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Kinda low tech, but post a target like this in your window.

Er, sorry, 70 light years. But that's still a small number of stars.

I used to own an incomplete set of those cards, how happy I was to find them all here. Thanks Zelda

I can only plead ignorance there-- I am a US citizen, after all. :)

The part I was referring to was the section where it discusses the relative amounts of various constituents. Everything is in grams or milligrams. In any case, my research indicates that a calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise one gram of water one degree celsius-- and that what is shown on U.S. food is actually kilocalories (or the capitalized Calories you usually see). That all sounds very much like the Metric system to me. And it is. A joule is a slightly different measurement: the amount of energy required each second to push an ampere of current through an ohm of resistance. There are approximately 4.19 joules in a calorie. My reference materials for this.

When doing so, IBM's GameGrid software typically operated with latencies of 50 microseconds or less, according to Hammer.

I hope thats a typo..

Why? A microsecond is a millionth of a second, fifty should't be that long :)

The electrons move (as a result of an applied voltage) at what is known as the drift velocity. A example in copper is also available.

Current doesn't stop (your "current move, current not move" parenthetical). Current is not a thing, but is a description of a situation: moving charge is a current. An Ampere is defined as one Coulomb of charge passing a reference plane in one second.

How fast a signal propagates down a wire is its group velocity.

The "friction" mentioned by the original poster I interpret to be a flawed understanding of how resisivity works. Electrical signals travelling through resistive materials are attenuated, not slowed down, due to the resistance. Changes in velocity are due to changes in the dielectic constant.

No, the Metric system defines degrees Kelvin as it's standard unit of temperature. Look here and here

Nope, you don't hardly get any less arbitrary than that, do ya? ;-) A unit of measure based on 1/4 of the circumference of the Earth isn't going to be any less arbitrary to ET than the length of some Royal English Dude's, erm... foot.

"The distance from the pole to the equator was divided into ten million parts to constitute the meter "

Now, if you came up with a measure that was based on the wavelength of light emitted by Hydrogen fusion or some other such pan-galactic standard, then you could argue non-arbitrary! :-)

AFAIK, you're wrong. Quick google search yielded this.

It was introduced before Napoleon, BTW.

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