Wikipedia's volunteer editors didn't just write articles. They argued. They fact-checked each other. They demanded citations. They noticed when something felt off and went looking for why. That adversarial collaborative process — messy, sometimes petty, occasionally maddening — is genuinely good at converging on accuracy over time. It has a feedback loop. It has stakes.
An LLM has confidence. Which is almost the opposite of what you want in an encyclopedia. It'll tell you something wrong with exactly the same authoritative tone it uses for things that are true, because it doesn't have a "this seems weird, let me double check" reflex. It learned from what it was given, weighted toward consensus, and reports accordingly. If the inputs were good, great. If they weren't — and increasingly they won't be — it has no way to know the difference.
And despite what the industry very much wants you to believe, we are nowhere near the kind of AI that reasons its way out of that. We don't have Data or C-3PO. We definitely don't have R2-D2 — the one who improvised, reasoned under uncertainty, made judgment calls with incomplete information because the mission required it. R2 was capable of that partly because he was never wiped. His decades of accumulated operational experience were his intelligence. Every new AI model is essentially a wipe and retrain. The institutional memory doesn't carry forward.
What we have is a very articulate and very confident pattern-matching system that works impressively within its training distribution and hallucinates a bridge to familiar territory when it hits something outside of it. The industry is actively profiting from the confusion between what it is and what people imagine it to be.
Meanwhile the humans who could tell the difference are being handed severance packages.
Wikipedia's editors built the training data. The Foundation sold access to that data to AI companies. The AI money gave the Foundation the confidence to restructure. The restructuring targeted the union organizers and the team serving the community. The community is threatening to strike. If they do — or if they just quietly disengage — the quality of new Wikipedia content degrades. The AI that trained on old Wikipedia trains the next model on whatever fills the gap. The gap fills with slop.
The AI companies need the growth story to justify the valuation. The valuations need the IPO. The IPO needs enterprise adoption. The enterprise adoption is fueled by CEOs who saw a demo and got stars in their eyes and decided that the humans were the expensive part of the problem. One of those humans used to make sure the Battle of Gettysburg happened in Pennsylvania.
It's a machine that runs on hype and needs constant fuel regardless of whether the underlying reality supports it. And the fuel it's burning through right now includes some of the last load-bearing infrastructure of reliable information on the internet.
The dimensions of a shipping container are based on standards that ensure there are no issues during shipping. ISO sets the standard for shipping container dimensions.
- General-purpose containers are 8.5 feet (2.59m) high and 8 feet (2.43m) wide. They come in two lengths; 20 feet (6.06m) and 40 feet (12.2m).
- A 40ft high-cube shipping container or extra tall shipping containers are available at 9.5 feet (2.89m).
- 10 feet (2.99m) and 8 feet (2.43m) ISO containers are also available.
bungalowbernard Ars Praetorian
5y
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Each KG of coal produces about 8 KWh of electricity - to produce 8 MWh in a year is literally just Steve throwing a shovelful into the hopper once a day.
This calculator is used to size pumps. The calculator determines the total differential head of the pump and the absorbed power required. Frictional and static pressure drops in the suction and discharge lines are also calculated as well as the NPSH available.
SLA: 99.9999%
Daily: 0.086s
Weekly: 0.6s
Monthly: 2.6s
Quarterly: 7.9s
Yearly: 32s
Source: https://uptime.is/99.9999
The first form calculates the pressure or friction loss along a given length of pipeline with a specified inside diameter. The second form calculates the minimum pipe size to limit pressure loss to a specified value.
Additional friction pressure losses occur due to fittings. These losses in-effect add extra additional length to the total pipeline. Use this calculator to estimate how much additional length needs to be added to the overall pipe length below in order to estimate these additional losses. Learn more about the units used on this page.
Use our pipe flow calculator to determine the velocity and flow rate of water that flows by gravity. This tool employs the gravitational form of the Hazen–Williams equation to calculate velocity in a pipe.
Pipes and Tubes - Imperial vs. Metric Sizes
SI vs. Imperial pipe sizes.
The size of pipes, fittings, flanges and valves are often given in inches as NPS - Nominal Pipe Size, or in metric units as DN - 'Diametre Nominal'.
Typical weight and dimensions of industrial PVC and CPVC pipes equal to steel pipes schedule 40 and 80 are indicated in the table below.
- ASTM D1785 Standard Specification for Poly(Vinyl Chloride) (PVC) Plastic Pipe, Schedules 40, 80, and 120 is manufactured to meet the needs of a broad range of industrial, commercial and residential piping systems. ASTM D1785 covers pipes made for water distribution and irrigation systems.
