{"id":379,"date":"2006-07-10T15:38:34","date_gmt":"2006-07-10T15:38:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/10\/extremely-dorky-poll\/"},"modified":"2006-07-10T15:38:34","modified_gmt":"2006-07-10T15:38:34","slug":"extremely-dorky-poll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/10\/extremely-dorky-poll\/","title":{"rendered":"Extremely Dorky Poll"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rob Knop offers a nice discussion of the speed of light<\/a>, in response to last night’s question<\/a>. This post is not about that, though you should go read it.<\/p>\n

This post is about my odd reaction to Rob’s title: “‘Speed of Light’ : a bad name for a great fundamental constant?” The notion of a “great fundamental constant” sort of suggests the possiblity of a not-great fundamental constant. Which leads to the extremely dorky poll questions:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. What is your favorite fundamental constant<\/a>?<\/li>\n
  2. What is your least favorite fundamental constant?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Post your answers in the comments (I’m too lazy to set up clicky-button poll software). My answers are below the fold.<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    This isn’t something I’ve given a great deal of thought to (honestly, if I weren’t a little punchy from lack of sleep, I probably wouldn’t’ve gotten this far on the topic in the first place), but I’d probably pick Planck’s Constant as my favorite. It’s the one I know if the most different units (2255, if you measure time in microseconds, mass in atomic mass units, and distance in hundreds of Bohr radii), and it’s connected with the wave nature of matter, which is one of the coolest things going.<\/p>\n

    The speed of light is definitely in the top five, though.<\/p>\n

    My least favorite? Probably Boltzmann’s Constant, because I can never remember the damn exponent.<\/p>\n

    Special bonus poll question: Is this the dorkiest poll ever?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Rob Knop offers a nice discussion of the speed of light, in response to last night’s question. This post is not about that, though you should go read it. This post is about my odd reaction to Rob’s title: “‘Speed of Light’ : a bad name for a great fundamental constant?” The notion of a… Continue reading Extremely Dorky Poll<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-silliness","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}