《那些古怪又讓人憂心的問題》第21期:短回答環節(2)
A. A HOUSE IN A very rainy place, like the Alaska panhandle, might receive close to 4 meters of rain per year. Water turbines can be pretty efficient. If the house has a footprint of 1500 square feet and gutters 5 meters off the ground, it would generate an average of less than a watt of power from rainfall, and the maximum electricity savings would be:
The rainiest hour on record as of 2014 occurred in 1947 in Holt, Missouri, where about 30 centimeters of rain fell in 42 minutes. For those 42 minutes, our hypothetical house could generate up to 800 watts of electricity, which might be enough to power everything inside it. For the rest of the year, it wouldn't come close.
截至2014年，有記錄的最大降雨量發生在1947年，美國密蘇里州的霍爾特在42分鐘內降雨量高達30釐米。在這42分鐘裏，我們假想屋子裏的發電機理論上能夠發出800瓦的電力，也許能夠驅動屋子裏的所有東西。那其他時候呢？差遠了。If the generator rig cost $100, residents of the rainiest place in the US-Ketchikan, Alaska-could potentially offset the cost in under a century.
如果一個發電機價值100美金，那麼住在美國最多雨的地方（阿拉斯加凱奇坎）的人們或許能在一個世紀內賺回這些錢。
Q. Using only pronounceable letter combinations, how long would names have to be to give each star in the universe a unique one-word name?
Q．如果只用可以讀得出來的字母組合，給宇宙中每顆星星都用一個單詞起一個獨一無二的名字，那麼這名字會有多長？-Seamus Johnson
——謝默斯•約翰遜A. THERE ARE ABOUT 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe. If you make a word pronounceable by alternating vowels and consonants (there are better ways to make pronounceable words, but this will do for an approximation), then every pair of letters you add lets you name 105 times as many stars (21 consonants times 5 vowels). Since numbers have a similar information density
A．宇宙裏大約有300000000000000000000000顆行星。如果你通過交替使用元音和輔音的方法（當然有更好的製造可讀單詞的辦法，但是這樣就夠了）拼出一個可讀的單詞，那麼每增加一對元音輔音字母就能使你能命名的名字數量擴大105倍（21輔音×5元音）。而由於數字的信息密度與之相近-100 possibilities per character
每一對數字就有100種可能-this suggests the name will end up being about as long as the total number of stars:
這意味着名字的長度會和星星數量不相上下：The stars are named Joe Biden.
我們用約瑟夫拜登給星星命名I like doing math that involves measuring the lengths of numbers written out on the page (which is really just a way of loosely estimating log10x). It works, but it feels so wrong.
我做數學時喜歡那些需要數打印在紙上的數字有多長的題目（本質就是估算以10爲底的對數的大小），這個方法確實可行，但總覺得怪怪的。