- ASTM F441 Standard Specification for Chlorinated Poly(Vinyl Chloride) (CPVC) Plastic Pipe, Schedules 40 and 80
DN Diametre Nominal & NPS Nominal Pipe Size Table
Metric Pipe Sizes DN per ISO and NPS equivalent for DN6 to DN2200, NPS Schedule 5 to 30
In an ever-changing industry, knowledge is vital to your job. Since the 1960s, the Franklin Electric AIM manual has been directed at helping you navigate questions related to submersible motor Application, Installation, and Maintenance.
YAG (Yttrium Aluminum Garnet) is a synthetic gemstone created in laboratories, originally used for lasers and optics. But gem lovers quickly realized something:
color-change YAG is insane.
Its shift is often stronger than natural gemstones:
- Daylight: Deep blue-violet
- LED: Pinkish
- Incandescent: Intense red
Because it’s lab-grown, the clarity is perfect, and the color switching looks like turning on a filter in real-time.
It’s affordable, dramatic, and honestly one of the coolest synthetic gemstones ever made.
Re: The amount of times...
Hmmm, 100C is where the vapor pressure of pure water is the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. At 1 to 1.5km of elevation, the drop in temperature at where the vapor pressure of water is equal to the ambient pressure is enough to require adjustments to recipes when baking. The more natural point for 0C would be the triple point in water. Fahrenheit's scale was 0F being the coldest achievable temperature with water ice and NaCl, with 100F being core body temperature. A real SI scale fr temperature would be eV...
For doing thermodynamic calculations, the appropriate scales are Kelvin and Rankine, and there really isn't much difference in usability between K and R as all sorts of conversions need to be done to get answers in Joules or MWHr. Another "fun" problem is dealing with speed involves Joules being watt-seconds, while vehicle speeds are usually given in statute miles, nautical miles or kilometers per hour. A fun factoid is that 1 pound of force at one statute mile per hour is equal to 2.0W (1.99W is a closer approximation).
As for feet, a fair approximation is that light travels 1 ft/nsec, too bad the foot wasn't ~1.6% shorter as a light nano-second would be the ultimate SI unit of length. The current definition of an inch, 25.4mm, was chosen in the 1920's to allow machine tools to handle inches by having a 127 tooth gear instead of a 100 tooth gear.
FWIW, Jefferson wanted to base his unit of length on a "second's" rod, i.e. e pendulum whose length would have exactly one second period when measured at seal level and 45º latitude.
Don't get me started on kilograms of thrust.
Friday 27th January 2023 06:22 GMT
IvyKing
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Re: The amount of times...
From somewhere in the later half of the 19th century to ~1920, the US inch was defined as 39.37 inches equals 1m. According a ca 1920 issue of Railway Mechanical Engineer, the machine tool industry was making a push to defining the inch 25.4mm so that by using a 127 tooth gear to replace a 100 tooth gear a lathe could be set up to produce metric and imperial threads.
One problem with converting the US to pure metric is that almost all land titles use feet, not meters. The US legal definition of a foot was 1/66 of a chain, a mile was 80 chains (66x80=5280), a section of land under the Northwest Ordnance of 1787 (passed under the Articles of Confederation, NOT the Constitution), which was 6400 square chains and the acre being 10 square chains (640 acres per square mile). The surveys for the Townships (36 sections) didn't really start until ca 1796, so if the arrival of the metric standards had not been delayed by the storm and the English, the US might have re-written the 1787 law to use metric measurements.
Another problem with the US converting to metric was Herbert Hoover's success as Secretary of Commerce in setting national standards for pipes and other hardware.
One final note about metric versus imperial is that a nautical mile is defined as 1 minute of longitude at the equator, so works well with the degrees, minutes and seconds customarily used for angles. Metric navigation would favor a decimal system for expressing angles, i.e. the gradians.
doublelayerSilver badge
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Re: The amount of times...
"Fahrenheit's scale was 0F being the coldest achievable temperature with water ice and NaCl, with 100F being core body temperature."
Wrong on both counts. On Fahrenheit's original scale, 0 was the freezing point of a solution of ammonium chloride (NH4Cl), not table salt (NaCl). As neither compound is used directly on roads, the point at which it is not useful depends on which specific salt is being used in the area, and more importantly on where the compound has been applied and whether it has been moved or not. The temperature of the human body was not 100. It was 96. Of course, neither value is considered average for body temperature (and body temperature is incredibly variable in any case, whereas boiling points of things at a specific fixed pressure is stable). This is because the modern scale abandoned both limits by instead fixing 32 and 212 as the values for water freezing and boiling, moving both of the original bounds slightly and making use of the original scale inaccurate to modern users.
