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A lot of people have trouble wrapping their heads around the fact that a watt is not an amount of energy, it's a rate. So to get amount, you have to multiply it by a time.

A lot of these are "cursed" in the sense that they contain uncancelled units, but some weird things can happen _with_ cancellation as well. Take the specific impulse of a rocket, which is used to measure performance. Basically, it's the force gained from burning a propellant divided by the weight of the propellant. (Yes, the weight, not the mass.) Since weight is a measure of acceleration toward a massive object (force over time), you essentially have two "force" units that cancel each other out, leaving only the time measurement. As a result, specific impulse is measured in seconds, with a higher number for a better performance.

Now you need to check out part two aswell, just as cursed

For some truly cursed units, I suggest the video "a joke about measurement" by jan Miseli, where he creates an alternative to the SI system.

According to my calculations, the cruising speed of an Airbus A320 is roughly 226 roman cubits per microfortnight

There are a lot of those in electrical engineering. We measure op-amp noise in “Volts per root Hertz”

The 12 parsecs Kessel Run in Star Wars is there because it sounded science-fictiony. The Expanded Universe added an explanation: the planet Kessel is located near a giant cluster of black holes (sic!) so everyone takes a long way around. Han Solos flex in that scene is now about how much shorter his run was - the Millenium Falcon is so fast it can get close to those black holes and not get sucked in.

The real cursed unit on your electric bill goes a step further: your average power consumption is given in kilowatt-hours per day. There are 41.67 watts in a kWh/d.

CHERENKOV RADIATION!! everybody take a drink!

You should watch part 2 of the cursed unit series

Apparently, in an earlier draft of Episode IV, Obi-wan was supposed to react to what was clearly a lie by Han Solo. It appears to have disappeared from the final draft of the script and the EU added an explanation to it which was adapted by the Disney canon - highly modified but the core rational of it being an impressive navigation feat remains. But when you look back, it makes way more sense for it to have been Han bullshitting. First off, it's Han Solo. Second, he's saying it while claiming the Millennium Falcon is fast so to give a navigation achievement (which speaks to the pilot) when trying to sell how awesome his ship is is just weird. And then there's the fact that just a few minutes later, the Falcon is getting overtaken by Star Destroyers and Luke explicitly calls out Han for claiming the ship was fast.

A barn is a strange unit.

There is a reason for the hubble numbers to be similar. Yes sure the universe's expansion changes over time, but things tend not to change that far from their typical rates. The only "coincidence" is that the current expansion rate happens to be near the AVERAGE expansion rate over time. Which doesn't sound far fetched or overly coincidental at all to me. It's like if you take a random person's current height and find that it's very close to their average height during their life. Okay... and? Not that weird.

This content is definitely your sweet spot. I love how you can really show off your unique knowledge in this hard science and math context. Great stuff!

1.21 gigawatts! 1.21 gigawatts!! Great Scott!!

Another cursed unit is any measure of speed or velocity - not because of a mishmash of units, but because I'm cursed with a nearly uncontrollable urge to commit violence on anyone who says "rate of speed." Rate of speed [thump] is the [thump] component [thump] of acceleration [crunch] along [thump] a trajectory [crack].

I mean we could start measuring in attoparsec. Which is around 3.086 cm or 1.215 inches...

I count in Siriometers = 1 million AU. Call me old school

Nowadays imperial units are more weird than ones used in astronomy.

In Sweden we consume twice as much electricity in winter.

I love your image of what it takes to make 1MW of electricity. I have never seen or heared that before and it gave me the 1st(I mean the VERY 1st) real perspective of it. "I'm an Artistic Scientist Moonlighting as a Mathematician." It'd be great to talk about it in person, but thanks again, Tyler.

I'm glad he goes over the derivation of these. Yes, it's weird and frustrating to have units in situations where they don't independently make physical sense, but we use all these units because the universe interacts with itself in ways that makes them useful.

Did the beginning part about a book and gallons per miles get cut for some reason?

I feel like you might enjoy "jan Misali" "a joke about measurement". I don't feel like it is content that a good reaction can be made to, but I think you'd have at least fun just watching it! It's a video taking apart how measurement units work and putting it all on it's head to come up with very cursed, often very non useful units.

2:00 Would you say the one you worked at ever ran at 1,210 MW??

