How much fun would she have been to take classes or lectures with?
What is a nanosecond anyway? Computing pioneer Grace Hopper shows us
How much fun would she have been to take classes or lectures with?
Compared, 1 second and 1 m3 are proprtional to 1 nanosecond and to 1 mm3 respectively. If you have a metric ruler look at 1 mm. Now think of a cube with those sides. Then 1 m cube made of those 1 mm cubes (1000 on each side). That is by the way what 1 billion dollars is if every small cube was 1 dollar. Every layer would be 1 million dollars.
Ms. Hopper uses the traveltime of light, which very few of us have any way of quantifying – not even scientists using it. Scientists think of these things mostly as powers of 10 without getting a real knowlege of them.
All I know is I followed her explanation but not yours. Maybe it’s not about the units used, but the way it’s explained?
Admiral Grace Hopper was a complete bad ass. I have so much respect for her.
Wow, she is a hoot! Thanks for sharing this.
How small is 1 nanossecond? What she pointed out is the distance traveled (1 ft). But how does it give you any understanding of what that time is? How many have an understanding of how far 186 000 miles is (distance traveled per second)?
I was trying to show another way to get a feeling for how many nanoseconds you need to add to get 1 second (most people know how long a second is).