Wednesday, June 11, 2008

1.2 million sq. ft.

1,200,000 sq. ft. =
27.55 acres =
0.11 sq. km =
11.2 hectares =
1,111.111 times bigger than our house in Lansing =
1,114,836,480,000,000,038,753,601,580,957,696.00 barns*

Or

1.2 million sq. ft. = 10 minute walk from my office to the front door of the Honeywell plant in Golden Valley.

I've gotten lost very single time I've walked more than 20 feet out of my office door. With a map. Luckily there's a bathroom in the safety department's area, or else I'd have exploded or resorted to leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Which would probably have gotten run over by the NASCAR forklift truck speedway.



*no clue what this 'barns' is, but it's awful damn small. It was just an option on the 'unit conversion' program.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

>*no clue what this 'barns' is, but it's awful damn small.

barns = unit of area introduced during the making of the first atomic bomb, gives an area that neutrons or other particles can hit, name was chosen to confuse the enemy

STFU & GBTW said...

1x10e-24 square cm. derived from the proverbial phrase “side of a barn,”
I believe that it's the reaction cross section of a nuclei, as opposed to the geometric cross section.

Anonymous said...

barn... like "as big as a barn". If you throw a baseball or soccerball or whatever onto a big barn, you are hardly going to miss it... The incredibly tiny area of 1e-24 cm^2 for one individual atom/nucleus is, however, for some other incoming ions/atoms/nucleons hard to miss. Barn is the unit of the cross section which is proportional to the number of reactions. The largest cross sections are of the order of 250 kb (kilobarn), 1 b is something you can easily measure, and 1 nb (nanobarn = 1e-9 b) is a pain in the a**. Neutrino reaction cross sections are often of a few ab (attobarn = 1e-18 b), that's where a 1 cubic km detector such as "ice cube" at the south pole comes in handy.

Gopher MPH said...

well, trust the 3 men I know who have (more or less) studied physics to know this. And, no offense meant to my STFU&GBTW, I was sure Peter knew this off hand. I should have known - after discovering that it had something to do with nuclear physics, - that Dr. Atom Smasher would not only have known, but had a nicely worded explaination.

How in the world is it that I know so many physicists, and why are they all German?