Benzene’s bond lengths corrected

Take a look at my reply to alliao. Can you imagine thousands of pages like that? Not likely. I'm far from being the brightest spark on the block but I'm smart enough to know I'd be chased off in a greased lightning sprint.

...But you've seeded an idea, some of it could be used as a substitute for Vogon poetry (shame on you).

Honi soit qui mal y pense.

;-)

It's an excellent metaphor because that's what happens. Over the years I've noted many times that some facts (even seemingly irrelevant ones) in one field can play an important role in me understanding a concept in a totally different (and often unrelated) one. The trouble is that I've never had a photographic memory so all too frequently when I encounter something new then I can be left thinking 'now I recognize that from something I've come across previously but where?'. It's a nuisance but I put it down to my brain's 'garbage collection mechanism' being overly efficient.

Sometimes it's also a burden especially when you can't mentally discard or turn off an old 'connection' as it can become annoying. Here's an example you might appreciate. It's well known fact there's a propensity for English language speakers to steal words from other languages then incorporate them effortlessly into English as if they'd always been there—simply because the foreign imports sound fashionable or posh—and that this practice happens even when well-known and perfectly adequate English words or phrases exist. The trouble is that inevitably they never take the time or effort to pronounce these imports correctly. (Right, it's no wonder English is such a bastard language).

When in Japan years ago I learned to pronounce tsu - つ, ツ - perhaps not perfectly but likely better than many Westerners/English speakers do who have never been there. Nowadays, the transliteration of the Japanese word ツナミ is more commonly used in English than its original native counterpart! Unfortunately, the trouble is that almost no native English speaker takes the time or effort to pronounce tsu correctly even though the Latin characters provide a reasonable facsimile of/guide to its correct pronunciation (even those who've much better diction than me—BBC announcers for instance—usually make a mess of it).

Thus, whenever I hear a slurred-out overly-long tsu it inevitably grates with me. If I'd never learned the correct Japanese pronunciation, which, given that I'm a native English speaker (thus it's essentially useless information), then I could be blissfully ignorant of the fact just like everyone else. ;-)

No doubt, having provided the phrase 'まめちしき', you are also aware of the difficulty we native English speakers have in pronouncing tsu. I often wonder what the Japanese think of us given that we're so efficient at mashing up their language and that we don't give a damn about doing so. It annoys me is that we've the hide and arrogance to adopt the word ツナミ then just mangle its pronunciation. In my opinion adopting and incorporating a word from another language and being insensitive or oblivious to its cultural significance is both rude and indicates ignorance. (Here, I make a distinction between incorporating a word into another language and say those who are learning another language and who are having difficulty in pronouncing words in that newly-acquired language).

BTW, I don't want to give you the impression that I'm fluent in Japanese as I'm not. Some decades ago, I worked in Japan for a short while but I was never there long enough to acquire an adequate understanding of the language let alone gain fluency. Also, I'm aware that I've a mixture of hiragana and katakana here (kanji is too complicated for me to deal with here). One curiosity I've never quite figured out (except perhaps that it's traditional), which is to ask why a certain formalism seems to have been adopted in the naming of Japanese cities. Why do cities and towns [seemingly] nearly always use kanji for their names (and not hiragana or katakana although there are exceptions); and why do most major cities use two kanji characters whereas smaller cities often use three or even four characters—or sometimes only one (as in the city of Tsu)? I can't remember Tsu's kanji name (character) but I do recall it was a sort of exception in that the hiragana character tsu, つ, is also sometimes used, which seems a little strange to me (but it makes excellent sense [to me] if for no other reason than it seems like a good shortcut).

Your claim that I'm only advocating these units because they're common in media is ignoring the fact that these are also very common as formal units in their respective fields. Another great example is AU, no one has seen what 1AU exactly is, but everyone can intuitively understand that 5AU means 5x further from the Sun than the Earth is, 0.74 terameters conveys absolutely nothing on its own and even for someone who is aware that 1AU=0.15 terameters, it takes a bit of extra mental effort to obtain the same information while not really adding anything because '1AU=0.15 terameters' is fundamental knowledge in the field anyway.

This is not going back to the old days of units for two big reasons, they have important meaning within their field and there is widespread knowledge of conversion factors. Normalized units are also very popular in physics as they simplify the math and are more intuitive due to being directly tied to physical properties.

Hell, even going back to the old metric vs imperial debate, there were very good benefits to the imperial system back when calculators were rare as multiples of 12s were more convenient to divide in the most common fractions (2, 3, 4, 6). Even now our clocks are based on those multiples due to their convenience for general use.

Saying 1.09e-10 meters is fine, I guess, but it's a lot easier and more intuitive to think in terms of units of CH (plus 10%), especially when you're talking about more than one.

Remembering that CH is about 1Å and CC is about 1.5Å is such a basic approximation that it's become universal.

1ft per nanosecond. (Okay, 11.8 inches.)

There’s also reasons that the speed of light is the “natural” speed to discuss large distances in — particularly astronomical ones.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28speed+of+light%29*%2...

eg Bohr radius is roughly half an angstrom and width of H2 gas is just under 3A

By expressing them in pm they actually lose some context as then they're all just numbers.

Daltons is a similar concept that springs to mind

But that's my layman's knowledge. I'd like to be corrected!

Superposition of two states is not preserved by measurement: it's more akin to a (complex, not real) probability you'll find the system of one of the states.

By contrast, resonant bonds are a real mixing of the two states: you don't observe the carbon-carbon bonds in a benzene molecule as either being a single bond or a double bond, you observe them as a uniform bond that's somewhere between a single bond and a double bond (e.g., bond length). Treating such things as a weighted average of various resonance structures is a usable approximation that allows you to predict the structure of more molecules without having to dive deep into molecular orbital theory.

> 120.0000 consists of six significant figures (1, 2, and the four subsequent zeroes) except for the last zero If the resolution is to 0.001.

> Zeros to the right of the last non-zero digit (trailing zeros) in a number with the decimal point are significant if they are within the measurement or reporting resolution.

> 1.200 has four significant figures (1, 2, 0, and 0) if they are allowed by the measurement resolution.

and

> Trailing zeros in an integer may or may not be significant, depending on the measurement or reporting resolution.

So my first example "1m and 1000mm" actually might be the same length, depending on if those zeros are significant or not which has not been clearly communicated.

My second example "1000mm and 1.000m" is also ambiguous, since 1.000m is clear(ish) about its sig-figs, while 1000mm is not. I suppose I could have written "1000. mm"

Best solution imo would probably be:

- something that actually specified the error: 1m ± 0.0001m

- or using words to indicate what's meant: "exactly 1000mm"