Grrl Power #1115 – Now you’re… looking at portals?
Here we go with yet another year, everyone writing the wrong date on their checks. I can’t actually recall the last time I wrote a check though. Probably for some home repair. Contractors really like checks for some reason. I legitimately can’t recall the last time I used cash though. I think I’ve had the same bills in my wallet for around 7 years.
I know I complained about forgetting Varia’s accent under the last page, but when I do remember, in my head she sounds like JFK from Clone High. Only female.
“What’s-er-ah, your-ah, eer-ah, pooooint?”
Vision based on radio waves seems like it would be terrible. They’re on the opposite side of the EM spectrum from X-Rays, so logically it seems like you’d be blind if you were surrounded by dense air. Radio waves are don’t penetrate solid matter very well, but they’re fairly bouncy, so I guess RW-vision would make for fairly even “gray” vision. But it probably wouldn’t work well indoors unless you walked around with a ham radio strapped to your chest.
Fortunately, Varia got RW-vision on top of regular visible light-vision. She’s gotten pretty good at discerning peculiar powers. She has more experience with superpowers than anyone else in the world as far as anyone knows.
I know what you’re thinking, though. “Isn’t Varia the one who gets the powers?” It’s a good question. One that possibly gets asked on the next page?
The December Vote Incentive is up!
Please enjoy Cora in a workout outfit. Variant outfits and lack thereof over at Patreon, as well as a comic to put it all in context. Spoiler, Cora’s ship is like a Roman orgy most of the time.
.
.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Doormaker get!
For those wondering, the portal opens to TD Garden in Boston. Varia IS getting a power though, in this case she’s getting Clairvoyant’s ability. Doormaker has to be in physical contact with Clairvoyant in order to target the portals he makes.
Yah, I recognized TD Gahden immediately. I’ve been a Bruins fan since the late 70’s.
Be a good day to transport them to the Garden with the Bruins playing at Fenway Park.
Oh god, keep them away from anyone with bug control powers and a penchant for munchkinry
Like Spider Colony Guy? (We still don’t know his “real” powers, so he’s still “Spider Colony Guy” to me.
Spiders-Man, Spiders-Man,
does anything he wants, really, because we’re just not doing that. Nope, nope, nope!
The funny thing is there’s actually a comic book character like that. Also probably the scariest of all of Spider-Man’s villains.
Called ‘Thousand Spiders.’ AKA ‘The Thousand.’ Carl King. He literally does wear a ‘skin suit’ like Vance was claiming. :)
Also if you want to go beyond the 616 universe, there’s Spiders-Man from Earth-11580, who is a hive mind of spiders that absorbed Peter Parker’s consciousness and wears a costume to keep them all in a humanoid form.
There are a whole lot of spidersupers.
Yeah…that’s one I was referencing.
And also – *lights flamethrower* – nopenopenopenopenopenope…
Peter from 616 really lucked out from some other possible results, all things considered. :)
Wasn’t there also some tribe in naruto who had insects living in their bodys or something like that?
Dunno. Havent watched every Naruto and never read the manga.
There was a character in Rick and Morty called Million Ants though :)
No skin suit though. Somehow that makes it a lot less scary. Weird huh?
Lol nope. These guys above are WORM fans. Basically think grim derp superhero world/multiverse that’s really fun to think about sometimes. The main character has bug control powers.
bug control. he could make a fortune in software development.
Or Pest Control, imagine telling all the bugs in a building to amscray a county over and they do it ASAP.
Alas the world is written by an idiot with an anti-authority boner, so she ends up a supervillain because the world conspires to fuck her over.
Alas the above comment was written by an idiot with an anti-good writing boner, so it ended up a dismissive oversimplification
Perhaps his power is to make people believe he’s made of spiders.
What you describe reminds me of something. Many many years ago I created two original characters, for an RPG, with somewhat similar powers. One was a teleporter who had no ability to target where he was teleporting to, if he tried to teleport on his own he might end up anywhere. The other was a psychic who could find/locate anything, no matter how far away, though she wasn’t very good at finding things nearby. So they teamed up to steal things from around the world.
Portal-making vision for the win!
“Kilograms? […] Yeah man, but kilograms?” => Another answer to that could have been “I’m from one of those modern countries where they teach kids the (almost-)worldly unified, accurate and rational measurement system aka the metric system in lieu of the archaic system even the country where it was invented abandoned a long time ago… man.” :p
He might have an American accent
Britain has not abandoned the Imperial System of measurements. Well except for Fahrenheit.
They use both in the UK, Imperial for measuring large stuff (feet, miles, pints, pounds and tons) , metric for measuring small stuff (millimetres, centimetres, millilitres, milligrams and grams), and points where they’re interchangeable.
UK recognized in 1897 the metric system. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1897/jul/22/use-of-metric-weights-and-measures-in#S4V0051P0_18970722_HOL_28
The US accepted metric in the Metric Act of 1866, and the Mendenhall order of 1893. That is, before the UK. Most everyday measurement is still in US customary units (some of which follow the International Yard and Pound standard).
When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, the US desperately needed a weights and measures standard for the whole country (at the time, the states had varying standards). Jefferson, being the science guy he was, recommended the metric system that had been created in France. Unfortunately, the ship carrying the platinum meter bar and kilogram weight was captured by pirates on the way back to the US, and said bar and weight were never seen again. Trying to get another set would have taken too long, so the US went with its current kludged together system. People forget that that was our SECOND choice.
And that’s why we still do not use the metric system to this very day, we are forever barred from using the metric system until the original meter bar and kilogram are recovered and returned to us, only then shall the curse be broken and logic and reason restored. The curse worsens by the day, but only by 1/16th, hence why the country’s rampant stupidity problem seems so much worse now, the progression is too small to be noticeable over time but becomes a stark difference in hindsight.
that and the Metric system can’t get you to the moon, it’s a proven fact
yes well neither can the power of horses, no matter how many are strapped to a shuttle; still hasn’t stopped NASA from measuring the rockets that way tho
What about space unicorns?
https://youtu.be/17o1OlroNSE
Sound like a great movie idea!
In 1866, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of the metric system and almost a decade later America became one of 17 original signatory nations to the Treaty of the Meter.
recognizing and the public actually using it are two very different things
Indeed. We RECOGNIZE it, we just recognize that it’s STUPID for everyday use. Let the physicists use it.
Stupid for everyday use? The US is the only “modern” nation on the planet that still uses the antiquated US system, which BTW is not the same as the British Imperial system that I grew up with. Not using metric forces a large part of your population to learn two systems of measurement. One that makes sense and the clumsy system that uses miles, feet, gills, quarts, furlongs, and chains etc. I expect that most Americans haven’t even properly learned most of the convoluted measurements in the US system.
Truth is, nearly everything sold in the US now has both measurements printed on it. And we’ve gotten very comfortable with liters.
The really convenient part of the metric system is knowing the approximate weight of liquids without doing any calculation. A liter of water is a kilogram, or close enough.
A pint’s a poound the world around. There’s no progress between English and French Imperial units.
The joys of Good Eats
The Alton Brown TV show?
Only no it’s not – the US pint is SMALLER than the UK pint and hence a different weight…..
WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW, AMERICA!
Of course most people haven’t learned the more arcane units, since they’ve long since fallen out of common use. (Assuming they were ever widely used in the first place.) I agree that metric offers significant advantages for science, engineering and manufacturing. If nothing else, using the most widely adopted system reduces the chance of misunderstandings and confusion. But, I’m not convinced that it’s all that great for day-to-day, human scale measurements. I will concede that’s probably less of an issue if that’s what you grew up with.
