itsnotavailable_67
    @Itsnotavailable_67 หลายเดือนก่อน

    This guy is absolutely awesome- he manages to make content that’s both informative and not boring whilst still managing to link it back to nuclear physics and/or reactors

  • @Adwaenyth
    @Adwaenyth 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +25

    I mean we could start measuring in attoparsec. Which is around 3.086 cm or 1.215 inches...

    • @DrDeuteron
      @DrDeuteron 2 หลายเดือนก่อน

      dear lord I hate parsecs. the speed of light is one foot per nanosecond, so a light-inch is 80 ps.

    • @cokxi
      @cokxi 2 หลายเดือนก่อน

      Please stop guys.

    • @DrDeuteron
      @DrDeuteron 2 หลายเดือนก่อน

      @@cokxi no, for real. Why is the useless "parsec" the standard in professional astronomy? It's a geocentric unit, based on the diameter of the Earth's orbit and the arc second.
      Meanwhile, the "light-year", which ties distance to time via THE universal speed limit, c, is so much more natural. ofc it is also geocentric, in that it ties times to one revolution around the sun...totally natural, unlike the arc second, which is 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/60th if 1/10th of a circle...based on the Babylonian's love of 60 for being divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30. js.

    • @SunMoonSpeedruns
      @SunMoonSpeedruns 2 หลายเดือนก่อน

      @@DrDeuteronwell, the way in which it’s used you could use light year, but then the light year just gets calculated as “the distance away when the two telescopes are 1 AU apart, and the angle is 3.261633… degrees.” It’s really inefficient to use it that way, and it will be a lot more accurate with parsecs

    • @DrDeuteron
      @DrDeuteron 2 หลายเดือนก่อน

      @@SunMoonSpeedruns after further thought, it makes perfect sense. Astronomers use telescopes 🔭, so a distance in parsecs is a direct conversion from distance to resolution (an experimental link). The light year is a direct tie from distance to signal time or age of the universe, so a theoretical concern for sci fi space travel or cosmological concern, and it makes for nice Minkowski diagrams axis labels. So I see why I prefer light year.
      It’s similar to my people measuring mass in electron volts. A theorist says, we expect the Higgs mass is below 140 GeV, I immediately know the beam energy required to make it, which is an experimental connection. It’s 70 GeV.
      Still not joules per particle, but you don’t want J, since the accelerator must accelerate electrons, protons, or ion, with charges of -1e, +1e, +2e, …, +82e. Then using +/-1e, I know I need to create 70 billion volts in the lab somehow.
      It’s all about practicality

  • @michaelbobic7135
    @michaelbobic7135 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +19

    1.21 gigawatts! 1.21 gigawatts!! Great Scott!!

    • @ShaneH42
      @ShaneH42 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +3

      I think you mean jigawatts :)

    • @Merennulli
      @Merennulli 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

      @@ShaneH42 Much like in jiraffe 🦒

  • @IvanBaAl961
    @IvanBaAl961 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +16

    Nowadays imperial units are more weird than ones used in astronomy.

  • @Rusty-METAL-J
    @Rusty-METAL-J 6 หลายเดือนก่อน +5

    I love your image of what it takes to make 1MW of electricity. I have never seen or heared that before and it gave me the 1st(I mean the VERY 1st) real perspective of it.
    "I'm an Artistic Scientist Moonlighting as a Mathematician."
    It'd be great to talk about it in person, but thanks again, Tyler.

    • @Rusty-METAL-J
      @Rusty-METAL-J 6 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

      I live in Georgia, Sooooooooooooo I totally feel ya about electric bills soaring in the spring, summer, and fall(for me) due to high A/C usage. Isn't it interesting that Air Conditioning is A/C ah Alternating Current is AC?

