Referring to "25 centimeters per year" as "so fast it can be seen from space" is so funny to me.
We have very good satellites! Lots of things can be seen from space. "can be seen from space" is an awful way to provide readers intuition for the scale of something.
Referring to "25 centimeters per year" as "so fast it can be seen from space" is so funny to me.
We have very good satellites! Lots of things can be seen from space. "can be seen from space" is an awful way to provide readers intuition for the scale of something.
We're at the point that "so slow/little it can only be seen from space" is a better description of our current technology.
Ya if anything the real take away is that our satellites are very impressive!
It seems you're implying this isn't very fast - ~10 inches a year is extremely fast for this type of activity.
It is very fast, Mexico City has serious problems.
My point is that "can be seen from space" is an awful way to communicate that. It provides no useful intuition for the scale of "10 inches per year".
They have to adapt somehow to the intelligence of target audience.
Discussion (220 points,5 days ago, 73 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47974682