Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ChrisMarshallNY 1020 days ago
They’ve discovered Administratium!

https://www.mit.edu/people/dmredish/wwwMLRF/links/Humor/Admi...

3 comments

>According to the discoverers, a minute amount of administratium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than a second.

There are 86k seconds in a day. 345 600 seconds in 4 days.

This quantum-slowing effect reduces the speed by 100 000 000 000.

Administratium is about as close to the actual speed of the reaction as it is to the slowed-speed reaction.

I think you might have miscompared to a day instead of a second? Unless I missed something. But you're right that if we were to be observing the administratium reaction over one millisecond in the slowed scenario, it would take 2.73 nanoseconds at full speed, nothing like femtoscale.
> ...administratium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than a second.

Let x = administartium slowdown effect = 4 days / 1 second

x = 4 days * 24 hours / day

x = 96 hours * 60 minutes / hour

x = 5760 minutes * 60 seconds / minute

x = 345600 seconds

Wrote this out to also convince myself, I am 35, did physics for 3 years in undergrad, and am apparently still bamboozled by orders of magnitude regularly. Completely unintuitive!

In fact, lemme do it in reverse, I'm shocked.

Given x = slowdown factor = 100B = 100_000_000_000

x = 100_000_000_000 seconds / (60 seconds / minute)

x = 1_666_666_666 / (60 minutes / hour)

x = 27_777_777 hours / 24 hours / day

x = 1_157_407 days / 365 days / year

x = 3,170 years!

Wow. Such a better illustration to compare 4 days to 3170 years than comparing 2.73 nanoseconds to a femtosecond. It makes me realize how linear my in-the-moment imagination of nano to femto is.
Or a day to a thousand years, give or take a little.
What's the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire?

1 million seconds == 11.57 days

1 billion seconds == 31.71 years

If you swallow it, your computer will appear 100B times faster!
Now that's some quality humor!