  • @DNA912
    @DNA912 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +5

    3:16 that is actually the most cursed unit of them all. because people say "cal" but mean "kcal" I hate that, but I've started to accept that cal equals kcal when people talk

  • @altejoh
    @altejoh 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +5

    7:30 i love how einstein is the only one that needs to only be casually mentioned and not have his face on screen xD

  • @jorandax9059
    @jorandax9059 4 หลายเดือนก่อน +3

    Fisher information is a great example of a cursed unit. Suppose you have data that you believe follow a particular parametric distribution, and you want to estimate one or more of these parameters. You can use a technique called maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to get the "most likely" possible value of the parameters. Fisher information is a measure of how much information the data carries about the maximum likelihood estimate. However, the useful thing about it is that its inverse is the variance of the parameter estimate in question. Variance has units of the square of whatever the units of the corresponding random variable are. So, that means if you're measuring claim amounts in dollars, and you fit, say, a Pareto distribution to the data using MLE, then the Fisher information for the scale parameter has units of inverse dollars squared ($^-2).

  • @Blaze5x5x5
    @Blaze5x5x5 2 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

    The whole Star wars Kessel run is supposed to be 20 parsecs long. Han Solo brags he can complete it in 12 parsecs as the Millennium Falcon is supposed to be able to take more dangerous routes meaning he can shave 8 parsecs off. It's like your buddy saying they can cut a 200 mile trip down to a 150 mile one because their car is able to go off-road and they know a shortcut through the woods.

  • @NicholasMati
    @NicholasMati 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +17

    Another cursed unit is any measure of speed or velocity - not because of a mishmash of units, but because I'm cursed with a nearly uncontrollable urge to commit violence on anyone who says "rate of speed." Rate of speed [thump] is the [thump] component [thump] of acceleration [crunch] along [thump] a trajectory [crack].

    • @olivergro7105
      @olivergro7105 2 หลายเดือนก่อน

      You couldve also just said that there is no speed

    • @DrDeuteron
      @DrDeuteron 2 หลายเดือนก่อน

      so you hate cops? They ascertain that a gentleman who produced a firearm and discharged in a business establishment and then fled at a high rate of speed, all. the. time.
      at which point an officer involved shooting occurred, and the suspect was code 4.

    • @Carbon.Organic_Emperor12
      @Carbon.Organic_Emperor12 2 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

      The rate of change of position is velocity
      The rate of change of velocity is acceleration
      The rate of change of acceleration is jerk
      The rate of change of jerk is snap
      The rate of change of snap is crackle
      The rate of change of crackle is pop
      The rate of change of pop is an abomination of monstrous amount of change in position under small interval of time possible
      All changes in rates are with respect to Time

    • @DrDeuteron
      @DrDeuteron 2 หลายเดือนก่อน

      @@Carbon.Organic_Emperor12 I like jounce at 4, just for the scrabble value.

  • @michaelk__
    @michaelk__ 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +9

    I feel like you might enjoy "jan Misali" "a joke about measurement".
    I don't feel like it is content that a good reaction can be made to, but I think you'd have at least fun just watching it!
    It's a video taking apart how measurement units work and putting it all on it's head to come up with very cursed, often very non useful units.

  • @phoenix3231a
    @phoenix3231a 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +13

    I count in Siriometers = 1 million AU. Call me old school

  • @MrGonzonator
    @MrGonzonator 6 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

    Barn-Megaparsecs are roughly ⅔ teaspoon.
    The volume of water that contains as many molecules as the Earth holds that volume, is roughly 2 Barn-Megaparsecs.

  • @DarkestValar
    @DarkestValar 6 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

    Having seen the original video before this, i have to say your reaction and context gives sooo much more value to it.

  • @roevhaal578
    @roevhaal578 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +14

    In Sweden we consume twice as much electricity in winter.

    • @srys9
      @srys9 2 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

      Can relate to you, from the UK though. I suppose it's got to do with whether a country needs air conditioning or heating. Although in recent years summers are getting warmer here so people who have both AC and heating will see a permanent bump in their energy bills lol.

  • @redshiftthefox
    @redshiftthefox 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +3

    When I made my name so many years ago, I didn't know it was also a term in nuclear power. Neat.

  • @psigh8161
    @psigh8161 6 หลายเดือนก่อน +4

    Can't remember for sure, but my guess is "less than 12 parsecs" relates to the space-time curvature capabilities of his ship, combined with his calculation abilities. in short, another pilot couldn't have curved that chunk of space that much, and thus would have spent more time in hyperspace. then again, there is almost no real science in star wars, it's basically a space fantasy with wizards and monsters, rather than an actual sci-fi

  • @sombreludens5040
    @sombreludens5040 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +17

    Did the beginning part about a book and gallons per miles get cut for some reason?

