Remember, the speed of light in fiber optic cables is ~1.47x slower than its speed in a vacuum, which means an equatorial transit is 0.2s instead. This difference is significant enough that some High Frequency Trading firms have used microwave links to reduce latency from Chicago to New York from 7.5ms to 5ms. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/priva...
Well. Significantly more than that due to latency from switches etc and also because of the fact that there's so little land along the equator, meaning there's only one cable that travels roughly equatorially. It's from Fortaleza, Brazil to Kribi, Cameroon: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
If you set up a bunch of good first-surface mirrors, I'm pretty sure you could get to pretty much the speed of light. You'd have to put them pretty high up in the air to avoid hitting things (a problem for cables as well, obviously) but putting the beam 2km in the air would still only lengthen the path by 4pi km, or .03%.
I have always found it very neat that the propagation speed of a light wave in glass is roughly the same as electrical waves in a coaxial cable. Both are shockingly slow compared to air/vacuum, but for completely different reasons. In both cases the advantages in signal integrity are immense.
one would usually consider a waveguide and a medium to be very different, but good job! You've managed to be condescending while also remaining completely opaque to anyone who does not already completely understand both cases.
As the manager of a vulnerability research team, I almost always organise my team's meetings to start at 13:37. It's become customary for us to refer to it as "leet o'clock".
Similar to "the game"[0] (you all just lost), for many years in a group of friends we'd text each other "leet" at 13:37 whenever we'd notice and whoever did it first won that day. Obvious gentleman's agreement to not just use an alarm clock and notice it naturally during the course of the day. Have been doing it for about 20 years now with one of them that kept it up.
I'm shocked that you do this to be honest, because I have my friends and I also do this. I didn't realize that we weren't alone. Not that I thought we were special, moreso that we didn't think anyone else would want to do something so silly.
Looks from the profile the other user is from Canada and I was referring to a friend group from childhood in Portugal, none of which are in Canada nowadays. I think we're just not so special :)
I am born at leet o'clock. Usually I say 13:40 for rounding reasons and before today I never thought about it this way, even though I am familiar with leet speak. But from this day on I'll be proud of my birth time, no more rounding.
Erm, there is a superstition in my region/country that say that you're sleepy at your birth time. So when I was in school, and I had hours at school until 2 PM (6 hours from 8 AM to 2 PM) and I was sleepy around that time then my mother revealed to me that I was born at 13:37, so that's how I know. And you know how parents are, they like to repeat some stuff throughout your life, like it or not. So I got drilled in my head what my birth hour:minute is.
L33t o'clock has been a thing for me for years now. I experience that weird phenomenon where you look at a clock and it happens to be 11:11, except for me it's 13:37 and I'm like "hey, it's l33t o'clock!"
There's another one I call "Razor o'clock" at 7:11 pm, i.e., 19:11.
I’m not sure that’s worth remembering specifically. You should really already roughly know the Earth’s circumference, 40k km, and the speed of light, 300k km/s. 40/300 = 4/30 = (4/3)/10 = (1.33)/10 = 0.133.
Which is not as fun as 0.leet: knowing that there's a 0.leet is good trivia, and no trivia is "worth" remembering... you just remember it because it's interesting and fun =)
Yep. I say that because I was very recently looking into the network latency for computers on the other side of the world. I ran the same theoretical calculation of circumference of the earth divided by the speed of light and measured ping times and they lined up quite well. Now, to be clear, OP definitely has one up on me because I didn't notice the 1337, but it stuck in my head that to one significant digit it's ~100 milliseconds to get around the world. Now four significant digits stick in my head. Thanks OP!
