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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 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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