  • @LordMarcus
    @LordMarcus 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +10

    2:00 Would you say the one you worked at ever ran at 1,210 MW??

  • @Adrian-3
    @Adrian-3 2 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

    of course he mentioned liquid control rods again! 23:45

  • @ramons8908
    @ramons8908 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +3

    Disappointed he missed out on the most cursed one off all, the "Schrödinger equation", try explaining the "i" to anyone that hasn't done advanced mathematics. There was that time when France tried to create metric time too, something even the French weren't crazy enough to go through with.

  • @blueblob8862
    @blueblob8862 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +3

    I was wondering if you'd ever do some kind of general overview/fun fact type of video about nuclear power plants (how they work, what did your work entail etc). It would be nice to learn these things from someone with first hand experience 😊

  • @mkwilson1394
    @mkwilson1394 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    This is a fantastic video with some genuinely beautiful math in it! Glad to see you cover it.

  • @tylisirn
    @tylisirn 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +3

    I *have* done actual calculations for real in km/h*min units... I was accumulating lots of intermediate distances given in minutes and speeds, and multiplying minutes with km/h properly is annoying since those are incompatible units, so I kept them in the cursed units until the end where I only had to convert it once into proper distance.

  • @goblinkoma
    @goblinkoma 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +5

    since you seemed to enjoy this one, I highly recommend the second episode of this

  • @minigamer4262
    @minigamer4262 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +6

    Please do the sequel to this too!

  • @nullpoint3346
    @nullpoint3346 3 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

    "Breaking the light barrier" in a medium, glorious.

  • @shoshannakf3884
    @shoshannakf3884 6 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

    ive been doing nuclear physics research for the last 2 years. my favorite cursed units are the almighty areal density units - atoms*10^15/cm^2, and also the fact that for rutherford backscattering, the end result of the equation is given in units of particles/m^2. Also, on a logical level I understand why reaction cross sections are measured in some variation on m^2, but also why? It's a probability!

  • @psymar
    @psymar 3 หลายเดือนก่อน

    There's two explanations for han solo's under 12 parsecs thing. One is the official explanation: that he shortened the distance by flying really close to black holes, which is supposed to be a testament to his skill as a pilot. The other option is, he's just testing to see if Obiwan, Luke & co. have absolutely any idea about outer space whatsoever. Which Luke doesn't. Obi-wan probably knows Han is BSing there, but also is desperate enough for the help to keep his mouth shut.

  • @tntdude999
    @tntdude999 6 หลายเดือนก่อน

    When you pause to explain something, he just explains it again.

  • @Blackvertigo1
    @Blackvertigo1 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    Blue shift in nuclear physics is what when the reactor's energy goes up quickly and why the demon core's supercritical state was blue for a second.

  • @caseyironvale20
    @caseyironvale20 2 หลายเดือนก่อน

    5 and a half minutes into this video and my brain has already melted out of my nose...

  • @carlosanvito
    @carlosanvito 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

    My favorite cursed unit is one that spans the globe and centuries - that would be "furlongs per fortnight". One furlong per fortnight translates to 0.6 km/hr.

  • @The_Dark_Lord-69
    @The_Dark_Lord-69 26 วันที่ผ่านมา

    29:00 As a nuclear engineer, I thought you were gonna choose reactivity increase, measured in dollars.

  • @zachrodan7543
    @zachrodan7543 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

    17:33 perhaps there is every reason for these numbers to be similar? Very rare are two related numbers going to have similar values by pure coincidence, after all. If we refuse to accept the closeness of the reciprocal of the hubble constant and the age of the universe as being unrelated, then perhaps the hubble constant will always be measured to be approximately the reciprocal of the age of the universe, and we just happen to be living at a time when it has a value of about 70 km/s/Mpc. Perhaps in a billion years, when the universe is about 15 billion years old, astronomers will measure the hubble constant to be different, such that when you take the reciprocal of it, you get about 15 billion years. After all, what evidence do we have that this number, which we only know from experimental data, is independent of the age of the universe? How do we know it isn't changing with time, when we are only working with data taken during one incredibly brief timeframe, from only one location in the universe. It is likely that the data is irrelevant to where you are (assuming the universe is the same everywhere and in every direction), but perhaps the data would look different if measured elsewhen?

