Has Google gone MAD?

Posted on 12 January, 2008 by maximinus

... or are they simply honoring Donald Knuth's 70th birthday (which was on the 10th of January) in a cool and somewhat quirky manner?

Google Calculator can now perform calculations in Donald Knuth's units of length, volume and mass - the Potrzebie System, as defined in MAD Magazine issue #33. (Thanks to Jeff Atwood for making the relevant pages available online via his blog, Coding Horror!)

Some samples of calculations in the Potrzebie System and some conversions to SI units:
pi potrzebie in mm
1 dekapotrzebie * 2.3 dekapotrzebie * 3.2 dekapotrzebie in ngogn
e * 42 farshimmelt blintz
1 furshlugginer ngogn in litres
pi hectopotrzebie per hour in furlongs per fortnight

Try it yourself, have some fun... and ponder over what other units Google may add in the future...

Update: Sorry folks, wasn't expecting quite so much load all at once; I've made some server config tweaks which should hopefully speed things up a bit.

Comment by reptilicus, Sunday 13th of January 2008 08:19:46 AM [Reply]

You, sir, are a NYERD.

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I am *not* a New York Esophageal Reflux Disease!

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Comment by Nate, Sunday 13th of January 2008 09:02:58 AM [Reply]

shrunklink was a bad idea. the thing is taking like 20 seconds to load each link.

Comment by maximinus, Sunday 13th of January 2008 12:41:37 PM [Reply]

That's odd - it should be pretty much instant. I used shrunklinks so that I could do some basic tracking - I haven't implemented outgoing link tracking in the blog system, and I wanted to be able to see how many people were going to each link.

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Comment by spiritbaby, Sunday 13th of January 2008 10:30:55 AM [Reply]

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Comment by Bob Holness, Sunday 13th of January 2008 11:09:07 AM [Reply]

I'm not, I'm quite chilled.

Comment by alphachapmtl, Sunday 13th of January 2008 02:18:12 PM [Reply]

all that is useless

Comment by minimus, Monday 14th of January 2008 04:25:13 AM [Reply]

For those familiar with MIT history, the length of the Harvard Bridge in Boston is measured in Smoots (364.4) and is recognized by Google Calculator.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot

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Comment by abb3w, Sunday 13th of January 2008 05:07:35 AM [Reply]

Did they fix the inconsistency in the time units?

Comment by maximinus, Sunday 13th of January 2008 12:39:38 PM [Reply]

I'm not sure; I didn't know there was one. Would you care to elaborate on this inconsistency?