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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Then they took the planes apart and copied them as closely as possible.

    Which was tricky given imperial vs. metric supply chains/production capabilities:

    The Soviet Union used the metric system and so sheet aluminium in thicknesses matching the B-29’s U.S. customary measurements was unavailable. The corresponding metric-gauge metal was of different thicknesses. Alloys and other materials new to the Soviet Union had to be brought into production. Extensive re-engineering had to take place to compensate for the differences, and Soviet official strength margins had to be decreased to avoid further redesign.[11] Despite those challenges, the prototype Tu-4 weighed only 340 kg (750 lb) more than the B-29, a difference of less than 1%.[12]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4






  • I have one, it’s been great.

    That said, “exactly what the problem is” isn’t always the same as telling you the solution. I had a “misfire on cyl #3” error or something like that, which can be a number of things. Replacing all the coils and plugs myself was probably still cheaper than taking it to the shop though!







  • Prescriptive vs. descriptive is different in colloquial language than in science.

    If my data logger captures 1kB/km, how many bytes/meter is that? In every other quantitative unit I can think of, the k should cancel out; but if you want computers to be special, that’s your preference.

    Metric sucks. Powers of ten are arbitrary, a fluke of biology. Powers of two are the only sensible way to make a system of measurements.

    Then why are you trying to shoehorn binary into decimal? As in: why are you using decimal prefixes in the first place? Answer is probably that most people have intuition behind powers of ten. You can easily express in log2-bytes instead (a GiB is 30, a TiB is 33…etc.). Be the change you want to see!

    I’m born and raised in the USA, and while imperial units can be handy for a few every day tasks, there’s a reason why the sciences in the US tend to use metric.

    Regarding cooking, I’ll stick to metric, measured by weight. I can double, halve, or multiply my recipe by pi, and all I have to do is look for a different number on my scale.