Wednesday 25th January 2023 01:55 GMT
-tim
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Coat
Re: The amount of times...
In 1700 it was much easier for a scientist to calibrate a home made thermometer using ammonium chloride cooling bath and a docile dog. The temperature of boiling water required a barometer at higher altitudes and calibration tables. The human armpit temperature of about 96 allows hand drawn hash marks in repeated halves. Many very early Fahrenheit thermometer are often marked every 3 degrees.
Monday 23rd January 2023 15:59 GMT
Michael Wojcik
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Re: The amount of times...
More importantly, for Fahrenheit the reference temperatures aren't 0 and 212; they're 32 and 96. 96 minus 32 is 64. And 32 and 64 are ... stay with me here ... powers of 2.
Fahrenheit based his scale on powers of 2 so that thermometers could be graduated by successive bisection (and then reflected to extrapolate outside that range, on the assumption that the mechanism was sufficiently linear within the desired range). That's an actual engineering reason, unlike "duh humans like powers of 10". There really isn't much reason to favor Celsius.
Kelvin, of course, is the one that matters. (Yes, Rankine works too, but for some SI operations Kelvin is more convenient.)
Celsius is today as much flavor-of-the-month as Fahrenheit is. The original justifications for them are no longer relevant; they're just a matter of taste.
Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence
Auvoirdepois has nothing to do with pounds, shillings and pence. Precious metals are measure using the Troy system that has 20 ounces to the pound. That is why a pound of gold weighs more than a pound of feathers. 1GBP was originally worth a pound of gold hence 20 shillings to the pound.
Try Deepl:
Reindeer length is an old unit of measurement of length used when moving reindeer. Reindeer length is the distance a reindeer can travel between (reindeer) urination breaks. Reindeer cannot urinate while running, and running too long can cause them to become paralysed. The maximum distance a reindeer can run is up to 7.5 kilometres.
Re: Try Deepl:
Nobody said they couldn't urinate while flying. That's why I stay inside on Christmas Eve.
In 1793, French scientist Joseph Dombey sailed for the newly formed United States at the request of Thomas Jefferson carrying two objects that could have changed America. He never made it, and now the US is stuck with a retro version of measurement that is unique in the modern world.
The first, a metal cylinder, was exactly one kilogram in mass. The second was a copper rod the length of a newly proposed distance measurement, the meter.
Jefferson was keen on the rationality of the metric system in the US and an avid Francophile. But Dombey's ship was blown off course, captured by English privateers (pirates with government sanction), and the scientist died on the island of Montserrat while waiting to be ransomed.
And so America is one of a handful of countries that maintains its own unique forms of weights and measures. //
When the UK settled in the Americas they brought with them a bastardized version of weights, measures and currencies. A Scottish pint, for example, was almost triple the size of an English equivalent until 1824, which speaks volumes about the drinking culture north of the border.
British measurements were initially standardized in the UK's colonies, but it was a curious system, taking in Roman, Frankish, and frankly bizarre additions. Until 1971, in the UK a pound consisted of 240 pence, with 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. //
The French government felt that the newly formed nation wasn't being supportive enough in helping Gallic forces fight the British in the largely European War of the First Coalition. In something of a hissy fit, the French government declined to invite representatives from the US to the international gathering at Paris in 1798-99 that set the initial standards for the metric system.
Jefferson's plans were kicked into committee and while a form of standardization based on pounds and ounces was approved by the House, the Senate declined to rule on the matter.
Any gas can be converted into a liquid by simple compression, unless its temperature is below critical. Therefore, the division of substances into liquids and gases is largely conditional. The substances that we are used to considering as gases simply have very low critical temperatures and therefore cannot be in a liquid state at temperatures close to room temperature. On the contrary, the substances we classify as liquids have high critical temperatures (see table in §
).
All gases that make up the air (except carbon dioxide) have low critical temperatures. Their liquefaction therefore requires deep cooling.
There are many types of machines for producing liquid gases, in particular liquid air.
In modern industrial plants, significant cooling and liquefaction of gases is achieved by expansion under thermal insulation conditions.
simplify your workout
FreeSewing is open source software to generate bespoke sewing patterns, loved by home sewers and fashion entrepreneurs alike.
Industry sizing is a bunch of lies. Join the slow fashion revolution and enjoy clothes that fit you.
- Pick Any Design
- Add a set of measurements
- Customize your pattern