# Talk:Metre per second

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## 1km/s

My maths may be being particularly ropey this evening, but 1 kilometre per second ≈ 2.237 miles per hour (approximate)? That seems a 'touch' low (though I would not like to trust my late night mathematical abilities to calculate it correctly). Might there be a decimal point in the wrong place? KRMike (talk) 23:04, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

snail recordspeed is a broken link 62.163.35.121 1 July 2005 10:22 (UTC)

Thanks. Corrected now. Bobblewik  (talk) 1 July 2005 10:55 (UTC)

## Format

The page has a table at the moment and some of the numbers on the left don't coincide with the facts on the right. Could we just make this a list of sorts with things like:

• 1m/s typical human walking speed; speed of action potentials in brain
• 586,000 miles/sec ~speed of light

Seems like something in this format might fix the alignment problems, though, on looking at the preview it still isn't quite right; I think the text is too close to the numbers. The original table could of course be fixed itself but I don't know how. Snowmanmelting 02:30, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

## Energy and Power

I was looking over here, and it says that accelerating a 3000 ton object to 120,000 kilometers a second will have the force of around 1E22 joules, a rather high number. I don't quite get how they got this number. Anyone care to explain? The Gwai Lo 02:11, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

It appears to have been calculated using the formula for kenetic energy: ${\displaystyle E_{\rm {k}}={\frac {1}{2}}mv^{2}}$. Note that joules measure energy, not force. Indefatigable 20:44, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
the MAC cannon article is about a pure sci-fi thing though this isn't clearly mentioned and the references etc. rather make it look like a page describing a real thing. I think this should be fixed. anyway, on earth nobody could even accelerate a gun bullet to that speed, which is over 1/3 of the speed of light, so the classical mv²/2 formula isn't good anymore, either, and relativistic formula should be used instead. — MFH:Talk 22:47, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

## benz unit

are there references for the "benz unit" ? never heard of that. — MFH:Talk 22:39, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Benz Unit

The references you request disappeared along with a large amount of discussion. For example, all of my postings, references and arguments were deleted.

Some online references:

[1]

benz (Bz)

   a proposed metric unit of speed, equal to 1 meter per second or about 2.237 miles per hour. The unit would honor Karl F. Benz (1844-1929), the German engineer generally regarded as the inventor of the automobile.


[2]

Measurement unit: benz

Full name: benz Category type: speed Scale factor: 1 SI unit: meter/second The SI derived unit for speed is the meter/second. 1 meter/second is equal to 1 benz.

Perhaps the most respected historical discussion -- including several pages are devoted to the battles between strict conservatives and indulgent liberals, using Hertz (cycles per second) and the parallel word Benz (meters per second) among several examples of tendentious arguments for elimination -- may be found in H. Arthur Klein: The World of Measurements: Masterpieces, Mysteries and Muddles of Metrology, Simon and Schuster (1974), Allen & Unwin (1975), ISBN 0-04-500024-7, who reports:

"… other units of rate have been proposed and have received fairly substantial support. One example is the benz, named for the pioneer German automotive engineer and inventor Karl Benz (1844-1929). The benz, if ever adopted, would be a velocity of 1 meter per second (1 m/s). Support for the benz unit proposal has come principally, as might be expected, from German sources."

The most respected encyclopedia (on units of measure) references the benz unit several time, correctly noting that the official assembly has not made the unit part of the formal system, and it is now not in much use:

Encyclopedia of Scientific Units, Weights & Measures (c) 2003 Springer Verlag -Cardarelli. ISBN 185233682X.

BTW: Thanks to the saviors of this entry. Within a few hours after I protested it being taken down, the strict Notability folks moved in force seeking from the force of their opinion a speedy deletion. In published research on early indicators of an edit war, this kind of "piling on" often is a precursor.

Since the "skeletonizing" (versus "elaborating") cognitive style seems a matter of heritable temperament that is genetically maintained across several species, it surely makes a contribution to human ecology. Every stable ecosystem needs come combination of predators and parasites to clean out the unfit and excessive population growth.

That's why in my deleted posts I attempted to introduce a fitness standard (efficient codings that speed memory, problem solving, and creativity) as a measure for Notability considered more as merit than popularity. I hope thereby we can escape the dead-end of the mammalian pillar of sociobiology discussed by EO Wilson - bands based on bullies. Better would be a hybrid ecology based on shared knowledge and merited competencies such as might be shown to the world by Wikipedia.

(Back in the early '70's & '80's I managed a similar attempt at NSF with M\$/yr, and ten thousand professors participating, leveraging computer networks. It mostly collapsed with the Reagan cutbacks. Although we found that freshmen could contribute articles about as well as name-chair professors, the NSF requirement of working within the Guild made it vulnerable to resource reliability.

Wikipedia has succeeded brilliantly, apparently for reasons similar to why big, fierce predators are rare. Notwithstanding our earlier failure, it appears there may be some past lessons that might help Wikipedia overcome some serious problems now. Like, as mentioned above, culling guides based on evidence-based merit rather than personal politics, cultural bias, or temperament. These kinds of local cultures scare off most folks; I've seen estimates that the unbuffered presence of these traits lead to the departure of about 80% of the population that is otherwise fit.) GreggEdwards (talk) 21:07, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Oops! I hadn't noticed. They bullied did win, despite my protests. So far as I can tell, they never addressed my arguments, simply piling on with the force of their opinion.

Other reference tools give a headline status to the unit benz. Now, it has been eradicated by a band who ignored arguments, and simply wreaked their will. Perhaps later, when I have more time, I'll attempt a reversion. GreggEdwards (talk) 21:18, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't believe I saw your participation at the deletion discussion for benz as a standalone article. However, the consensus from that discussion was to merge information about the informal unit into this article (metre per second) and redirect the original title to here. I was actually the editor who performed the merger, and as you can see, the salient information is indeed present here, including the Klein citation you reference above, along with a couple of others. I've just tweaked the content to cite that Cardarelli source; I had overlooked it during my earlier referencing. Ultimately, community consensus on having a standalone article is unlikely to change; the coverage given in those sources is not "substantive", but this solution ensures that the information is still available to the project's readers, in a place that, if anything, is more visible than it would otherwise have been. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 21:34, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

## Full-width symbol?

Is there any information on the usage of the character ㎧? Is it a full-width symbol which is only used in East-Asian languages for compatibility reasons? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.57.214.104 (talk) 08:29, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

## Original Research?

"Although m·s−1 is an SI derived unit, it could be viewed as more fundamental than the metre, since the metre is now derived from the speed of light in vacuum, which is defined as exactly 299 792 458 m·s−1 by the BIPM."

I noticed this statement while I was browsing, and I thought it looked like original research, as defined under the WP:NOR. I looked at the source provided, and it backs up my conclusion. No where does it say anything about m/s being a more "fundamental" unit than the meter.GreenWolf013 (talk) 02:21, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Removed it. Not only would it be original research, but it's simply wrong - they have the definition backwards: The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second. Starglow42 (talk) 14:32, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

## Redundancy

I find it a slight bit redundant to use ≈ and then say approximately — Preceding unsigned comment added by TheKing44 (talkcontribs) 21:20, 23 April 2013 (UTC)