When you say “as in”
” ‘With any luck we will be able to ftp some suitable software and get it running on the Tera.’
‘The Terror?’
‘Tera. As in Teraflops.’
‘That does me no good at all. When you say “as in” you are supposed to give me something more familiar to relate it to.’ “
I got a Portland Water Bureau Drinking Water Quality Report in my mailbox today. There’s a section where they list contaminants, including Radium, which is measured in picocuries per liter. There’s also a “Definitions” section which defines picocuries per liter, among other things. The definition is:
“Picocurie is a measurement of radioactivity. One picocurie is a trillion times smaller than one curie.”
Note to the PWB: please see the above Cryptonomicon excerpt for my reaction to this definition.
Well, one curie is 3.7 x 10^10 disintegrations per second. So one picocurie is 0.037 disintegrations per second, and so if you multiply the number of picocuries by 3196.8, I reckon that ought to tell you how many people disintegrate per day from drinking Portland tap water.
Comment by Q. Pheevr — 3 July 2009 @ 8:26 pm