Collaborate Disseminate
It always fascinates us that every single thing that is made had to be designed by someone. Even something as simple as a bag and box that holds cereal. Someone …read more Continue reading New Metric Prefixes get Bigger and Smaller
With the news here in Europe full of the effect of the war in Ukraine on gas supplies and consequently, prices, there it was on the radio news: a unit …read more Continue reading Just What On Earth Is A Therm?
Usually when we post a Fail Of The Week, it’s a heroic tale of a project made with the best of intentions that somehow failed to hit its mark. The …read more Continue reading Fail Of The Week: Mistaking Units for Values
He was either the smallest person who has ever lived, by an order of magnitude, or the heaviest person ever known, by two of them. Continue reading The massive coronavirus IT blunder with a funny side
We have all heard that good variable names are important for creating readable programs — advice that will serve you well when you come back to your code two years later, or even twenty. Sometimes, when you are so deep …read more
The Mars Climate Orbiter was a spacecraft launched in the closing years of the 1990s, whose job was to have been to study the Martian atmosphere and serve as a communications relay point for a series of other surface missions. It is famous not for its mission achieving these goals, but for the manner of its premature destruction as its orbital insertion brought it too close to the planet’s atmosphere and destroyed it.
The cause of the spacecraft entering the atmosphere rather than orbiting the planet was found in a subsequent investigation to be a very simple one. Simplifying matters …read more
As a Hackaday writer, you can never predict where the comments of your posts will go. Some posts seem to be ignored, while others have a good steady stream of useful feedback. But sometimes the comment threads just explode, heading off into seemingly uncharted territory only tangentially related to the original post.
Such was the case with [Steven Dufresne]’s recent post about decimal time, where the comments quickly became a heated debate about the relative merits of metric and imperial units. As I read the thread, I recalled any of the numerous and similarly tangential comments on various reddit threads …read more
Continue reading What’s So Bad about the Imperial System Anyway?
