I believe that the picture below has earned a showing in every physical science lecture that discusses the importance of units:
 |
Thanks FailBlog.
Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia. We have similar outlooks on many things, widely disparate opinions about others, and will do our best to keep the discourse reasonably elevated.
Site Meter
May 20th, 2009 at 11:50 am
I’ve seen tons of pictures like these. Well, not tons, but probably 5+ unique ones… Makes me think that they’re either intentional, or faked.
May 20th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Kudos to the residents of New Cuyama for having a sense of humor. The end units are, I think, “people-feet-years”, aka the “cuyama”.
May 20th, 2009 at 11:57 am
Google Images gives three clearly different photos of this same sign. If it’s faked, it was done by a massive conspiracy.
May 20th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
But with suitable choice of c, h, and G, can’t we convert everything to km? (In all seriousness, as convenient as setting c=h=G=1 can be, it does remove the calculational check provided by carrying along the physical units.)
George
May 20th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Probably a prank then, someone adding the “total” line as a joke. The “6″’s under the total are fatter than the one in the population line.
May 20th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Fail? I think it’s very funny, as I expect it was intended to be. This tiny town went from a population of 562 to an astounding total of 4663. 4663 what? Who cares? It’s a lot more than 562.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
It’s clearly intentional. The townies, or at least the sign painter, have a sense of humor.
May 20th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
@Metre units don’t work like that when you sum them…
May 21st, 2009 at 2:00 am
@ George:
So what is the Plank unit for population?
May 21st, 2009 at 5:30 am
@Sven
Yes, Sven, I know …
May 21st, 2009 at 7:28 am
[...] ao Cosmic Variance e ao Fail [...]
May 21st, 2009 at 8:46 am
Many physics textbooks actually suffer from the opposite problem, see here:
May 21st, 2009 at 6:50 pm
I see it as both a clever joke and a kind of test. People who don’t get the joke either (a) have no clue about units and must never be allowed to compute mission-critical numbers or (b) assume too quickly that the people responsible for the sign are just morons rather than entertaining pranksters.
May 23rd, 2009 at 5:29 pm
I was curious about whether this was fake or not as well. Luckily, the all all-knowing Google has the answer. The Street-view with Google maps has at one awe-inspiring moment both been beneficial and a bit creepy. However, at the intersection of Rt. 166 and Perkins Road in New Cuyama, CA, you can use Streetview in Google maps to actually see the sign for yourself. Amazing, creepy and sad all at once.
May 27th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Infoket:
There is no street view for the intersection of Rt 166 and Perkins Road in New Cuyama, CA, unless my computer or internet or something is faulty and just doesn’t show it for some reason.
May 28th, 2009 at 5:55 am
I have never seen a sign like this.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
@ Armadillo: Yes there is. Here’s the link.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Not so fast! There are well known indices that add together measure with different units. The misery index is the sum of unemployment rate and inflation rate. OK, being percentages you can say they don’t really have units, but still they conflate ‘people out of a job’ with ‘value of a dollar’, which clearly have different units, and get something meaningful. We physicists are such purists!
July 1st, 2009 at 7:07 pm
It pains me to say this, but you can write this same summation in your typical mainstream programming language — without any compiler warnings, much less errors — with frightful ease.
This is upside down. What SHOULD be easy is programming the units consistently. What SHOULD be hard is programming them inconsistently.
Know of any programming language that provides this beneficial characteristic?