Friday, May 12, 2006

Unit conversion

I had a great performance during a meeting today in which I showed how incredibly rusty my unit conversion skills are... Yuck. You know that feeling of "I used to be able to do that!" as one is put on the spot and flubs things? That's what I had today. It's a great way to make a positive impression. (I also showed my equally impressive inability to add and subtract exponents when multiplying powers of ten. I am awesome!) I've been concentrating on symbols for too many years... I can't do the easy stuff anymore.

Anyway, I was looking up the wikipedia entry for Joule just to refresh a couple things in my mind. Among the conversion factors (a list of what a joule is approximately equal to), I found the following statement:

1/100th of the energy a person can get by drinking a single droplet of beer


There is has got to be a good Phys 103 (Order-of-Magnitude physics) question in there somewhere. Maybe something along the lines of "How many joules does it take to get Jing drunk?"

That was just off the top of my head. I'm sure you people can think of much better questions.

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