And, hey, if all else fails, I have a really great unit conversion app on my phone. Just in case you ever wondered, there’s just a smidge more than eight gills in a liter. (Yes, it includes even some very obscure units.) Fun fact I discovered while doing a little quick research: the nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill” was inspired by King Charles I of England reducing the size of the jack, a unit of volume commonly used in reference to wine or whiskey, in order to collect more sales taxes. (This happened almost 400 years ago, proving shrinkflation isn’t exactly new.) Since the jill, aka the gill, was defined as two jacks, this automatically reduced the size of the jill as well. “And Jill came tumbling after”
While I’m mostly on the side of metric, I note that metric lacks any units called a slug.
I have never been able to figure out if that’s good or bad.
“ that still uses the antiquated US system”
I prefer to say we are rocking it old school style.
Almost none of the units you mention are in actual use in the United States. Short distances are measured in feet and inches, with decimal miles used for long distances. Masses are generally measured in ounces and pounds, with tons sometimes used for freight or buildings. Volume has a large number of named units, but they form a very nice powers-of-two system that’s every bit as practical as metric’s powers-of-ten system.
And for everyday use, degrees F are far more practical than degrees C: 10 degrees F = 1 change in how much clothing you need to wear to feel comfortable.
It’s no stupider than anything else.
For all nonspecific purposes, a meter is a yard, a liter is a quart, a cup is 250 ml, a tablespoon is 15 ml, a teaspoon is 5 ml, and a kilogram is 2.2 pounds. Oh, and an inch is 2.5 cm. (who cares about the .04?)
We use 2 liter and 3 liter bottles all the time. Also 750ml for booze, for who the heck knows why.
Metric is far easier to mentally figure out weight. I have to go through metric to estimate the weight of a gallon of water/gas/blood/human.
It goes like this: a gallon of milk is 4 pints is (almost) 4 liters is 4 kilograms is 8.8 pounds but round down to 8.4 pounds because a liter is over 33 ounces which is 5% more.
The internet says a gallon of water is 8.35 pounds, so we’re in the right ballpark. From five feet away, most people could not tell whether a distance was one meter or one yard, or whether an unfamiliar vessel held two liters or two quarts, so in daily use, it’s just not that important.
US liquid measures aren’t the same as UK ones. British pint is 20 fluid oz, not 16 fl oz like the US pint. Hence the mnemonic I learnt at school “litre of water’s/a pound and three-quarters/so a gallon weighs ten pounds”
Which does matter when you are ordering a beer.
So your British pint would be a half liter, then about 10% larger. A British quart would be a liter, plus 10%. Again, no real difference in estimation ability.
It’s converting back and forth that’s tricksy, and there’s not many reasons to do that.
The mnemonic I learned was “A Pint is a pound the world around” only to discover years later the Imperial Pint was 20 fl. oz. therefore 5/4 of a pound. To be fair the teacher that taught me that never left the state of Utah his entire life, so his world ended at the border with Idaho.
Why, exactly, is it “stupid for everyday use?”
Show your work.
This is just a guess but I think Richard might be meaning that the Imperial system might be easier for the average layman to intuitively grasp and visualize on a more primal level that we can approximate if there are no measurement devices. At least where distance is concerned since we have an intiitive idea of how big an average adult human foot is, even if just looking at an adult human foot… even though the human foot varies in size? Whereas meters is a more arbitrary but accurate scientific measurement… much in the same way that mL is more precise but people often use teaspoon and tablespoon and pinch and dash measurements when cooking? Or why we use horsepower as a measurement even if that originally varied horse to horse.
I think the modern ‘foot’ was originally referencing King Henry I’s booted foot (although there was another size of ‘foot’ during ancient Sumeria I think, based on a statue).
“STUPID for everyday use”
OK, first off: Why are you yelling?
Secondly, what do you even mean with stupid?
Is it too simple or too complicated for you? Usually when people call someone stupid they mean they are simple, but the usual complaint about metric is that it is too hard to use (read: unfamiliar). I can’t tell which is your position.
That said, let me try to explain how I use metric units.
When I need to measure something small a centimeter is the thickness of my thumb, and the width is 2 centimeter. My nail is about 0.5 millimeter. You might think that 0.5 is complicated, but since metric works in base ten, dividing any multiple of the base by 2 is very simple. It is only in imperial that 0.5 of something first requires figuring out which unit you should be using, looking up its base as expressed in the closest smaller unit, and then dividing that number by 2. While in metric, you can just say 0.5 and everyone will understand what you mean instantly.
Let’s compare:
0.5 meter (times base 10) = 5 decimeter (times base 10) = 50 centimeter (times base 10) = 500 millimeter.
0.5 yard (times base 3) = 1.5 feet (times base 12) = 18 inch = (times a variable base = ) unknown number of an undecided fraction of inches.
On four different levels metric has 1 base, while imperial has 2 + infinity bases.
But OK, let’s try something else: Unit conversion.
A cube of one decimeter contains one liter which weighs 1 kilogram.
A cube of one centimeter contains one milliliter which weighs one gram.
This is because going from decimeter to cubed decimeter is the base times the base times the base, i.e. 10x10x10, which is 1000. Yay! That’s easy to remember!
Now let’s try the same in imperial:
A cube of one foot contains 7.480519 US gallons, which weighs 8.33lb. Why? Nobody knows. Nothing makes sense, you just have to memorize all these numbers or do a molar weight calculation.
And if you don’t do unit division or unit conversion daily, then you don’t need units at all and you might as well measure everything in grunts and feelings.
You missed one of the important attributes: there is no ambiguity of units in the metric system. But if a can says it contains 10 oz you don’t know if that is volume or weight!
Yes, you do. Shake the can: if it sloshes, it’s volume, if it doesn’t, it’s weight.
Second off, sometimes, CAPITALS is used for EMPHASIS, not shouting
then why did you put emphasis on csapitals, but shout emphasis?
;P
In the USA only scientists and military are smart or tough enough to handle the metric system.
I think it depends on your generation.
Personally, for example, I’m a british generation X’er, and wouldn’t have a clue how much a stone, ounce or pound (of weight) is. For weight, I think in grams and kilograms (aka bags of sugar!). My satnav is set to imperial (miles and mph), but in part because that’s what our roadsigns are in still – I guess it’d be really expensive to replace all those roadsigns. Otherwise for length, I mostly think in metric and metres – but find cm really hard to estimate – inches are easier to estimate short distances in. Wouldn’t know a gallon, but I can picture a litre – that’s the volume of a cube 10x10x10cm (about 4x4x4 inches). So yes, a bit of a mix of imperial and metric, but with a lean towards metric.
I think most younger people in this country probably think in metric, and I doubt the schools even teach imperial units anymore.
Generation and location. I straddle the Boomer-Gen X divide and live in the US. I often use metric and imperial units. Carpentry is easiest in imperial but I learned to do chemistry in metric. Mechanics uses both systems, usually depending on the age of the machinery. I even have some Whitworth wrenches. When you are working on very small things decimal fractions are easier to deal with and thus metric is easier but when the tools and stock materials are in imperial fractions I keep a chart handy to convert to decimal measurements.
I can remember the US changing a lot of the road signs on the freeway to dual imperial/metric. Cost a shitton of money. Then we went around and took ‘em all down again because people found them confusing.
I have a full set of metric tools because 1) I tend to own Japanese cars and 2) I’m an engineer and the stuff I work on has overwhelmingly been metric.
A quart is a liter. A gallon is 4 liters. It’s about 5% off, but who cares. You can’t measure that by sight.
Also, a yard is about a meter. A foot is a third of that. (Off by 10%, yard is shorter.)
****
Two inches is about five centimeters. Estimate the inches, slide the decimal, cut in half.
So, six inches slides decimal and becomes 60, then halve to 30 cm.
****
For cooking, a tablespoon is 15 ml, a teaspoon is 5 ml, an ounce is 30 ml. That’s exact, for cooking.
>> So, six inches slides decimal and becomes 60, then halve to 30 cm.
Halve it twice.
6 inches –> 60 –> 30 –> 15 cm
(the ratio is 2.5 = 10 ÷ 2 ÷ 2)
Technically, it’s 2.54
Not abandoned but it’s only used for non professional purposes and even there is declining. It’s non existent in the engineering construction and manufacturing world. You’d have to go massively out of your way for decades to find things like inch only rulers or tape measures.