  • @MrHamof
    @MrHamof 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    10:00 Flying really fucking close to a big cluster of black holes, is the explanation the novel writers came up with. In the original script it's supposed to be him messing with what he thinks are two uneducated farmers from the middle of nowhere that don't know anything about space.

  • @NoNameAtAll2
    @NoNameAtAll2 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

    I'll be waiting for your commentary on part 2 as well ^_^

  • @bobgoldham69
    @bobgoldham69 6 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

    Physical chemistry uses sqrt(liter/second). A liter being 10^-3m^3 makes that a unit of the dimension Length^(3/2)Time^(-1/2)

  • @michaelbobic7135
    @michaelbobic7135 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    It's interesting that you used RMS for electrical signals. In stats, we use RMS in many circumstances, but especially in sorting out whether expected error is 0 or if the expectation changes over time or across correlations, which is similar to your use.

  • @Xnoob545
    @Xnoob545 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +6

    Did you miss the beginning of the video?

  • @Juan-Dering
    @Juan-Dering 4 หลายเดือนก่อน

    Yeah it was actually pretty correct estimate for how fast his ship was. Because basically there is a huge black hole in the middle of the path. So the closer you can get to the black hole without getting pulled into it, is a good bragging right for how fast your ship can go past the speed of light. Since the faster the ship, the smaller the event horizon. So the smaller the e faster the ship, the smaller the event horizon. So the smaller the distance to the black hole, the faster the ship is.

  • @TheTrueSignpost
    @TheTrueSignpost 3 หลายเดือนก่อน

    The issue with a couple is the fact that the units lack direction. If the dimensions were clarified, the unit would not be cursed.

  • @aiocafea
    @aiocafea 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    i have toa dmit by the 20min mark i was thinking 'hm im watching someone watch a video what am i doing here' but i am so glad to stick around and find out about 'breaking the light barrier'

  • @network_king
    @network_king 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

    I mess with a lot of electronics and have multiple electrician friends. KW/H always seemed odd, but there are a lot of stranger ones. Like power factor where the voltage and current either lag or lead each other I get the concept but it seems crazy too because you can't have one and not the other. Then there is watts and KVA which are similar but different enough to matter and be confusing, then there is also KVAR (KVA reactive).

    • @KaneYork
      @KaneYork 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

      Everyone records power factor as a ratio (unitless) but the source measurement is an angle...

  • @psymar
    @psymar 3 หลายเดือนก่อน

    My best intuition for picoseconds is based on my best intuition for nanoseconds, which is that a nanosecond is the time it takes light to travel a distance of 30cm ("one foot" for americans.) (It's actually about 29.97 cm or 299.7 mm.) So then a light-picosecond is about 300 microns.

  • @benjaminpedersen9548
    @benjaminpedersen9548 4 หลายเดือนก่อน

    My dad used to be an electrician and he usually says kilowatts instead of kilowatt-hours. That is cursed!

  • @Schwenne1994
    @Schwenne1994 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    4:00 This is a great point and also what this video teaches you a very fun way:
    It can be interesting and eye opening to explore the depth of the usual. You might find things you would have never guess or realise that some ways we do things are.... kinda stupid, even though they work very well :D

  • @pxtrichora
    @pxtrichora 6 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

    I use the manning equation from hydraulics a lot at work, the roughness coefficient ‘n’ ends up with units of ft^(1/3)/s

  • @thorin1045
    @thorin1045 4 หลายเดือนก่อน

    the issue with the kwh is that we hide the problem into the watt. if the 1200 (km/h)*min would be renamed 1.2 kvm, it would look perfectly normal. m obviously in this case minutes just added confusion from mistaking it for mass, the k is kilo for tricking you into something meaningful and v is for velocity where one velocity is 1 km/h, and suddenly no problem with that strange unit. if we start to use that for how much energy it needed for the travel, it might even catch up. (please no!)

