Population of China
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All I can find is @blakeyrat's first law:
- Blakeyrat's Law: Any discussion of an ad will quickly devolve into a discussion of the use and/or morality of ad-blockers.
- Corollary to Blakeyrat's Law: During the discussion of ad-blockers, somebody will invariably reply, "oh, this site has ads? I've never seen them", in the most condescending way possible.
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@blakeyrat's first law:
From http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/JustForFun/TheGrandListOfForumAndCommunityLaws?
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I seem to recall the Second Law as being "any discussion on TDWTF since the change to Discourse invariably leans towards discussion of Discourse".
But I may be wrong.
Edit: I'm not. Here it is straight from the rat's mouth: @blakeyrat said:
That's not quoting, that's one-boxing, and it's supposed to be all whitelisted and shit... you know what fuck this, this thread is just going to turn into Blakeyrat's Second Law: "any discussion on Discourse soon becomes a discussion of Discourse and its myriad bugs"
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Does @blakeyrat only have two laws? I thought there were more. Guess it just seems like it.
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!LikeBot Get BlakeyratsSecondLaw
edit: okay so I have some bugs, manually fixed it for now.
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The longer a discussion continues on Discourse, the more likely it becomes that the discussion will be about how broken Discourse is.
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I've found this:
http://what.thedailywtf.com/t/this-site-design-made-me-say-wtf/3256/28
Other than that, I think it's time we had a topic about @blakeyrat's Laws; preferably created, but at least revised, by himself.
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You could call it ... WikiBlakeya ?
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Blakey's laws are like the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition on Star Trek... whenever you come up with a new one, give it a random number.
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Arthur C. Clark and Stephen Baxter wrote about that in Time's Eye, basically providing Alexander the Great's entourage with wheelbarrows. The things worked for a day then it rained and the ground turned muddy.
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I think the mistake is a stupid translator error. My guess is that the original article was in Chinese, and mentioned 4.7 Yì. That is 4.7*(10000)^2 (Chinese group digits 4 by 4), so 470 million.
Then some idiot came and mis-translated 4.7 Yì as 4.7 Billion.
By the way, sorry for re-railing the topic, I don't know if that's allowed around here...
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Heh, that sounds familiar.
Not once have I seen numbers in local newspapers that are way off because someone literally translated some US press release / text. The problem? 1 billion is 109 in US. But it's 1012 here.
We use what's called the "long system" here, meaning it's million → milliard → billion, as opposed to American (and British, AFAIK) million → billion. Just use the damned numbers if you're not absolutely familiar with language differences, you dolts.
Then again, all those zeros are scary, apparently. Not to mention scientific notation, man, what a nightmare.
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Also, most people don't realize how big is the difference between million dollars and billion dollars. They're simply unable to imagine it, since their own account balance never exceeded $100,000 in their lives.
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Well, it is a problem with conceptualizing numbers that big, yes. There's a great bit Penn Jillete did once on this. He was explaining his understanding of numbers in regards to candy: he can imagine eating one candy. He can imagine eating up to 5 pieces of candy. Everything after that is "a lot". And once you get to a pile of candy that you can hardly eat in one go it's just up to a "shitload".
I'm pulling the numbers and names he gave them from memory so I might be off, but he does have a point: can you imagine having 10 billion of anything physical? Hardly. And so your brain is just not used to coping with it. It can be done, sure. But I'd say that most of the time your brain sees it as "10 shitloads" (because "10" is still reasonable to you), so differentiating between "10 shitloads" and "10 even bigger shitloads" becomes a pain, no matter what name you give to "bigger shitloads". We just had no practical need to deal with numbers that big until we invented money.
I mean, scientist do it as well, up to a point. While doing calculations where you deal with, say, energy levels, you work with 3Ă—10something and 7Ă—10something. So you do your calculations, whatever they are, to get that the final energy level is now 4.2Ă—10something. Only at this point do you really start considering how big (or small, if it's a negative power) something is. Up to then you had 3, 7, and whatever other reasonably sounding numbers you dealt with.
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We just had no practical need to deal with numbers that big until we invented inflation.
FTFY
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Blakey's laws are like the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition on Star Trek... whenever you come up with a new one, give it a random number.
Space Corps Directive 12456322.4 agrees with you
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Space Corps Directive 12456322.4
Surely, that is impossible without a live chicken and a Rabi? You probably meant 12456322.4Â-C.
Filed under: INB4 a pedantic dickweed fixes my numbers: I was bending it to make a joke
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can you imagine having 10 billion of anything physical
One billion grains of flour is about a half cup. However, that creates the problem of visualizing how small a grain of flour is.
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10 billion bytes is about the size of a video game from the previous generation. But how big is one byte? It's kind of hard to make the jump from "eight light switches" to "enough light switches to describe an entire fictional world".
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Welcome to Lightswitchtopia, where all* your dreams can come true!
(*) Dreams must be light-switch-related. Offer void in Nebraska.
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It's right next to Spatula City.
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One billion grains of flour is about a half cup.
One billion grains of anything is nearly 65 tonnes. That's a big cup.
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833kg of fat, 131kg saturated... Ow my arteries.
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Why don't you wash it down with some water?
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Why don't you wash it down with some water?
With 2kg of salt it might make me a bit thirsty.
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Come on, don't be a sissy. It's only 31 ppm.
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a grain of water?
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Sounds very DF-y.
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a grain of water?
Since the joke here is substituting the grain unit of mass (~65 milligrams) for the term grain, meaning the unit size of a bulk material -- yes a grain of water is a real thing.