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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3645 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 25, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I simply read it once and remember it for the rest of my life (unless it is a specific number. I can only remember ratios or formulas without trying hard; so I try to cast numbers I need to store as ratios of each other).

I am simply built different. Built autistic, if you will.

I don't know why I have the speed of light in meters per second memorized down to the standardized value, but I'm sure it'll come useful when I'm inevitably thrown into an uplift isekai.

Do you know what a "meter" or a "second" is, though?

Heading off on a tangent, one thing that annoys me about (most) uplift isekais is that the authors know less about physics (etc) than their characters do, and their worlds act on highschool (or simpler) physics as well.

As an example, Delve has a scene where the main character calculates the elastic energy stored in a bow at different draw lengths (fortunately, the draw force is linear). He has a magic measuring stick, so getting meters and seconds (and therefore probably kilograms as well) is possible, but the results are insane to anyone who has done a physics experiment: It is exactly two points of damage per joule of calculated energy input. A second trial had a 2.5% error. Either the System doesn't care about the arrow as a physical projectile, or else the energy lost to the limb mass, air resistance, dampening in the material, etc. "coincidentally" line up and cancel each other out.

As a counterexample, Ar'Kendrithyst has a scene where the main character doesn't know about the (low) hardenability of austenitic stainless steel, but his teacher does.

Also, I'll recommend https://www.patriciabriggs.com/articles/silver/silverbullets.shtml for an author's quest to cast silver bullets.

I know that a meter is approximately 1/millionth of the length of a Great Circle on Earth (or so I remember, I haven't checked yet).

Assuming the world was earth-like, that could help.

As for a second, no I can't think of any easily conserved phenomenon I could represent it in.

Your own height? Should get you within 1% or so. The "one 10 millionth of the way from the equator to the pole" will get you more accuracy, if your isekai destination is an actual alternate earth and not just an earth-like planet, but in that case "24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute" might get you even more precision on the time front, and then you can do either stuff with pendulums or with rotating mirrors depending on the tech level of your destination.

Not that I've spent any time thinking about this, ha ha why would I have put a lot of thought into this.

You seem unusually prone to being nerd sniped, but is that really a bad thing when the world rewards being a talented nerd so much these days? Haha

You certainly put a lot more effort into things than most posters here, myself included!

1/40,000,000 of the Great Circle (10,000 km from pole to equator through Paris set the standard, IIRC)

Aside from the obvious fraction of a day, there aren't really any easy ways of precisely rederiving the second without modern technology. If you know what a meter is and are in a 1 g gravity field, then you can build a 1 meter long pendulum which has a period of about 2.006 seconds. If you have perfect pitch, then the second is 440x the period of middle A. Other than that, you're out of luck as far as I can tell. It's not like you're going to be looking at any cesium atoms in your spare time.

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