Interesting! Either a way out or he’s “showing her home” a handy power if you want to find out where someone is from, or if you are looking for someone. Many of the street drugs out there are sent from other countries which is why the metric system is used. A “key” of pot is a kilogram (2.2 lbs). I grew up in the Gary, Indiana area it was hard NOT to know that stuff! So she would of weighed 3080 lbs. He may of just have a locational vision rather than a portal since Varia touched him he’s “looking” at her home town. But maybe her gestalt may make it a portal. If so one quick zap from Jiggawatt on the wrist bands and they are all home free! Although not ideal since I’m sure Max and various criminal agencies will want to talk to them about why they were there etc.
There is nothing that makes metric more rational nor more accurate. Unified sure.
There is also a case to be made for metric being less rational when it comes to cooking. See, Customary (the US absolutely does NOT USE imperial. Imperial was created after the US was founded and a decision was made to stick with customary. The primary difference between customary and imperial is in measurements of volume and weight) has it’s volume measurements based on ratios. Cooking requires ratios for weights and volumes.
Metric has a lot of very not round numbers when cooking. So if you want to halve or third a recipe it’s easy. You can do it with metric sure, but if not if you’re starting with 100ml or 1000ml as your base. You have to use something t that doubles and triples to get the job done efficiently without having to carefully measure things to make sure you’re getting like say 333.333333 ml.
Btw, the US is secretly using metric for all of this. We start with 10ml on the teaspoon for a liquid ounces and everything cascades from there. A teaspoon is 5 ml, a tablespoon is 15 ml, an ounce is 30 ml, a cup is 240 ml, a pint is 480 ml, a quart is 960 ml, a gallon is 3.84 liters. These are exactly defined numbers. Go read U.S. law 21CFR101.9(b)(5)(viii) for proof.
If those ml amounts don’t jive with what you know about metric to imperial conversions that you’re used to and you’re about to scream at me that a pint is 568.261ml for example, there’s a good explanation. The explanation is that you haven’t been paying attention. 568.261 ml is the Imperial pint, not the US Customary pint. The US isn’t on Imperial, it’s on Customary… sort of. Used to be a liquid ounce was 29 point some ml, but U.S. law 21CFR101.9(b)(5)(viii) changed it ever so slightly to get America secretly (tricking Americans really) onto the Metric system for volumes.
So get this, if you have metric spoons and scoops for cooking that read 1.25ml, 2.5ml, 5ml, 15ml, 60ml, 120ml, and 250ml… Get this, you’re cooking with Customary. Joke’s on you because those are exactly quarter teaspoon, half teaspoon, teaspoon, tablespoon, quarter cup, half cup, and cup in US Customary.
I’ve heard the “metric is more accurate” claim before, but it’s absolute nonsense. It’s based on the fact that metric can just keep dividing by 1000 to get new units, but that’s not what accuracy means. Accuracy is about exactness. Except 1 inch is always 1 inch. If you have two things that are exactly an inch long, they will always be exactly the same length. So accuracy isn’t at issue here. The argument should go that Metric is finer grain.
Except metric isn’t finer grain. Inches have been decimalized for a long time. A mil (known internationally as a thou) is 0.001 inches. “A mil is as small as it goes? HAHAHA Nanometers!” Um no. You have 0.1 mil, 0.01 mil, 0.001 mil. Also I’ve seen a chart with a ridiculous number of smaller units than mils, but I can’t find it at this time and I don’t have them memorized.
All of that said, I would rather the US use metric, just to get on board with the rest of the world, but there is nothing more rational about metric other than the fact that having a single, unified, global measurement system is preferable.
I’ve also created my own system of measurement that I feel is far more rational than trying to divide the polar circumference of the Earth into a million parts and then basing all other measurements on that… That’s a fool’s errand, the Earth’s polar circumference varies from longitude to longitude, and it also varies by time of day along those longitudes thanks to tides. That doesn’t seem very rational.
Nor do any of the other measurements, like weight being based on the weight of a liter of water… at what temperature? Is it pure water because 100% pure water is too hard to come by to make that a rational basis of anything, and any impurities will skew your results and make them less accurate in that one person measuring it might have too much salt or minerals. Distilled water will get you closer but even that’s not as accurate as having absolutely pure water upon which to base the weight measurement on, but like I said pure water is hard to come by.
Note: pure water is not purified water. They’re not the same thing. purified is just water with a lot of impurities removed, but the word doesn’t mean 100% pure. If you had 100% pure water, it would absolutely cause chemical burns on your skin, it would be unsafe to drink, and if you got your hair wet with it, it would severely damage your hair. There’s nothing rational about expecting people to purify their water like that, and so that’s why the kilogram cylinder and later the kilogram sphere were created. You realize metric has become just as arbitrary as customary and imperial at this point.
Since you know where from the metric basis came, I won’t spend time on it and cut to the point: that’s exactly why the metric system is more rational than the imperial one. The metric system was based on objective references, not one varying town to town.
Modern geography tells us it is wrong to think Earth is a perfect sphere but at the time of the metric system development – 18th century – it made sense. And it’s precisely to answer such legitimate concerns the CGPM (if you don’t know what it is, it’s the organization in charge of the metric system, to make it short), since 1875, works to keep the definition in tune with our scientific knowledge. For your information, the measure of a meter is not anymore based on Earth circumference but on a constant – the speed of light in vacuum – since 1983.
As yourself admit it, imperial measures lack this objectivity: they have to rely on a metric basis to be defined because they were never thought to be defined in an objective way – unless you plan to customize human DNA so our feet are all the exact same length. :D
So yes, metric system is rational, compared to the imperial one.
Yes, you can decimalize the imperial units if you need to. But it’s not its logic (1 yard = 3 feet = 36 inches, or x = 3y and y=12z… and don’t get me started on the mile = 1760 yards?! Just where does that came from?); decimalize is metric logic (1m = 10 cm = 100 mm etc. : you always go from one to another by multiplying by 10).
So if you admit the usefulness of being able to refine to infinity your unit of measurement, why not simply use the very system based on this logic?
So yes, at its core, metric system is more accurate than the imperial one.
TL;DR: since the metric system is based on scientific method – to look after objective evidence -, it evolves with our science to give us the most precise and definable tools of measurement. So the adjectives rational and accurate are rightfully associated with it.
The mile and the yard are different levels of measurement, not related to each other.
The active measurement for intermediate distances is not the yard, but the foot. (5280 feet per mile.) No one memorizes that 1760 number. The YARD is not really used except in sports and fabric. Everything else is feet and inches.
The foot varied across time and locale. The mile also varied across time and locale. At various points, they were standardized and related to each other. Don’t try to rationalize it… it doesn’t make any more sense than the US political parties do; a haphazard collection of interests that accreted by historical accidents, then made up stories about themselves and each other.
If I recall correctly, the inch was a certain number of a certain type of seed or barleycorn, if that helps. ;)
3 feet in a yard? I see a dog escaping.
He won’t get far on three feet once he escapes the yard.
He can still outrun, you!
she has ninjas. not as many, but they will de-feet the dog.
Then the dog can just inch along
I have no idea how Pander is still able to foot the bill for her ninjas. Her income as a lawyer probably goes sole-ly into her ninja budget by now.
Presumably by hiring very cheap ninja. With proportional results.
All systems of measurement are arbitrary, some more than others. Why set the measurement for a meter based on some particular planet? And if you’re going to do that, why not set it based upon making the gravity on that planet a simple number, like 10 m/s/s, instead of 9.8 m/s/s?
Why are the weight and temperature scales based upon water, of all things? That’s so parochial it’s pathetic.
However, once they GOT those definitions, they at least went back to re-define them in terms of what we can reasonably expect are universal constants.