This channel makes me feel ... something ... about my life choices. Nostalgia? Regret? I don't know. I got my bachelor's in Physics with a mind towards a graduate degree in Nuclear Engineering. A severe concussion at the end of my senior year put that plan on pause, and well, it's never unpaused. I started working in electronics fabrication and have held various technician-type jobs in industry and academia ever since. The pay's well good enough to sustain myself and the work is usually interesting, but I always feel like I could have made more of myself. Especially since nuclear power is so valuable and important, would I be more fulfilled if I had made it into that field? I don't know. Sorry for the angsty ramblings, but the TL;DR is that you make compelling and interesting content, and I'm glad you do it.

since you seemed to enjoy this one, I highly recommend the second episode of this

When I made my name so many years ago, I didn't know it was also a term in nuclear power. Neat.

Please do the sequel to this too!

1/H_0 being ~ age of the universe is NOT a coincidence at all. 1/H_0 is the time which receding galaxies would need to reach the point where they are now if they would start from our location, and if their velocity is constant. Which is not a bad approximation for Big Bang.

I was wondering if you'd ever do some kind of general overview/fun fact type of video about nuclear power plants (how they work, what did your work entail etc). It would be nice to learn these things from someone with first hand experience 😊

Did you miss the beginning of the video?

It is not that big of a coincidence that the Hubble time (1/H0) is approximately the age of the universe. If the universe was nearly empty (like, very little energy, more empty than it is now), the age could been exactly the Hubble time (disregarding inflation). If there was only matter in the universe (and no inflation), the age of the universe would be 2/3 the Hubble time. The combination of radiation, matter and dark energy (whatever it is) that we get today predicts a age of the universe very near the Hubble time without inflation, which is interesting. The inflation predicts a expansion of the universe in the order of e^60, if I recall correctly. Heck both of those are in fact a coincidence. Some scientist see those as a huge problem, others see other absurd coincidences as a problem. This is why cosmology is a very active and interesting field :)

When you pause to explain something, he just explains it again.

Can't remember for sure, but my guess is "less than 12 parsecs" relates to the space-time curvature capabilities of his ship, combined with his calculation abilities. in short, another pilot couldn't have curved that chunk of space that much, and thus would have spent more time in hyperspace. then again, there is almost no real science in star wars, it's basically a space fantasy with wizards and monsters, rather than an actual sci-fi

I *have* done actual calculations for real in km/h*min units... I was accumulating lots of intermediate distances given in minutes and speeds, and multiplying minutes with km/h properly is annoying since those are incompatible units, so I kept them in the cursed units until the end where I only had to convert it once into proper distance.

I'll be waiting for your commentary on part 2 as well ^_^

This is a fantastic video with some genuinely beautiful math in it! Glad to see you cover it.

7:30 i love how einstein is the only one that needs to only be casually mentioned and not have his face on screen xD

1000 megawatts is a gigawatt

I mess with a lot of electronics and have multiple electrician friends. KW/H always seemed odd, but there are a lot of stranger ones. Like power factor where the voltage and current either lag or lead each other I get the concept but it seems crazy too because you can't have one and not the other. Then there is watts and KVA which are similar but different enough to matter and be confusing, then there is also KVAR (KVA reactive).

My grandma, rest her soul, always said, "dimensions carry a certain frequency. Lower or higher is like the room number on a hotel room's door......My Grandma was into esoteric stuff, never thought it had some form of basis in science. 😳, must have been a popular topic of the day.

Having seen the original video before this, i have to say your reaction and context gives sooo much more value to it.

Barn-Megaparsecs are roughly ⅔ teaspoon. The volume of water that contains as many molecules as the Earth holds that volume, is roughly 2 Barn-Megaparsecs.

There is a 2nd part to these series watch that too

I use the manning equation from hydraulics a lot at work, the roughness coefficient ‘n’ ends up with units of ft^(1/3)/s

ive been doing nuclear physics research for the last 2 years. my favorite cursed units are the almighty areal density units - atoms*10^15/cm^2, and also the fact that for rutherford backscattering, the end result of the equation is given in units of particles/m^2. Also, on a logical level I understand why reaction cross sections are measured in some variation on m^2, but also why? It's a probability!

For part 2!

