Nalgene: My Personal Myth Buster

[articulate]

Dr. Emmett Brown: No, no, no. This sucker's electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 jigawatts of electricity I need.
Marty McFly: Doc, you don't just walk into a store and buy plutonium. Did you rip that off?
Dr. Emmett Brown: Shhhhhh. Of course. From a group of Libyan nationalists. They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and in turn, gave them a shoddy bomb-casing full of used pinball machine parts! Come on! Let's get you a radiation suit. We must prepare to reload.

why yes you do... at least until Mr. Fusion comes along!

:jump:
You win the random movie quote contest. Excellent work on picking that one up!

I should ask, how many jigawatts are in 156,000 watts?

 

[articulate]

Ya know.....it might just be cheaper to go spend the $5.50 to get a new drinking buddy that looks like your old drinking buddy (pre-abuse). Or, you could spend an extra $1.50 and get a new drinking buddy that looks like this:

Exactly.

:friday:

 

[david despain]

:jump:
You win the random movie quote contest. Excellent work on picking that one up!

I should ask, how many jigawatts are in 156,000 watts?

oh i love random quotes from movies and tv shows. my brothers and i can hold entire converstaions in them. usually use all the kevin smith movies, simpsons, big lebowski, star wars, and the best one to use for quotes is star trek the next generation. of course there are others as well. take note of my sig line...

also i dont think there is a jiga watt. but if its gigawatts then it would be .000156 gigawatts. which by the way is also equal to 209.196 horse power

 

[DaveInDenver]

oh i love random quotes from movies and tv shows. my brothers and i can hold entire converstaions in them. usually use all the kevin smith movies, simpsons, big lebowski, star wars, and the best one to use for quotes is star trek the next generation. of course there are others as well. take note of my sig line...

also i dont think there is a jiga watt. but if its gigawatts then it would be .000156 gigawatts. which by the way is also equal to 209.196 horse power

Back To The Future rules, being a punk kid back then.

The spelling in the script was "jigawatt" according to IMDB. Thing is there is no jigawatt measurement, so we are left to assume they mean either mean gigawatts or they just made up a fictional measurement. A gigawatt (GW) is 1000 megawatts (MW) or 100,000 kilowatts (kW), basically it's 1 billion watts. That's a bunch considering the Hoover Dam produces about 2000 MW or 2 GW for all 17 of its generators combined. Incidentally, you typically consider it takes about 1 kW or so per household, so the Hoover Dam supplies about 1.7 million houses and that 1.21 GW could suppy around a million homes with power!

Now the sticky part is I had a prof who insisted that it's pronouced 'jiga' and actually he's technically right. The root of scientific prefixes is Latin and giga is pronouced correctly with a soft 'g'. It's been hardened mostly by the tech industry here in the US to 'giga' (as in gigabyte), but most older scientists and engineers will still say it with a soft 'g', since they may have also learned Latin when they were younger. So the movie spells it wrong but says it right, if they mean a gigawatt. Personally I think 'jigawatt' sounds better, but 'jigabyte' doesn't. But the argument is that a gigawatt is 1000 watts, while a gigabyte can be defined either as 1000 MB or 1024 MB, depending on who you ask. If you take the literal road, a giga or mega or kilo anything in the binary world is 1024 times the root and so I guess you could say there are two different giga prefixes and so the classic analog one is 'jiga' and the modern digital one is 'giga'. Kinda geeky, eh?

 

[articulate]

Kinda geeky, eh?

Would that be geeky with a hard G or soft G?


GOD dude! I'm pissing my pants your post was so funny!
:xxrotflma

 

[datrupr]

There was nothng "kinda" geeky about your post at all Dave. It was completely geeky, with a hard 'G', Mark. But, it was, as usual, very informative and also quite hysterical. Now, talk about threads going way off topic.

 

[DaveInDenver]

Well, OK, yeah it was a /totally/ geeky train of thought. But, if you say 'geeky' with a soft 'g', it kinda sounds like cheeky. And that can be loosely defined as being basically flippant, as in lacking correct level of seriousness about things. At least that's my understanding of the Brit usage, right?

 

[kcowyo]

From praise of a Nalgene (soft "g") bottle to binary numbers.... :Wow1:

Yes, this thread certainly is "lacking the correct level of seriousness about things." Which is just the way I think the articulate one intended.

Thanks for getting us back on topic Dave! :smiley_drive:

RE binary numbers, I'm not one of the 10 types -

 

[devinsixtyseven]

great thread .

i have only broken a nalgene bottle once, the hard lexan kind...it was full of water, and i dropped it on the concrete as a show of how tough they are. of course, the two or three layers of stickers held it together with only minor leaking, but the weight/incompressibility of the h20 inside cracked it.

empty, we tried to break one...shot, dropped from a 5th story window...nearly indestructible.

-sean

 

[articulate]

great thread .

i have only broken a nalgene bottle once, the hard lexan kind...it was full of water, and i dropped it on the concrete as a show of how tough they are. of course, the two or three layers of stickers held it together with only minor leaking, but the weight/incompressibility of the h20 inside cracked it.

empty, we tried to break one...shot, dropped from a 5th story window...nearly indestructible.

-sean

The hard lexan kind. Yep! Gotta be careful. Nevertheless, it's a tough bottle. You just won't break the white, flexible style. But they take on a stink if you put anything in 'em...like tequila.

 

[paulj]

I had one of the white ones break on me. It was an old one, and had been used constantly to hold cold water in the fridge. I have an older one, with a lid from the same material as the bottle, but that is reserved for special night time use

paulj