If I recall correctly, the term of duration, (“second”) is a certain number of vibrations of a Cesium atom at its lowest power state. Once you have time, you can use the speed of light in a vacuum to set a distance measurement. I believe it is the distance light travels in a vacuum during a certain number of vibrations of that same cesium atom at its lowest state. No sense using something different if you’ve already collected up a single cesium atom and supercooled it. After that, you can use the total mass of a certain number of those atoms to give a mass unit.
Given those things, you can look for … what is it, quasars? fast rotating stars (cepheid variables?) that have certain measured frequencies. The distance to four of them, and their current rotation speeds, tells you exactly where and when you are in the galaxy, and how fast you are moving relative to the central galactic mass and those stars. That tells you approximately where you are relative to earth, and what year it might be there.
Although, relativity being what it is, the latter is not guaranteed.
They did eventually get
If I remember correctly, once upon a time, there were all sorts of different units of measure. The English measurements were the most common (before they went with imperial to conflict with all of the former empire that did not decide to move along with their old king), but it certainly wasn’t the system most people used.
More fun, it was my impression that for a while, there were a bunch of different systems that all had a measurement of ‘a foot’, except the reference foot was different. JOY!
Everybody using one of the obscure ones were fairly delighted to have a standard they could switch to that didn’t mean they needed to give up their sovereignty. Go along with some scientist guys who *aren’t* rulers, and then we all can communicate units easier? Yes, please. Of course, different countries took different amounts of time to come to that conclusion. But sooner or later, nearly everybody saw how much better it was for everybody to agree.
Until there was basically one holdout. And it held out until 2237. WTF? Well, that was a prior run. We can do better this time, right?
It shouldn’t matter what system one uses, as long as it is consistent and not arbitrary
How much inches did you have in a mile ?
1 mille = 1760 yards
1 yard = 3 feet
1 foot = 12 inches
63 630 inches in mille ( I dare you to make it by head)
How many centimeters in a kilometer ?
its’ in name 1/100 meter and 1 000 meters
100 000 centimeters – easy to calculate by head –
It’s for convenience and ease to use
And US customary units are defined by metric units , the definition of an inch being 2.54 cm, a mile 1 609 m…
It’s since 1893 the Mendenhall Order…
It’s for accuracy if you convert one system of unit to another , you’ll be nerver accurate or you’ll use an unit in disguise – it’s the U.S case -…
It’s for inches are accurate yes but because they are concealed metric system…
And it’s not the only exemple of the US quirks and stubbornness ,like using a centimeters and pretending they are inches … The bald eagle is not an eagle it not belong to the genus aquila the genus of true eagles… it belongs to the genus haliaeetus and was called in french “pygargue à tête blanche” and “pigargo de cabeza blanca” in spanish…
You defend an outdated and convoluted system , uneasy for engineering, physics and chemistry…
It’s like defending alchemy vs chemistry or black powder vs poudre B the name of Paul Vieille invention in 1884 – smokeless powder -.
Why do you want to know how many inches are in a mile? Nobody does that in real life. And NOBODY uses yards related to miles. It’s just not a thing.
If you’re converting miles to feet, its 5280. That’s the number. Nobody memorized that 1760 number, so your example is speciously overcomplicated.
Yes, you can multiply 5280 by 12 in your head, but why would you?
The rest of your tirade is… bizarre, to say the least. Going off about bird names? The “crested tit” is not a tit either, it’s a bird. So what?
Considering that stuff means something about national character is a sign that you have spent WAY too much time obsessing about it, and should get another hobby.
Marksmen.
Marksmen know those conversions. Because every blessed one of us is trying for a 1 mile bullseye.
…I blame my stepfather, the gunner’s-mate.
Nothing compared to an Expert, of which I am, according to the DOD, (m16).
the conversion that drives everyone crazy is length cubed to straight volume. because its fairly easy to measure a diameter and a height. ok genius, how many gallons?
bridge building. lots of things are inches. then they become miles. its usually psi not psf.
any measurement system is arbitrary. it has to be. as long as the units are consistent.
I’m an engineer … and not an american one.
US customary units are defined by S.I units – aka metrics with the exception of °kelvins –
The crest is an exemple of approximation used as statement about being ignorant and proud of it…
A typical american trait…
Three exemples when you need a conversion from unit
Public engineering when you make road markings..
An exemple of everyday life with metrics superior di US customary units:
for exemple a swimming pool with a depth 1,5 m of water (approximately 5 feet)
5 m x 2,5 m = 12,5 m²
12,5 m² x 1,5 = 18,75 m²
1 cubic decimeter is 1 liter it corresponds to 1 cubic meter is 1 000 liters
You need 18 750 liters of water to fill it
For a approximately equal 15′ x 7’6″ with 5′ depth could you calculate how many gallons of water you need to fill it, by head ?
If you were an American engineer, you’d know that we use a reduced set of units for engineering work. Engineering is generally done with decimal inches for length, area, and volume, decimal pounds for mass and weight, and decimal seconds for time.
A swimming pool 180 inches long, 90 inches wide, and 60 inches deep holds 972,000 cubic inches of water.
ok, now go talk to the fire department about how long you need to borrow the hydrant to fill that pool.
Heh, no one has broached the Nautical Mile yet. My faulty recall system has it at 2000yards, which is roughly 1 degree of lattitude; which is rather useful for sailors and navigating.
yep, it was faulty… 1 NM – 1 min of latitude (1/60 th of a degree)
Metric is extremely rational.
It’s literally multiples of ten.
Any measure is accurate, as long as you’re consistent about applying it. You measure things in Uncle Buck’s One Nosehair’s, as long as you use the exact same length every time.
Moreover, metric is based on the polar circumference of the planet we all happen to live on. It was a very, VERY minor mathematical error that resulted in the metric distance being 40,008 km, instead of 40,000km, and it just wasn’t worth redoing every damn thing for a margin of some .005%. The meter itself was derived from this math, and was settled on as the base unit because it’s a practical length that is something the average human can both comprehend and encompass themselves.
The length opened the door for volume, which in turn actually provided the framework for heat.
The only place the French dropped the bloody ball…was on the question of time. Have you ever wondered why metric is all multiples of ten…except for time, which is all #$&!@% base _60_?
That, you can thank the Babylonians for. They developed timekeeping based on the number of human heartbeats in a day, while measured against what they pictured as the Sun traveling in a 360-degree path around the earth.
…in any case, that system was inherited by the bloody world, and as a result, was utterly entrenched. The French decided to leave it be, instead of creating a new system that actually fit with the otherwise lovely and orderly base 10 metric system they’d pulled together.
*wanders off muttering angrily at the ghosts of dead Frenchmen*
as stated above we no longer use the earth for a meter. its the distance a specific frequency of light takes to travers a vacuum in a stupidly short amount of time. this means that a lab over a certain level can actually certify its own instruments. last I heard the Kilogram is the only physical arbitrary unit left. (platinum iridium cylinder in France) there is a move afoot to replace it with some fundamental thing. especially since it appears that the Official Kilogram has lost mass. (insert diet jokes here)
note- I made the mistake of reading about metrology at one point (science of measuring things. not weather) those people take pedantic to a whole new level. don’t go there.
The thing about time is that you can’t consistently use multiples of 10 anyway, because you have the fundamental units of day and year with a ratio of 365,24. Both are too important to overwrite because they have actual, relevant consequences by which we structure our lives(year is probably less important now that few people farm, but the cycle of weather still has relevant impact, and by the time the metric system was designed, most people were farmers), whereas all other measurements have no “natural unit” that’s practically relevant, so if your unit doesn’t have a meaning anyway, you might as well make it convenient to measure.
“No natural unit,” my augmented ass.
How about, “the time needed to boil one cc of water?”
Boom! Derived from the existing metric measurements, and perfectly useful at the human scale.
At what elevation?
Sea level, obviously.
You adjust from there.
Yes, I’m familiar with Denver cooking.