It's interesting that you used RMS for electrical signals. In stats, we use RMS in many circumstances, but especially in sorting out whether expected error is 0 or if the expectation changes over time or across correlations, which is similar to your use.

As a nuclear engineer you shouldve mentioned the Barn!

14:20 Google reduces the Hubble constant to 2.3×10^-18 Hz because Hz is the most familiar inverse second, but strictly speaking it's incorrect. Hertz is specifically cycles per second, a measure of frequency of periodic phenomena, but the Hubble constant doesn't describe a recurrence, so instead we should use an inverted second for aperiodic phenomena. That's right, the Hubble constant is 2.3×10^-18 becquerel! (Or 2.3 attobecquerel)

4:00 This is a great point and also what this video teaches you a very fun way: It can be interesting and eye opening to explore the depth of the usual. You might find things you would have never guess or realise that some ways we do things are.... kinda stupid, even though they work very well :D

Blue shift in nuclear physics is what when the reactor's energy goes up quickly and why the demon core's supercritical state was blue for a second.

It's absolutely not a coincidence that 1/H_0 is roughly the age of the universe since H_0 aka the hubble parameter at present time is directly related to the scale (parameter) of the universe which is linked to the big bang aka to the "start of the universe"!

Physical chemistry uses sqrt(liter/second). A liter being 10^-3m^3 makes that a unit of the dimension Length^(3/2)Time^(-1/2)

My favorite cursed unit is one that spans the globe and centuries - that would be "furlongs per fortnight". One furlong per fortnight translates to 0.6 km/hr.

10:02 Yes! That’s actually the right explanation.

I wanted to design a omni-directional spherical space station, purely for testing the most efficient electromagnetic induction motor, that can have rotor float upright in stator. Since the force of attraction from earth is proportionately less as relative distance and mass is accounted for, the energy created via spinning a shaft, can be applied to spinning a sphere in 3-dimenional space, creating a curling force similar to artificial gravity but able to tested and potentially turn simulations about gravitational forces in higher dimensions into configurable values. However, we'd a space elevator first, so in preparation I'm designing a conical induction motor, which will have somewhere between 100-360 phases. I know that we have conical 'squishing' with diamond tips, but what if we took one with magnets on the outside, spun it inside an inset stator of the same shape, will the before circular field, turn into a curling field that will cause the cone to turn. The same test would be, taking a magnet and pushing it down a tube against the repulsing electromagnetic field. I want to push a spiralling cone into a still cone, to see if gravity will pull the spiralling cone into the magnetic field, or dissipate the field due to spin creating more directions for the field to travel.

3:16 that is actually the most cursed unit of them all. because people say "cal" but mean "kcal" I hate that, but I've started to accept that cal equals kcal when people talk

i have toa dmit by the 20min mark i was thinking 'hm im watching someone watch a video what am i doing here' but i am so glad to stick around and find out about 'breaking the light barrier'

You should react to some of Explosions&Fire's videos. He's really funny and makes great videos. Maybe the white phosphorus, NCl3, metal fires, gold explosives, hydrogen peroxide or the flares one. Also his sulfur nitride video for his opinion on yellow chemistry. Even his ice cream video is funny.

Our kWh usage does not change too much but the freekin admin fees sure do.

You forgot to mention that Sievert also has constants for organs affected too. Like when iodine-131 concentrates in the thyroid or for strontium-90 in bones.

I was confused about the last one until he started explaining it, because I read the ‘ps’ as horsepowers (in german)…

there is a part two of this video that also includes the different radiation units

Disappointed he missed out on the most cursed one off all, the "Schrödinger equation", try explaining the "i" to anyone that hasn't done advanced mathematics. There was that time when France tried to create metric time too, something even the French weren't crazy enough to go through with.

Trying to understand inverse seconds truly Hertz my brain.

This channel has become an experiment into how big you can become strictly on the content of others

19:29 this actually explains the whole "blue note" thing i have seen in a lot of Sci-Fi examples of warp/ftl travel... Most prominently Eve online and Star Trek. I had never really though about what it actually was, i just went along with it because it was Sci-Fi...

