Le Gran K

I know a lot of you morons already heard that the International Prototype Kilogram has been, um, evaporating or something.

Sheesh, you'd think they'd put the bong and tweezers away for the picture

Even I already knew this, and I'm a retarded snaggle-toothed hunchback.

But it's an uninspiring blogging day, so this post is for those of you who are not so geeky that this is old news, but geeky enough that this is still interesting.

Now, two U.S. professors -- a physicist and mathematician -- say it's time to define the kilogram in a new and more elegant way that will be the same today, tomorrow and 118 years from now. They've launched a campaign aimed at redefining the kilogram as the mass of a very large -- but precisely-specified -- number of carbon-12 atoms.

"Our standard would eliminate the need for a physical artifact to define what a kilogram is," said Ronald F. Fox, a Regents' Professor Emeritus in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "We want something that is logically very simple to understand."

Their proposal is that the gram -- 1/1000th of a kilogram -- would henceforth be defined as the mass of exactly 18 x 14074481 (cubed) carbon-12 atoms.

You know what would be funny? If they found out years later that the redundant glass domes are actually causing the loss of mass somehow.

At the link, another story on what the Australians plan to do about it.
Silicon sphere, baby. Oh yeah.

posted by Laura. at 10:31 AM

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