Sea level is subjective. What is the barometric pressure of the air where you are boiling the water?
Sea level is subjective. Just imagining a cookbook where part of the directions might be ‘wait for the tidal wave, but finish before the tsunami’
“Sea level is subjective,” might just be right up there with “tide goes out, tide comes in, you can’t explain that…”
Pressure is derived from time, so you can’t use it to define time.
Denver Pyle? Or John Denver? :P
Sea Level?
Sea level on the French side of the straits of Dover is 4 feet higher than on the English side, due to water sloshing as it goes around the bend….
Sea level between the Pacific and Atlantic sides of the Panama Canal has a 20ft difference.
> the time needed to boil one cc of water?
What’s that supposed to mean? Wouldn’t that time depend on how you’re heating it?
Also you’re missing the point entirely, which was that time already has units that are and will be used. You’re not getting past day and year, because that’s what we’re already scheduling by due to compelling practical reasons.
I said that other units have no natural units – maybe some that would be nice and practical, but none whose absence would be problematic.
*slow, long-suffering sigh with nose-bridge pinch*
…the length of time needed to boil off one cc of water, which in the context of the conversation is clearly a reference to the amount of heat needed to do the job, which is where we get the measurement for calories.
In other words, have the appropriate lab use the appropriate tools to replicate the method used to make the initial determination, and use that to set the new metric time standard. Call the base unit “chrons,” and then apply the appropriate prefixes.
Done.
The amount of heat necessary to boil one cc of water is fixed (for a given atmospheric pressure), but the amount of time to do so is not, and thus any determination would be arbitrary, rather than having any relation to any other units or standards.
Heat and time are entirely different quantities, you simply can’t define time with just a reference to heat.
What you describe not a natural unit of heat*. You can use it and it has some practical convenience**, but you’re not missing anything if you don’t. It’s not something you’re already automatically measuring in and will continue to for practical reasons.
Joule is the better metric unit for energy (which heat is), because you can derive it from existing measurements without needing to measure anything, which also makes it convenient for unit conversion.
*Neither is the calorie, which is about heating (by 1K), not vaporization.
**Not that much: You rarely want to fuly vaporize water, and if you want to boil water, you need to get it to 100°C from the starting temperature, which is variable.
as a English man we still use miles lbs etc…
do you use kpsi? they are fun!
2 points, that are going to get drowned out. 1: The “Murican” system is as accurate or precise as the metric system. The conversions are less intuitive, but rigorous measurement only requires standardized units and precision, not base 10 units. 2: Those who say “kilogram is mass” and “pounds are only weight” are ignoring the ability to use a given weight (at sea level, average sea level, in Earth’s gravity, at the equator, away from a local mass concentration, etc.*) as a given mass. The user and the recipient need to be aware of the standard used and the intent, but that’s it.
* more details: at Earth’s rotation speed (equator was mentioned earlier) as adjusted by Earth’s orbital speed and the Sun’s orbital speed around the galaxy, and within the Earth’s frame-dragging referent,…
In 1866, the U.S. Congress authorised the use of the metric system and almost a decade later America became one of 17 original signatory nations to the Treaty of the Meter. A more modern system was approved in 1960 and is commonly known as SI or the International System of Units.
So officially America has been using it like all the sane countries in the world, though there are very few nations in the world that use the Fahrenheit unit of temperature. The countries and territories that use the Fahrenheit scale are the United States, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, Liberia, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands. So basically out of 195 countries, only 3.58974359% of the world
I got nothing
Okay, that could work… if it’s a portal one can travel and not just look through
Think i called it on the portals.
lets get a word from Chell on portals. she’s an expert.
Chell is not very big on “words.” :)
but she is into cake!
well, let her out of the cake before you cut it, and don’t put her in before you bake it!
Radio-wave vision? Or Sonic vision?
EverQuest II has Sonic Vision, haven’t used it in years, but believe the Kerra (giant biped kitties) have it, and it turns the screen yellow (can’t remember what it’s suppose to show, ultra vision turns the screen purple)
The imperial system was designed by people who only knew how to divide by 2 and is currently used by a people who only know how to do math using common core. Hey, what’s “I’m freezing my balls off” in Fahrenheit again?
“I’m freezing my balls off” is about 0-10. “It’s hot as balls” is about 90-100.
Freezing is 0 C = 32 F, but !00 C is 212 F “hot as balls” isn’t that high, it’s 40 – 50 C. 50 C = 106 F. The factory I worked at bought many of it’s machines from other countries I HAD to know that stuff… Pain in the neck but it was part of the job.
Different from person to person last week for me it was 18 degrees F, or ten degrees who can’t manage 9/5s (or 5/9s if you’re going the other direction)
Don’t forget to subtract 32 first when converting.
C = 5*(F-32)/9
F = 9*C/5 + 32
So 18 F ~= -8 C
The Imperial system was used by the same people who brought you Calculus in the 1670’s, Newton’s theory of gravity in the 1680’s, Galileo’s measurement of air pressure (and a few other minor discoveries ;) ) in the 1640’s and the Sistine chapel in the 1470’s, all of those long before the metric system was put forward in France in the 1790’s.
Dunning a system that was in use long before the one you ‘grew up with’ is hardly indicitive of any experience with it.
I was born long before the metric system was introduced as legislation here around 1970 and watched it’s demise as an enforceable standard in 1985. We use both, and have the choice to use whichever we prefer. I buy milk and gas in litres, meat by either the kilo or the pound, and a 2×4 is exactly that…3.5″ x 1.5″ ;)
I can measure distances in metres, yeards or arshins, I’m not restricted to only being able to divide by ten, I can work in millimetres or 32ths of an inch, I can use radians or degrees on a map, remember those ? they were what we had before gps.
To minimize the way others measure anything is to admit that you don’t have the capacity to use more than one system and is indicitive of the ‘I don’t have to learn anything because knowing stuff is racist/sexist/somethingphobic/pick a new reason mindset of today. This generation brags aboiut being able to use their phones to blindly quote what someone else wrote and managed to get to the top of the search engine list instead of learning things for themselves but forget who built the phones to begin with.
/rant off
Honestly, Fahrenheit is pretty unintuitive, just think of it as % hot.
So, 50°F is kinda warm-ish (50% hot), and 95°F is hot, and 120°F is OMG I’m going to die it’s so hot out.
Since, freeze your balls off cold is subjective, the simplest answer is anything below 0°F.
Personally, °C is much worse, (when used for human comfort level)
The difference between my heater running and my AC running is like, 2 degrees, so, you have to always know the exact degree, rather than just know, well, it’ll be in the 30s today. But, that’s just my personal opinion.
*ahem*
30 is Hot,
20 is Nice,
10 is Cold,
0 is Ice.
You’re all welcome.
An old science joke, regarding the human perspective of temperature scales:
0 degrees F – Cold 100 degrees F – Hot
0 degrees C – Cold 100 degrees C – Dead
0 degrees K – Dead 100 degrees K – Dead
[And yes, I know “degrees K” is improper, but it doesn’t disrupt the pattern]
Yes, but in Fahrenheit 69 degrees is nice.
You mean “noice.”
Or Nicccccccccccccce.
Well, yeah. That *is* the joke :-P
But it’s also a genuinely useful mnemonic if you’re from a metric-using country and visiting the US.
comfortable. 69-70 F is about where walking outside in the same clothes you’re wearing indoors is comfortable. That it happens to line up with an internet meme just makes it easier to remember.
Funnily, I write one check a month, it’s for my rent. I also have to use a voided check once a year for my direct deposit option at work. Cash, though I use quite a lot. While my bills (except for rent) are handled automatically, and a lot of purchases are through my debit card, there are a number of things that are “cash only.” Things like if I want to buy a lottery ticket, leave a tip, do my laundry at the local laundromat, and sometimes, when the damn credit card machines go off-line.
