Comment

Comment by arp242

To be honest I think this is almost a trick question, because you're combining two very different things (speed of light and performance of computers), and people are not very good at combining these sort of contexts intuitively (i.e. you need to do the calculations).

The other day I was watching The Twilight Zone, and one episode involves a crew "655 million miles" from Earth. I know what miles are, I know the rough layout and scale of the solar system, galaxy, and universe, but I had no idea how far away that actually is because it mixes these two units from very different contexts and intuitively it just doesn't make sense to me; is it still in the solar system? No idea. Converting it to AU showed it's about 7 AU, which put it in the appropriate context: a bit beyond Jupiter.

parent arp242 3 years ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton