Tell me you have a background in IT without telling me you have a background in IT.

   Then, the ejected debris that created the canyons likely soared over the lunar surface and then collided with it at speeds of about 2,237 miles per hour (3,600 kilometers per hour).

Oddly adding a veil of precision to an estimate of a kilometre per second.

That's only a problem if your favorite method of representing uncertainty is in-band signalling via a technique like significant figures.

You could translate the units and then also translate separately the error bands (assuming +/- 100 km). But “2237 mi/hr +- 62 mph” sounds pretty silly.

Use the error bands to find a close-enough round number: 2200 or 2300 mph or "almost 3 times the speed of sound on earth"

Anyone pedantic enough to notice the conversion mismatch should be smart enough to understand the concept of "error bars".

That's nothing! They determined that one valley formed 3.8 billion years ago, and the other one, 3.8 billion years plus or minus 10 minutes.

> That's nothing! They determined that one valley formed 3.8 billion years ago, and the other one, 3.8 billion years plus or minus 10 minutes.

Now that's what i call precision. How did they measured it ? With a pendulum ? /s

US people typically want numbers translated into American football fields it seems. So around 39,000 football fields an hour might be more obvious.

Please be complete if you’re gonna translate to American units. That’s 117,000 football fields per football game, or 325 per commercial.

Does the hour include or exclude ad breaks?

10 m/s = 36 km/h, I believe they started from a round number.

Yeah, they just did the conversion and slapped it on there. Should have said "about 2200 mph".

It's unfortunate that the only written mechanism we have for expressing a lack of precision is scientific notation, which tends to be obfuscating for numbers at this scale: if you write "3.6e3 kph (2.2e3 mph)", you make it clear approximately how much precision you do and don't have, but it's less obvious-at-a-glance for the target audience of an article like this.

Or use kps and not lose additional precision every time you translate units?

In an ideal world.

m/s

Or that, anything SI

I had figured since km/h was NN00, the same would be good for mph.

Naw, it's already been false precisioned to hell.

The original would have been "about 1000 metres/second". That got translated to 3600 km/h etc.

Check how much it charges if it was really 800 m/s. Or 1200 m/s.

Its because they started with "roughly 1km/s", which was deemed too difficult to understand for pleb readers, so it was converted to km/h, which is more relatable. Then it was converted to mph for the US audience, and the author just did a straight conversion without really considering the madness that is " about 2237 mph". I hate it when they do this.

1-2km/s, which is a reasonably accurate estimate for these things, should have been translated to "2000-4000mph" and it would have been perfectly good enough.

Climbing may require concentration, try indoor autobelaying. It requires effort to think about anything but the next move. Perhaps that will start you on growing back the ability to focus.

Or indoor bouldering. I find it requires a bit more thinking than climbing, though both are good for focus and concentration.

@mauvehaus, with your idiosyncratic spelling of emacs as "eMacs", you put Stephenson in a bad light. He knows how to spell. And edit.

As a vi guy, I trusted whatever my iPhone said was the canonical capitalization of emacs when it autocorrected it :-)

EDITED TO ADD: I just figured it out. My iPhone presumably thinks I'm taking about an obsolete Apple product. Doh. I'll let my error stand as a monument to not trusting everything a computer says.

I would also note that most of what we seem to be discussing is whether his writing is good or not. Spelling, I'll give him. The opinions on editing seem to be a little more divided.

You may well be aware that there is an external keyboard from Lenovo that mimics the Thinkpad keyboard: "ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II"

Then there are mechanic keyboards with trackpoints from Tex in Taiwan: https://tex.com.tw/collections/all

I have a Tex Shinobi and the Lenovo trackpoint keyboard. The Tex is on my Linux workstation at the office.

When I had a Thinkpad and used the Trackpoint keyboard with my workstation, I had the same muscle memory for both. Bought a MacBook for battery life.

From http://www.paulgraham.com/pfaq.html

  What editor do you use?

  vi.

At least his x- and y-yearold may rebel by using emacs.

Debian install worked fine for me, even if it was my first linux install on hardware in many years.

There are notes on Fedora install at https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Fedora

Sorry about that. Thanks, @nosoonhui.

Turn into a snob? When a tutorial from a certain domain disappoints you, stop following links into that domain. Seek operating systems with smarter people, and fewer errors. Look for languages with high quality in implementation, documentation and ecosystem.

See you in a few years, when you you'll ask for advise as there aren't jobs for people whose stack is arm, *bsd, sqlite/postgres/redis, cl/elixir/go.

Is Postgres as bad as go?

Bad in what way, @newbamboo? I meant to list stuff that's nice to learn and spend time with.

Sorry, I misread your comment.