Measure velocity in angstroms per fortnight

Most people who even notice the kWh stuff can't wrap their heads around the fact that kW and kWh are not the same thing. And, sadly, I've see that type of unit conflation from my local power company who really should know better at least once where they measured the energy storage capacity of a battery installation in kW. I mean, sure, if they were referring to the maximum charge or discharge rate, kW would make sense, but they meant total stoarge capacity. And it wasn't just a simply typo leaving the "h" off the "kWh" - they had it written out in full in more than one place.

10:00 Flying really fucking close to a big cluster of black holes, is the explanation the novel writers came up with. In the original script it's supposed to be him messing with what he thinks are two uneducated farmers from the middle of nowhere that don't know anything about space.

There's a part 2, with even curseder units! Honestly I think it's even better than the first one.

6:31 I swear I'm hearing "culos squared".

His surname being Newton suits this video perfect

Playing around with units is always fun 😁

I had a hard time with one you probably used, which is Watts per meter Kelvin.

3:40 The units aren't matching but the guy still multiplied them together. 20 minutes is not hours, it's 0.3333333 hours, so the number and units would both be different.

I’d be curious to know how much power goes into enriching the uranium used in commercial power plants. If a steam cycle is only 30% efficient, and the enriching process consumes a fair amount on its own, what is the efficiency of the complete process?

When you said what a MPC was, I about spit out my drink. Good god that'd far.

5:12 isn’t it the distance between the centre of the two masses and not the surface to surface distance???

I could handle everything physics threw at me in highschool, kWh broke me. After a few hours trying to parse my thoughts on it I gave up trying to understand it and stuck to anything but that.

Speaking of optical fiber and dispersion, soliton pulses are *funky*. I have no idea how it's possible to construct a pulse which *doesn't* change its shape during transmission, taking into account all disturbances.

25:45 it reminded me of Monte Carlo were the deviation of the mean from the correct answer goes as 1/sqrt(sample size).

You mentioned "people who are designing nuclear power plants" like they were some regular dudes and not semigod engineers.

check out part 2, it has sime radiation units!

4:40 I prefer to express Newton's constant in N m²/kg² -- or G = ⅔ ⨯ 10⁻¹⁰ N m²/kg². What use is there in expressing quantities in fundamental units? 20:30 Once in class, I had to come up with an analogy for Cerenkov radiation. I gave a motorboat traveling with a couple waves trailing the boat. 26:30 RMS deviation, random walks, standard deviation, all these are of general application. The speed of the electron in the hydrogen atom being c/137? That's the RMS speed of the electron in its ground state. It's also the speed of the Bohr hydrogen atom at lowest angular momentum. 28:20 Wikipedia's "Deuterium fusion" article tells us that the rate of energy production from protostellar deuterium fusion is proportional to (temperature) to the 11.8th power.

Sir, there's also the 2nd part. Maybe there's more cursed units after all 😂

I find balistic penetration units cursed a bit because you express it by mm of RHA wich is fine for regular solid projectiles. But when you enter chemical projectiles such as HEAT or HESH it gets weird. You see, as armor evolved, so did projectiles, and so did armor in response and so on, so you get stuff like spaced armor, or composite armor wich now has value of RHA that's low, so kinetic projectile can go trough, but high value HEAT or HESH can't, and vice versa. It's kinda like röntgen unit that it's less usefull and more confusing with modern technology.

The people getting the bill work in KW hours...

23:25 it's does make one ponder if this idealized nuclear reactor could be run in micro gravity environment. After all I am pretty sure thats how they make metal ball bearings(freefalling).

Hi Tyler at 19:26 if someone swam down and bear hugged that blue glowing fuel rod assembly how long long would they need to hug it for that to be fatal?

I gotta ask, could the waste heat from a nuclear power plant be used for district heating? Not to mention the waste heat off the cooling ponds? I honestly think nuclear is really under utilized for its waste heat purposes

Check out number 2, he goes over grey there :D

I dont think i want to know anymore

He has a part two you should look at

Why don't we stop light and then look at it and figure out exactly what changes when you look at it. Is it weightless matter when we look at it? Does it spin and not act like a wave anymore? 4d spin?

Again I want to suggest the video “the Scale of Mushroom Clouds”

kwh and MJ is most fun with heat energy, when they coexist, one from electricity and the other from burning fossil fuels or biomass. BTW check out his new video, Curseder units, nuclear engineering comes up there.