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Comment by pavement | Hacker News Reader

  1 Light Year  = Pepsi Planet

  2 Light Years = Pepsi Galaxy

  8 Light Years = Pepsi Universe

Man, that's a small universe. To be fair though, it's clearly marked as an unfinished draft.

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I much prefer the Pepsi Parsec as a unit of measurement.

In all seriousness, parsec is a horrific unit of measurement. It's really annoying how many non-SI units are used in Astrophysics literature. For me the most insane one is that some Asteroseismologists (study of variability in stars) use cycles per day as a unit of measurement as opposed to uHz (the conversion factor is around 11).

I think most of it arose from the idea that astronomy is about logging as much of the sky as you can in the most efficient way you can(there's a lot of it), and everyone else can put in the work to use their measurements in other disciplines. Sadly, that mindset went on to astrophysics where it's not too helpful.

From mocking Pepsi advertisements to discussing astrophysics in three comments.

I think it's more about the insane devotion to backwards compatibility (which rivals Linus Torvalds). I mean, the whole object colour thing (where the community discovered that their classification system was completely wrong) was handled by just reordering the classification (but keeping the names) so that old papers and catalogs could be used verbatim is true devotion.

> it's clearly marked as an unfinished draft.

Hey, I know some people with astronomy degrees that'll take a high six figure salary from a BS marketing agency to be their on staff astrophysicist. 4 hours of real work a month, tops.

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