5
xkcd #3047: Rotary Tool
(xkcd.com)
"Sidereal" pronounced /saɪˈdɪəriəl, sə-/ sy-DEER-ee-əl, sə-
I get I never learned phonetics but how tf do you pronounce upside down e
It's the phonetic symbol for schwa, which is like a relaxed "uh" sound.
Oh it's so obvious now.
meaning "of the stars" (from Latin, as opposed to Astral from the Greek)
used in modern English in "consider" (literally: with the stars, meaning to scrutinize the sky).
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Isn't record 78rpm instead of 72rpm?
You'd think the WR would a lot higher...
Wow, dental drills spin stupidly fast. I never realized they're jamming something in my mouth that makes a turbopump seem sluggish, and that makes the scariest laboratory centrifuge I've ever seen blush in shame.
Big centrifuges are quite scary. Think of how much mass they are moving at those speeds. In comparison, a small drillbit turbine being rotated by compressed air seems less scary.
The scariest lab centrifuge i've personally seen went to something like 100k rpm, and 800,000 g. It's basically a cartoon safe with a piece of lab equipment inside, because when something fails at 800,000 times the force of gravity, it's going to end up outside the city borders, or inside the next building over.
Stupid question… are these RPMs true??
Maybe I'm dense but shouldn't the clock be:
- H: 0.01667
- M: 1
- S: 60
Yep, I'm a dumb, realized after a cup of coffee. Confirmed by the reply below.
I think I'm just going to go back to bed and skip today
Yes, you're dense lol. The speeds are correct: the second hand that does one full Revolution Per Minute, the minute hand does one full Revolution Per Hour and the hour hand does one Revolution Per 12 Hours.
Everything in XKCD is based on truth. That's what makes it so funny... to geeks, at least.
Edit: God damn it, he put 72 instead of 78 RPM. I guess he does make mistakes after all...
He's made typos a few times in the past too: https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?search=typo&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go
He also put 33 instead of 33 and ⅓. Get the pitchforks!
Just a random thought, I always knew that 33 multiplied by 3 is 99 and 33 1/3 multiplied by 3 is 100, but I never considered that 33 is 99% of 33 1/3.
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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