Country got rid of cheque books years back, they are still working on removing physical cash as well
Which is stupid as all living fuck. You just have to look at what happened in Canada when Rogers’ network crapped out. Half the country couldn’t do ANY banking cause of all the cashless morons, both business and customers. Relying on digital for everything means you have sweet fuck all when the network crashes, or the power goes out.
Never mind it lets gov and banks track everything you do. And sell your info to advertisers.
I don’t imagine many banks are going to want to do any banking these days without power or a network connection.
I carry cash, but hardly ever use it. It’s just a hassle for everyone.
If the power is out (and they don’t have a backup generator) then most businesses won’t be open anyways.
Many large businesses should have a backup internet connection (should being the key word), so, the chances of a major internet interruption is quite low, and, with the increased digitalized POS cash registers and such, they may not be able to operate without an internet connection anyways.
Basically, it’s to the point where you probably couldn’t use cash in those situations either.
I smell paranoia…
Floridians carry cash for use because of hurricanes. The banks will freeze your accounts if you use the card too far from home and if you use a regional bank it may be closed because of the reason you evacuated, sometimes for months. With no cash you would have no way to even buy food while you sleep in your car because the hotels won’t let you book a room without a card for the deposit. With natural disasters on the rise there is an even greater reason to carry a physical currency. Besides all of that, with a physical currency if someone wants to rob me they have to do it face to face, and I will at least make them work for it.
Professional trucker here.
I use my card while traveling literally a thousand miles in a day.
In my nearly 20 year career, I’ve had my card frozen exactly once, and that’s because it was being used in _France_, less than a hour after I used it in Miami.
Frankly, I’m more inclined to avoid businesses that abandon cash because they’re specifically excluding the homeless & poor, who usually don’t have bank accounts, what with the not having an address thing.
Good point!
Mine has been frozen whenever I leave the state, and also when someone once tried to use it for buying stuff at a hardware store in France. I don’t leave the state very often and that is probably why it was frozen.
I was shopping online buying house hold items and food for a pickup order and went over $200 and they froze my card. Really pissed me off they didn’t tell me. I was at checkout with a few items the next day and couldn’t pay for it, the bank don’t like me so much after I got off the phone…
I carry bluebacks in case the Snake Pliskin dystopia ever occurs and I need to bribe someone to escape from either New York or LA.
one of the main reasons was because negative interest rates could have some interesting properties in certain semi stagnant economies.
Who you calling stagnant? o_O
What interest rates? Cheques are connected to your bank account, that’s why they can ‘bounce’ after you get them, whereas a credit uses someone else’s money (you just have to pay it back them back, personally close to reaching the point where they start paying me :) )
this was pre-pandemic. when some places were using zero rates to encourage growth. the negative rates were to encourage spending.
Given that you reminded me that radio waves a very bouncy, wouldn’t that allow you to “see” around corners better then light vision? Or rather, better then you would then with JUST light vision.
Not really, because most surfaces just scatter and not reflect. You might get a somewhat better feel of what passive light comes around the corner, but it won’t really tell you more than moving shadows.
It would also be REALLY weird. If you could see around corners by the bounce, the ‘bounce’ would look like the corridor is longer in a straight line of multiple angles becoming a ‘straight line’. It would look pretty weird to be looking down a corridor and see a corner and a wall and also the corridor extending straight off ahead of you smoothly…
Radio wave vision would work anywhere you can get radio or TV reception, and maybe some other areas. Most things would be translucent, it would be like a world made of glass. As with any alternative to visible light, “colors” would bare no resemblance to their visible light equivalent. For example, tree leaves are white in infrared, but a green shirt might be black or transparent.
The biggest problem would be the wavelength of light. A 1 megahertz radio wave (mid-AM band) has a wavelength of 299.79 meters (983.6 ft). So at that “color” of light you would not be able to focus on anything smaller than that! UHF waves are around one meter, and are considered microwaves. Infrared starts at around 1mm, so the shortest microwaves might be visible.
on the other hand, things that interfere with radio waves would look…black-hole-ish? So, for example, I imagine you’d be able to “see” things buried power lines by the way they disrupt radio waves.
If it was blocking radio waves, it would look dark or opaque. If it was interfering by making its own waves on the same frequency, it would look bright.
“Vision based on radio waves seems like it would be terrible. They’re on the opposite side of the EM spectrum from X-Rays, so logically it seems like you’d be blind if you were surrounded by dense air. Radio waves are don’t penetrate solid matter very well, but they’re fairly bouncy, so I guess RW-vision would make for fairly even “gray” vision.”
Actually, it’s the other way around. Longer wavelengths are more penetrative than short wavelengths because their attenuation is so much lower.
A radio aerial is the equivalent of a single rod in your eye. You’d need a field with hundreds or thousands of such receivers to be able to discern any kind of an image.
For example, radio astronomers can see a lot more of the stuff in space than their optical colleagues due to this very reason.
“But it probably wouldn’t work well indoors unless you walked around with a ham radio strapped to your chest.”
How would that even help? That’d be like strapping a video camera to your chest and expecting to be able to see in the dark. You’d be better off with an emitter (e.g. a torch), than a receiver.
It would work by throwing out strong radio waves …rather like a torch, genius.
A great example of this is the VLF radio capabilities of nuclear submarines. https://nuke.fas.org/guide/usa/c3i/vlf.htm
A ham radio is an emitter, as well as a receiver. But some kind of radio “torch” would presumably be better, because a ham radio doesn’t passively emit a signal.
just imagining a ham radio made to look like a can of spam…but it would probably only pick up advertisements.
The world is filled with radio waves, and they go through almost everything. You’d need a Faraday cage in order to be in the dark. Of course, “radio waves” covers a very large part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Characteristics vary greatly depending on frequency.
They’re going to escape to Boston… well… at least it’s not Detroit. (That looks a lot like like the TD Garden)
I haven’t been to Boston since Spiro Agnew was still Veep, but when I went there I saw the New England Whalers playing in Boston Garden. Is TD Garden the new building, or just the new name?
I had occasion to write a check yesterday morning on 1/1. Wrote out all the other fields, went to write the date, got it wrong. Had to start over on a new one.
And yeah, I rarely write checks, so just my luck.
If she got the power to grant powers that is glorious!
And of course awakens the possibility of getting the ability to permanently grant powers.
Which makes me wonder, Max is exceptionally strong But she seems to have gone through the normal Super process. Does this mean others in the same neighborhood of capability or even greater might awaken?
And possibly in different dimensions than punching, flying and blasting. Max tier power granting. Max tier forcefield generation. Max tier portal creation. Max tier matter generation. Max tier power boosting. Max tier mind control.
Did you forget the Sandman already?
How many prisoners are there in that facility?
20? 200?
What’s with the bandages? Seems excessive if it’s only for blood ‘donations’.
I’m guessing they are experimental subjects. The actual experiment hasn’t been identified yet but they all have bandages and wrist bands in the same places. That suggests that they have all been exposed to the same experimental condition and are being monitored for results. We don’t know how many prisoners yet as there may be more cell blocks but it is interesting that the cells shown would probably be temporary holding cells. We haven’t seen any toilets or sources of drinking water. The bad guys might not care about their prisoners having to use the toilet in mixed company but it is a hassle to clean up the mess when no toilet is available. Those bandages may be covering inoculation sites and the prisoners are incubating something particularly nasty
radio wave vision. as long as she doesn’t also broadcast (or the person she’s touching) the ‘colors’ and the shapes would be weird. but the big thing is the illumination. the waves bounce more than visible light does. so its similar to shining a bright light onto a wall painted white- the room gets a soft light as the reflected light is very diffuse. only now- any open window, crack, etc is shining ‘light’ hmmm… not terribly useful in this context, but there are applications. I kind of doubt she’d be able to ‘read’ the waves as the frequency or amplitude modulations would be very fast and our vision processing isn’t made to do that..
Wait a tick…
Panel 6, third to last…
Are the bandages missing from the prisoner’s upper right arm?
They all got bandages specifically in that location. Wonder what’s up with that.