  • @alexgebhart5512
    @alexgebhart5512 4 หลายเดือนก่อน

    My dad was an engineer and broke down kilowatt hours along with his mpg at every fill up and much more. Had notebooks full of stuff😅

  • @chedderjack4968
    @chedderjack4968 3 หลายเดือนก่อน

    My favorite unit is used while measuring strain in a material, you use in/in

  • @leeroydaanknz5064
    @leeroydaanknz5064 3 หลายเดือนก่อน

    Oh it's funny. In Germany the electricity bill goes up in winter usually because we don't have AC and our heating is sometimes powered by electricity

  • @Chasedtuna9
    @Chasedtuna9 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

    19:29 this actually explains the whole "blue note" thing i have seen in a lot of Sci-Fi examples of warp/ftl travel... Most prominently Eve online and Star Trek. I had never really though about what it actually was, i just went along with it because it was Sci-Fi...

    • @Razgriz__1
      @Razgriz__1 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

      Yup. In Eve you'll notice that the back of the warp tunnel is red-shifted

    • @aggonzalezdc
      @aggonzalezdc 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

      What does that have to do with Cherenkov radiation?

    • @nikolthomas2544
      @nikolthomas2544 6 หลายเดือนก่อน

      @@aggonzalezdc
      Cherenkov radiation is blue and caused by particles going faster than the speed of light

    • @aggonzalezdc
      @aggonzalezdc 6 หลายเดือนก่อน

      @@nikolthomas2544 I know what Cherenkov radiation is, but it's a bit more accurate to say it's photons moving faster than the normal speed through its medium, not greater than C. I still don't see what it has to do with the sci-fi stuff mentioned. Blue shift
      ed shift makes a lot more sense than Cherenkov radiation.

  • @JohnRandomness105
    @JohnRandomness105 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    4:40 I prefer to express Newton's constant in N m²/kg² -- or G = ⅔ ⨯ 10⁻¹⁰ N m²/kg². What use is there in expressing quantities in fundamental units?
    20:30 Once in class, I had to come up with an analogy for Cerenkov radiation. I gave a motorboat traveling with a couple waves trailing the boat.
    26:30 RMS deviation, random walks, standard deviation, all these are of general application. The speed of the electron in the hydrogen atom being c/137? That's the RMS speed of the electron in its ground state. It's also the speed of the Bohr hydrogen atom at lowest angular momentum.
    28:20 Wikipedia's "Deuterium fusion" article tells us that the rate of energy production from protostellar deuterium fusion is proportional to (temperature) to the 11.8th power.

  • @okaro6595
    @okaro6595 หลายเดือนก่อน

    People complain how expensive electricity is. They could try generating their own with a bicycle generator. In 8 hours they could maybe generate two kilowatt hours. The extra food they had eat for that would cost several dollars.

  • @okaro6595
    @okaro6595 หลายเดือนก่อน

    The weird thing is that units lite joule and watt originate from electricity. Joule was the energy one ampere current dissipates in an one ohm resistor in a second. However, their current definitions have nothing to do with electricity.
    Kilowatt hour is hard for many to get. Many think it is kilowatts per hour. Many just say kilowatts when they mean energy.

  • @kvikende
    @kvikende 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    You forgot to mention that Sievert also has constants for organs affected too. Like when iodine-131 concentrates in the thyroid or for strontium-90 in bones.

  • @ericvilas
    @ericvilas 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    There's a part 2, with even curseder units! Honestly I think it's even better than the first one.

  • @chinmayk8004
    @chinmayk8004 6 หลายเดือนก่อน

    5:12 isn’t it the distance between the centre of the two masses and not the surface to surface distance???

  • @6401gabriel
    @6401gabriel 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +1

    You should react to some of Explosions&Fire's videos. He's really funny and makes great videos.
    Maybe the white phosphorus, NCl3, metal fires, gold explosives, hydrogen peroxide or the flares one.
    Also his sulfur nitride video for his opinion on yellow chemistry.
    Even his ice cream video is funny.

  • @jackobrien9864
    @jackobrien9864 3 หลายเดือนก่อน

    You can use dimensional analysis to solve problems that you don't even understand. Just find a way to convert the given units to the units required, and there's a decent chance it's the right answer.

  • @prestonfisher2632
    @prestonfisher2632 6 หลายเดือนก่อน

    As a nuclear engineer you shouldve mentioned the Barn!

  • @justgame5508
    @justgame5508 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    His surname being Newton suits this video perfect

  • @MicroageHD
    @MicroageHD 6 หลายเดือนก่อน

    It's absolutely not a coincidence that 1/H_0 is roughly the age of the universe since H_0 aka the hubble parameter at present time is directly related to the scale (parameter) of the universe which is linked to the big bang aka to the "start of the universe"!

