Identify this boat: A Weird Units challenge for Metric/Imperial debaters

[marshmat]

Hi everyone,

A challenge here from the Metric vs Imperial poll . I'm putting it in a new open-discussion thread so more of you will have a chance to give it a shot. Prove your masterful command of the language of engineering by figuring out:

What boat am I describing here?
LOA 0.20202 chains
LWL 1.2347x10^-7 nanoparsecs
Beam 225.7 jows
Displacement, in race trim, without crew 3.55x10^28 amu
Sail area in racing trim 7.06x10^28 barns
Speed record for the class 102.9 hands per microfortnight

No Google Converter, guys, you have to figure this out for yourselves to truly feel like you won the challenge!

The answer will be posted... let's say tomorrow or Thursday. Take yer guesses!

[CTMD]

Moth.

Length is about right and its the only class I know that talks about speed records.

[marshmat]

OK, two more hints:
- That speed 'record' (unofficially held by Mark Denzer) is not officially ratified, as the WSSRC does not track this class
- It was made an Olympic class in A.H. 1417

[Crag Cay]

49er.

I shall add the fact it's .20202 times the length of a cricket pitch to my trivial knowledge.

[masalai]

13.333 ft loa???????? 66ft to a chain

[Guest62110524]

10454.64 mm
but what the heck is a micro? there is no def of this is rel to sp.

[CTMD]

Originally Posted by whoosh

10454.64 mm
but what the heck is a micro? there is no def of this is rel to sp.

1/1000000

[Guest62110524]

well that makes it speeed 3.512, mm per fortnight, , duh, puzzled, maybe its a glazier
well if I was a mathmaticien, I would not be building boats

[masalai]

31.14km/h (19.33miles/h)???? OK so we have covered 'imperial measure' land surveyors, horse owners, now a contribution from an astrophysicist, an archaeologist or medical doctor? then I am confused by "amu" and "barns" and the rules say NO GOOGLE which I presume also means "wikipaedia" and other online search options

but to hazard a guess, a moth of laser class seems in the range...

[CTMD]

you'll need a nuclear physicist. From memory a "barn" is a unit of atomic area. but physics was a long time ago...

Assuming its a metric unit (and therefor related directly to metres) and going for realistic numbers I'm going to guess the sail area is 7.06 sq.m.

0.70 sq.m and 70 sq.m don't tally to the other dimensions.

[masalai]

CTMD, the LOA was not metric it was an old imperial land measuring system a chain was 66ft or 1/80th of a mile (British @ 5280 ft as opposed to Nautical of 6080 ft) and I guess the one Whoosh partially got, was "hands" to measure the height etc., of horses...

So convert the given scale to feet/imperial or metric using your metric conversion calculator...

[CTMD]

True but if I'm right about barn being a nuclear measurement then you can bet your house its metric.

[CTMD]

Olympic class just under 14' it has to be a laser

[Guest62110524]

Originally Posted by CTMD

Olympic class just under 14' it has to be a laser

my good fellow, dont be daft, glaziers to not have sails!
on a more serious note, wait til ancienne Kayaker, wakes up, he,ll solve the mathi n a nano wotsit

[marshmat]

Chains - One chain is 66 feet, or 1/80 of a statute mile (in metric, that's 20.1168 m). Thus our little boat is 4.06 m, or 13'10", long.

Nanoparsecs - This is a bit of an absurd unit. A parsec, 3.0857x10^16 m, is the distance from our Sun at which a star has a parallax of one arc-second, viewed from Earth. Thus, a nanoparsec is 30,857 km, or about three-quarters of the circumference of the Earth. Our mystery boat, then, is 3.81 m (12'6") on the waterline.

Jows- this is an obsolete Indian unit of length, roughly equal to 6.3 mm or 1/4 inch. Our boat's beam, then, is 1.42 m or 4'7".

amu, or atomic mass units- one amu is defined as 1/12 the mass of an isolated Carbon-12 atom at rest in its ground state. That is to say, it is the approximate mass of a proton or neutron, 1.660x10^-27 kg. This puts our mystery boat's dry weight at about 59 kg.

Barns- A barn is 10^-28 square metres, roughly the cross-sectional area of a uranium nucleus. It's commonly used in nuclear medicine and high-energy physics to calculate collision probabilities. The name comes from a few American nuclear physicists joking during the Second World War that shooting things at uranium nuclei was like "hitting the broad side of a barn". (See also the harder-to-hit "shed", equal to 10^-24 barns). So our little boat has, you guessed it Chris, a 7.06 square metre (75 sq.ft) sail in its normal configuration.

Hands per microfortnight- Here I'm just messing with you A hand is 1/3 of a foot (or 4"), a fortnight is two weeks (1,209,600 seconds). Therefore a microfortnight is 1.21 seconds, and a hand per microfortnight is 0.275 feet per second. So our boat's "unofficial" speed is 16.8 knots, the current claimant being Mark Denzer of Honolulu. Interestingly, the microfortnight is a fairly common unit in computing science, dating from the VMS operating system; it is used to force users to really, really think before they mess around with settings.

A.H. refers to the Islamic lunar calendar, which has 354 or 355 days to the year and began in 622 AD. Thus, A.H. 1417 refers to 1996 A.D., the year of the Atlanta Olympics.


Chris Tucker, you win a free pint next time you're in Kingston, Ontario

It is, indeed, a Laser.