Well they are all on a bicep and blood work has been at the elbow when I have been in hospitals. So I assumed it was where they implanted the explosives to kill the prisoners if they escaped. Major blood vessels and hidden under muscle.
They may put in a chip to make ID-ing each “guest” easier. Like the pellet my wife’s dog has since tags can get lost or broken. If I was going to put a kill bomb in someone it would be in the neck or chest a bomb in the arm isn’t going to be a quick kill more like a “gotcha last” kinda thing.
Yes, in Panel 6, Osmium Facts Guy (not Sydney’s Random Facts soulmate, but possibly a classmate) is missing the bandage that he has in Panel 3. Minor oops on DaveB’s part, but as a likely location for the remote triggered cyanide/chloride trifluoride/nanoexplosive capsule to be implanted, that seems legit.
That’s kilo-osmium guy, his bandage was still there in the panel above it…
Yes I think that DaveB forgot to add the bandage in the third to last panel on that guy since he had it on a few panels before that.
So this guy is a super, but did not know it? Or is Varia’s new power, “Grant super powers to people I touch”?
DaveB said we might get that question answered next page
NO, he said it would get ASKED…
You have lived up to your name, sir.
Is it me or are her eyes crossing in panel 4? looks weird.
Just you, it’s the angle, can’t see all of the whites of her eyes, specifically her right eye
Nobody seems to have commented on what Varia’s eyes seem to be doing in the last panel.
Namely that they appear to have gone completely white, which is often indicative of physical blindness.
Hint, hint.
Fairly sure she is looking towards the portal, at least, that’s what it looked like to me: her eyes contracted to points as she’s looking towards the portal without turning fully around
Typically, blindness is indicated by a white filter over the eyes (can still see the colour of the eyes, but it’s milky), not completely white (unless you are Storm when she activates her powers)
The difference between breaking open a cell with alarms going off and getting out of a jail with lots of guards and super powered criminals is a far different story.
Best to check for perks before ringing the alarm to see what you have to work with.
Not everything reflects radio waves the same so it could appear as colorful as light
Re: Preferring checks over debit or credit cards. The owner of a local model train store explained to me once why he only took cash or checks, no electronic payments. It seems that if he got a bad credit or debit card payment he was only able to sue for the actual lost amount. If somebody bounced a check OTOH, under Texas state law he could recover 3X the amount in damages.
I had the conversation with my local hobby shop guy (also in Texas). He would take credit cards since the card company would usually guarantee payment but not debit cards. This is probably true for a lot of small businesses.
After the credit-crash of the 00’s it is VERY hard to use a debt card if you don’t have the funds, they may cover it and charge the user a fee for the over-draft, depends on the bank’s rules, sounds like to me it was an excuse to triple the income from a banking law. Plus after that mess it is VERY hard to get any kind of card reader for small business through their bank. Plus there’s a charge for processing any card purchases so it’s just a convenience for the shop own to not bother really.
Yeah, can’t use a debit card if there is no money in the account
A debit card works like a cheque, except you know straight away if there is any money or not
Some businesses only take cash so they dont have to deal with the interchange rate fee (I think its still 2% for credit cards right?)
The ‘fee’ for credit card use is highly variable between cards. Those cards with all the perks? They charge the highest fees to use them… and the fee is applied to the store, not the consumer, so there’s no incentive for the consumer NOT to use those cards.
The fee is usually a fixed amount (say, 25 cents), plus a %. The place I bought my comics at basically broke even at a $5 sale, anything below that bought with a credit card and he lost money on the sale.
If you go overseas, I believe the fee is basically a few cents a transaction, and fixed. The credit card companies spend a LOT of money howling that they not be so restricted, backed up by both the banks and the credit unions (who are traditionally big enemies), because those fees are a huge source of revenue for them (typically split between the credit card processor and the bank behind it).
Credit cards in the US are basically a scam and a weight that falls on businesses. Just remember that if you’re buying something worth 5 bucks or less, the place selling it is probably losing money because of your card. If it was in Canada or Europe, it would be meaningless, because the fees are regulated to actual cost.
I just remember during my Commercial Paper classes during law school that it was roughly around 2% for credit cards (less for debit cards because they are more like checks in how the fee structure works).
I havent actually done much with this knowledge as an attorney, funny enough. But I remember my professor saying the same thing as you said in your last couple of sentences. :)
I still use cash for small purchases.
don’t think ill ever get over the mental block of putting a 1.25 charge on a credit card for refilling my travel cup in the morning. just cant do it.
Up until 2017 my wife and I lived in Muncie, IND. It’s not as bad as some cities but we’re older and both disabled so it was a VERY bad idea to carry cash, I had the same $5 in my wallet for 4 years! LOL. I did use the pre-paid credit card on occasion, when you’re on a fixed income sometimes it’s a “must have”. Only nice thing about having to use a cane(s) is you always have a weapon. Here’s a tip though, Don’t use a black one, cops tend to think it’s a gun after dark. Well, in certain cities anyway.
Sounds like the cops in certain cities are morons who should not be allowed out when the street lights come on
How the haels can you mistake a cane for a gun? o_O
‘How the haels can you mistake a cane for a gun? o_O’
training. constant expensive training.
What modern gun looks like a gun?
Most guns, Guest, do in fact look strikingly like guns. -_-
Damint! Second ‘gun’ meant to be ‘cane’ :(
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0c/Eriegun1.jpg
https://www.farmshow.com/images/articles/36/2/5442_l.jpg
I want that first one. :)
I don’t even need a cane. I just want it.
in the united states, I’d recommend against it. see rigorous and expensive training to see everything as a threat….
I still want one. :)
You’d need a barrel end cover or the barrel would get either bent or fill up with dirt and it wouldn’t feel good when the barrel exploded, and yes I like the first one too! The second time I was harassed the cop unscrewed the grip to see if it was a sword cane… I’ve seen those, the tube is double that size! (grumbling….. )
No clue, but it happened twice. Wasn’t the same cop and both were under 30 so a newb thing? It was in the dead of winter, after dark, and a 1/4 mile walk to the bus station. I was wrapped up like a mummy so I doubt they could see my face well. just checked my cane, padded me down and left me there. After checking my pipe tobacco to see if was in fact tobacco. We were living in the downtown area near the police station and the court house so…?
I mainly only use cash for garage sales and sometimes gasoline. I’ve gotten really spoiled with using my phone to pay for stuff.:)
is that a call option?
Feels like a bad time to be testing
“Oh this one make me emit a 600 dB track of biebers “baby baby” oh… you are all dead…”
“Oh this one makes me emit gamma rays”
I wonder what’d happen with Varia dancing Mambo no. 5 in a mosh pit
Didn’t we see her club outfit?
Skin tight full body spandex.
They have a “purge System” installed in the cell.
3 guesses what happens to the occupants of said cells when they are being purged.
So everything she does, only increases their chances of survival.
maybe the power is to give another person a power? or share the power like with Sydney.
My guess is he has the ability to see where someone is from. Her power is to open a portal to that location he senses through his eyes.
Butts, is it a portal? Or just a window?
That might be a very oddly specific power.
What if the power is “portal to a place in sight”
And the other person has the power of “claravoiance, limited to the place of your birth” So, he can always see that spot. And then it went slightly strange because it’s seeing HER origin spot because powers can’t tell one from the other.
…
… actually, taking into account the superion field… okay, I need to make a new post for this…
“Sweet, got an S rank on the 10 pull.”
Gacha
The main problem with radio vision is wavelength. Shortest radio waves are about 1mm, so human eyes do *not* make good cameras. Longer ones can be in multiple meters.
We know that Varia gives the person she touches immunity to the power she gains, but doesn’t give powers from when she saved Arianna from a fiery death.