  • @trypt0faani161
    @trypt0faani161 5 หลายเดือนก่อน

    mos time I've spent in physical chemistry is actually converting units and the checking that the units match :D

  • @Akideoni
    @Akideoni 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    23:25 it's does make one ponder if this idealized nuclear reactor could be run in micro gravity environment. After all I am pretty sure thats how they make metal ball bearings(freefalling).

  • @DeeSnow97
    @DeeSnow97 5 หลายเดือนก่อน

    i love how much that copium about the parsec quote in star wars permeates culture. your read is the actual canon as of the solo movie (idk if it was canon in legends or just a fan explanation) but let's be real, the original screenwriters totally just thought parsec was a unit of time when they wrote that line.

  • @pauliussimkus190
    @pauliussimkus190 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +2

    There is a 2nd part to these series watch that too

  • @Bluelagoonstudios
    @Bluelagoonstudios 5 หลายเดือนก่อน

    That blue glow is beautiful, but I assume having this in your living room isn't a good idea?

  • @IsYitzach
    @IsYitzach 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    25:45 it reminded me of Monte Carlo were the deviation of the mean from the correct answer goes as 1/sqrt(sample size).

  • @Ulas_Aldag
    @Ulas_Aldag 3 หลายเดือนก่อน

    I am an aerospace engineer and despise the Unit kWh with my entire soul. You see the W and are ready to deal with Power, but then the h forces you to drop every assumption you had before. I know it has a lot of practical use, but I just can't.

  • @matsv201
    @matsv201 5 หลายเดือนก่อน

    15:28
    I don´t think this is a coincident. The short and the long of it is that the acceleration is dependent how far it is away from the origin point and that is in turn dependent on how long the time was since big bang
    ohh. right, he do explain this

  • @jeremystarkiller8181
    @jeremystarkiller8181 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    When you said what a MPC was, I about spit out my drink. Good god that'd far.

  • @MilaneseMoon
    @MilaneseMoon 3 หลายเดือนก่อน

    Ironically, when people say “oh that place is 20 minutes away by freeway” they mean 20 minutes going 60mph so: 1200 mph minutes.
    which is both normal and logical to us 😆

  • @halskarl
    @halskarl 6 หลายเดือนก่อน

    I was confused about the last one until he started explaining it, because I read the ‘ps’ as horsepowers (in german)…

  • @lostwizard
    @lostwizard 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    Most people who even notice the kWh stuff can't wrap their heads around the fact that kW and kWh are not the same thing. And, sadly, I've see that type of unit conflation from my local power company who really should know better at least once where they measured the energy storage capacity of a battery installation in kW. I mean, sure, if they were referring to the maximum charge or discharge rate, kW would make sense, but they meant total stoarge capacity. And it wasn't just a simply typo leaving the "h" off the "kWh" - they had it written out in full in more than one place.

  • @rorybyrne86
    @rorybyrne86 5 หลายเดือนก่อน

    The very annoying thing for me is that my gas is billed in megajoules, where my electricity is billed in kWh.
    Just....make it all joules! MAKE IT ALL JOULES!

  • @SwitchingPower
    @SwitchingPower 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    there is a part two of this video that also includes the different radiation units

  • @TheNovaq
    @TheNovaq 7 หลายเดือนก่อน

    You mentioned "people who are designing nuclear power plants" like they were some regular dudes and not semigod engineers.

    • @noodlelynoodle.
      @noodlelynoodle. 5 หลายเดือนก่อน

      Nah it's just Bob from down at the bar lol his drunken rants are about those damn neutrons bouncing around everywhere lol

  • @denysvlasenko1865
    @denysvlasenko1865 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +5

    1/H_0 being ~ age of the universe is NOT a coincidence at all.
    1/H_0 is the time which receding galaxies would need to reach the point where they are now if they would start from our location, and if their velocity is constant. Which is not a bad approximation for Big Bang.

    • @XCC23
      @XCC23 7 หลายเดือนก่อน +6

      Yeah, the coincidence is that the *current* speed and the *average* speed are reasonably close, if anything.