> After fifty minutes (one microcentury as von Neumann used to say)
I like this. I also had to check: 100 years * 10^-6 = 52.56 minutes.
I like this. I also had to check: 100 years * 10^-6 = 52.56 minutes.
nanoacre = about 4 square millimeters
microfortnight = about 1.2 seconds
beard-second = 5-10 nanometers (depending on who you ask), or the length an average beard grows in one second
20 miles per gallon ≈ 0.1 mm²
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2F%2820+mile%2Fgallo...
perfect
kilosecond: 11.57 days
and fun to say, but never useful:
gigasecond: 31.68 years
* 60 seconds per minute
* 60 minutes per hour: 3600 seconds per hour
* 1 kilosecond = 16 minutes and 40 seconds
* 24 hours per day: 86,400 +/- 1 seconds per day
* 1,000,000 / 86,400 ~= 11.57
I love giving metric-using friends a hard time whenever they criticize imperial units of measure. I always tell them that I will happily embrace metric when they give up their irrational attachment to an archaic system of time-telling.
You have: microcentury
You want: minutes
* 52.594877
/ 0.019013259Pi seconds is a nanocentury!
I find movies have become too long — especially in recent years.
I consider 3+ hours indulgent (we get ice cream and beer, once or twice, during what used to be the reel changes here), but two and half hours is about right.
Two hours would be my bare minimum for "feature length", and when I see one and half hour "films" I wonder "why was this not made-for-TV"?
I doubt I will ever watch Heat again, unless over a couple days, and unless my child wants to I won't watch the Lord of the Rings again (and especially not The Hobbit movies; that was largely a waste of time, though I will gladly read The Hobbit at least once more before I die).
Mad Max: Fury Road (Black & Chrome version) I watched for the third time recently, but over two days.
Engaging conversation, though? I recently had the luxury of time and privilege of talking for three hours straight with a well-read college student. Not being a high school teacher anymore I'm out of touch with young-adult perspectives, and I have so many follow-up questions now.
You can improve this if you make it more varied, adding interactions, changing media, multiple speakers taking turns, that sort of thing, but having a rule of thumb helps.
And it fits calendars nicely, fifty minutes per talk, ten minutes break between, one talk per hour.
Yes, I suspect that's the real reason.
Yeah, personally I read it less as 50 minutes being some biological limit of human attention and more as once you go over people start thinking about how much longer you're going to be, how long it'll take to get to their class, weighing missing the end of this talk vs the start of the next one vs skipping their bathroom break/sprinting. Plus the added the distraction of people who have reached their limit getting up and squeezing their way past to leave.
So if you think the radius is 93m miles, you get 18.6 mile/sec, but if you are not American, you think the radius is 150m km, so 30 km/s.