

Cal physicists make a radio 10,000 times thinner than a human hair - gibsonf1
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/01/BUTBT44A2.DTL

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hugh
Wow, 10,000 times thinner than a human hair! That's, like, a hundred billion
times smaller than a football field! If you stacked twelve double-decker buses
on top of one another, the pile would be 43 billion times larger than one of
these radios. If you put 3.8e14 of these radios together they'd stretch from
the earth to the moon.

Seriously though, I don't know why science journalists like that unit of
measurement so much.

~~~
gibsonf1
Because everyone has held a piece of hair in their hands and can grasp the
size, the human hair is an excellent human scale reference for attempting to
describe very small measurements.

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Darmani
Usually units like that are used because they make the scale easier to grok.
Unfortunately, with large numbers, humans fail to truly understand the scale
between them (e.g.: you can innately feel the difference between one and a
thousand more easily than between a quadrillion and a quintillion). This is
also the reason why you'd prefer eating dots in Pac-Man to give you 100 points
a piece rather than 1 million.

Thus, having to say "1/10000" defeats much of the point of using the width of
a human hair as a unit. I don't think it's much harder to innately grasp 5
nanometers than 1/10000 the width of a human hair.

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Darmani
Hmmmm....no mention of any potentially Orwellian uses?

~~~
omouse
I...I can hear the voices. They don't stop, they're telling me to...read
1984??