Celsius isn’t any more or less sensible than Fahrenheit; they’re both completely arbitrary. Kelvin is slightly better, but somewhat unweildy. The metric system is better than imperial, but the base units are also arbitrary. The most sensible system from a scientific point of view would be where the base units are such that the speed of light, the gravitational constant and Planck’s constant are all equal to one, but that ends up being orders of magnitude more unweildy than using Kelvin for temerature.
Yes they are both arbitrary, but Celsius is less so. Fahrenheit is based on complete accident, and has no rational basis, it’s just the result of the particular thermometer that Fahrenheit made and standardized.
Celsius, however, is arbitrary in the sense that a scientist arbitrarily selected planetary constants to use for calibrating his scale… things that covered a wide range of expected phenomena. The freezing and boiling points of water, which in an adulterated state is one of the most common molecules on the planet, necessary for our particular type of life, are reasonable standards that nearly anyone could calculate or calibrate to. (Then you have to figure in altitude and air pressure, because life, ya know.)
I was under the impression that both Farenheit and Celsius were based on the boiling point of water, Gabriel Farenheit used the freezing and boiling point of an ice-salt mixture for some reason. It was very intentional, not a ‘complete accident.’ It had to do with the divisibility of 64 or something overly and unnecessarily complicated like that.
Not entirely correct. She gives immunity to SIMILAR POWERS to those she touches… so she does, in fact, give powers. Arianna survived the flames of another super because she got immunity to the flames she gave Varia, and it worked perfectly well against a similar attack.
Huh. There’s something you don’t see every day. Unless you live or work near the stadium, anyhow.
Metric guy was bitten by a radioactive pedant.
Pander is the She-Hulk?!
I wouldn’t let someone else trademark my pseudonym if I was. :)
we look forward to the strength of your arguments.
I’m not sending a ninja hit squad over that one because of how subtle it was.
I doubt it because the punsters of the world are not smashed.
We are, it’s just Johnny Walker that did it.
I don’t know if this has been asked before, but what happens if/when Varia makes contact with two or more people? Is there a combined result, a left-half-right-half situation or a wholly different third outcome?
I doubt if the universe could survive the third one. Just on the team, say eight people, she’d have to remember 56 different combo powers. By the time it included support staff, she’d have thousands of combos. Most importantly, that would have been introduced very early on. When she was dancing, she only contacted one person at a time.
It is a good question whether it is winner-take-all or both or combo or what when she contacts two people. The important thing to test with innocuous powers is whether both get immunity to each other’s power effects. If not, then that could get ugly.
Did Varia gain the Power, to grant someone a power?
That’s what it seemed to me.
It seems like her gestalt triggered his power in a new way. Instead of him alone seeing that everyone could.
Indeed water and wet air are more-or-less opaque to the other not quite end from x-rays, namely far infrared. And while the heroine is doing what she is doing, someone may wonder why some guards got cut in half.
Fahrenheit based his temperature on two natural points, one of which the temperature at which a specific mixture freezes and the other was an estimate of the average human body temperature, called 90 degrees. (Yes, the original scale had different size Fahrenheit degrees than ours does.)
On the other hand, Anders Celsius did invent his Celsius temperature scale, in which water boils at 0 and freezes at 100, which is kind of useless in statistical mechanics.
In addition to this, in the 19th century Congress adopted legal definitions for the volt, the ampere, and the ohm, based on best scientific advice. Science was imprecise. As standards were made more accurate, if you put one legal volt across one legal ohm, you did not get one legal ampere of current, you got something else. Congress had repealed Ohm’s law.
Hah. Jiggawatt can ARC-weld those bars. *snicker*
More like a plasma ARC-cutter heh. ARC-welder is joining metal not cutting.
So do Jiggawatt’s powers confer resistance to sparks and radiant heat? it’s all well and good to be a human plasma cutter but a hot spark down the back of your shirt is pretty uncomfortable. It would be cool if she could spot weld metal by pinching it between her thumb and finger.
During my time as factory mechanic, I used many of the common welding techniques like spot welding, stinger(rod), MIG and TIG. She could if she was strong enough to clamp the surfaces together enough. She can control the voltage and type, amperage, and frequency of the arc. AC current is harder to control where DC allows for finer control and the direction of the heat. Also static electricity, a.k.a. lightning, which is more about voltage than amperage. Which is why it stings when you touch a door knob on a dry day, rather than you hand bursting into flame every time.
So we’ve gone from arguing the differences between radar and sonar to calculating the mass/density of osmium. Is this a cage full of nerds? Too bad Sydney isn’t here; she’d be right at home. :)
Varia’s powers from some points of view should be impossible.
Lets take the superion field into acount here, shall we?
All powers come from interaction of the encoded human genome with the encoded field. She’s not shifting her genetics, or the person she’s touching. So she’s not shifting at that level.
Her power is thus a META power from the pov of the superion field (and not a meta power from the point of view of interacting with other powers, as we were told the power to shut off powers is impossible in this world (Though, really it would only take genetic tinkering, a really alien geneticist could probably strip the earth of supers in only one generation) and thus powers interacting with other powers is probably also a no) in that it changes how the encoding she has, and thus the powers she gets is viewed from the field.
Lots of times, completely useless or random.
Other times it is related to or might even be useful to if the super she touched had it as an ability in addition to existing ones.
At best her power shows what one step of evolution of the power of a super would produce.
Lets hop characters a moment over to .. what’s her name? Pixel? The one who sees the universe as code and can interact with it?
She can make very small changes to things and does a lot of checking before doing any of them, because she’s nearly destroyed the universe with paradox before.
So, what’s the junction of the two?
Arbitrary code execution.
Varia’s power isn’t random.
She inserts arbitrary code into the operating system of the universe based on the DNA of who she is touching.
It normally results in random junk. Bad code. Strange powers. Small Glitches.
When the person she’s touching is a super, those bits are already interfacing well with the superion field code. When the random insert goes well, she’s accessing a powerup that was never unlocked on that person. When it goes bad, she missed.
But that’s just a theory… a wild fan theory, thanks for reading.
“Bouncy” does not matter too much in vision; the image will be garbled but differently at different points of the spectrum, and grey matter is good at postprocessing. Even at adapting – there were test with all kinds of distortion lenses, and people adapted within the week. (The experiments I’m aware of had relatively simple distortions, such as inverting the image bottom-up, and sorting out color bands is a different kind of adoption. Still, I’d expect adaptation.)
Is anyone else concerned about the (biometric?) wristbands all the prisoners are wearing?
Also, I would like to remind everyone dunking on the U.S. system of measurement, NASA put men on the moon using feet and ounces. It wasn’t until they switched to metric that they drove a Mars lander into the dirt like Atlas spiking a football.
Fuck the wristbands, most of us are concerned about the matching bandages on all the right arms
Oh yes. I’m wondering if it’s similar to the cocktail bracelet used in the restaurant showdown to tranquilize downed bad guys, but a LOT less friendly. Hopefully, our team will consider this before porting folks out of the allowed GPS area.
NASA used feet and ounces while putting men on the moon, yes, but it’s more accurate to say that they put men on the moon USING metric considering that’s what the computers used.
There was a time where one of the scientist had used the both the imperial and metric units while calculating a landers point of contact, the result was the lander didn’t land, it buried! Whelp, that was a billion lost to an OOOPS!
Uh yeah, [I check my original post] I mentioned that. The fun thing about metric is that it’s based on water. 1 liter of water weighs 1 kilogram and so on. It makes conversion easier. I would also like to point out (regarding NASA) is that smart and stupid are not mutually exclusive. Besides, I got .04 grams of silver (about a nickel) that says, when the last surviving dozen or humans are picked up by aliens for their Museum of Idiocy, them thar aliens will be laughing their posteriors off regarding all our measurements for not taking into account fifth dimensional decay.
Being a Genius, I can attest to that, occasion.
what? only 5 dimensions? gads, what a backwater universe! You need at least 8! And Time doesn’t count, it’s a measurement!!
They never said there was only five dimensions, just that the hyu-mons hadn’t taken into consideration the fifth decay