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Units...

Silvexil 28
July 07 2005
0
Well, I've been working on a units poster for some time now... Okay, so this isn't the same as some of the blogs which are currently posted, but c'est la vie. I recall thinking how close g (= 9.80665) was to π, and only now do I learn that that is more than coincidence. When the French came up with the metre, I guess they wanted something very close to three Parisian feet, and there were at least two possibilities: 1/10 000 000 the distance from the North Pole to the Equator or the length of a pendulum which has a half period of 1 s. As it turned out, they picked the former, but as both were close appropximations to the same standard, it ended up that `≈`(sqrt(g/m), pi/s), and thus, solving for g, we get that `≈`(g, pi^2). Oh well. Seeing that this is suppose to be a math site, I would hope that MathML works: I guess I'll see once this gets posted. :-) Well, actually, looking at the preview, it seems that it doesnt even support sup or sub tags -- you can't even fake mathematics, let alone use MathML... Maybe someone will read this. :-)

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