Re: [Phys-l] Fun/cool unit conversion example?

["Clements, Gregory" <clements@mlc.edu>]

I usually have students convert 1 microCentury to minutes.  It turns
out to be around 53 minutes, which is close to the length of our class
session.  I have them do the conversion near the end of class and then
ask them if it seemed like they were in class for a century or a
microCentury. A little humor on the first day of class is appreciated
by anxious students.

This conversion gives them some practice with a prefix and powers of
10.  I also point out that they can use the common conversions from
century to 100 years, 365.25 days per year, etc. to get to the minutes
result, or use the conversion table in the front inside cover of the
book to convert from years to seconds and then convert to minutes.

Greg Clements
Midland Lutheran College
Fremont, Nebraska

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 3:16 PM, Jeff Loats <jeff.loats@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> On the first day of class I do a brief example to illustrate unit conversion
> (snore) and I usually spice it up by making it very silly (such as density
> measured in gigaslugs per parsec cubed).
>
> I thought I would ask here to see if anyone had a neat unit conversion
> example that left you with a sense of "huh, I didn't know that" or "that was
> cool!" or something similar.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jeff
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-- 
Prof. Greg Clements
clements@mlc.edu