UKH

While out for a spin on the bike today I passed many groups of kids out making their own fun. Most were on bikes, they were grubby, wet, playing in the burn, throwing stones at targets etc. Just being kids and being outside, some of them were likely some way from home, judging by how many houses were around! It was very reminiscent of how I used to play as a kid, and something that I have often thought lacking in the current generation. I guess they are now not going into each others houses and being outside is becoming really normal. 

I really hope this new found freedom of being outside all the time becomes normal again and that this time has really taught people how good it feels to be out and about.

I'm sure these kids are learning tonnes of life skills out there that they would never learn in school. Maybe they will be better rounded people from living through this period? One can hope!

It’s good to see positive messages here for change. 

I've appreciated having a smaller world for a bit. Ofcourse, I've missed some stuff, but found there are other things I won't be going back to - I don't really miss the pub or takeaway coffee. 

Quite right.  Nothing is so overrated as book learnin'

Ahhh, come to our school and they do tons (tonnes) of both!

I have no idea who has disliked this. Your school sounds great. 

Every comment on this thread has a dislike. I think someone is grumpy that they were not out playing on their bike too!

People must be using the new User Option: ‘Auto Dislike Everything’... 

It must be brexiters objecting to tonnes.

I'm fully metric in all measurements! I'm part of the modern world

I prefer the metric sh*tload myself.

“There are two kinds of country – Those that use the metric system, and those that have landed on the Moon.”  

I get the joke, but weren't Russia (well Soviet Union) the first to land on the moon?!?! 

They were, although I’m not sure that ‘landed’ is the best description of what happened.  

Didn't the USA also slam a lander into Mars as half the team were working in miles, the other half in kilometres?

This! My job gets me to travel around all the world, which I see as a huge perk since it's usually easy to combine a couple of days' work with 3-4 days of exploring amazing places. So far I have had to cancel two trips to the US, one to SEA and several shorter European trips.

I thought would really miss this, but the quiet productiveness of working from home has been really good for me (did a lot of remote work before anyway but from anywhere in the world). I haven't missed the traveling at all so far.

And, at the risk of sounding grumpy, three months without tedious family get-togethers has also been a big plus (big thing here in Spain for extended family to eat together at weekends).  

There were several incidents with mars landers, but I went to a guest lecture of the guy in charge of the computer forensics of that famous incident. The conclusion after months of looking at data was that it had either "landed hard" on Mars, or missed Mars altogether. So they narrowed it down to the lost probe being "somewhere in the solar system".

I believe that there was a slight misunderstanding

I understood this to be a issue with assuming the inch was 25mm rather than 25.4mm

Which would be bad enough if you were cutting a piece of wood but magnified over the distance to another planet probably works out as a huge distance!

Some mathematician is probably working it out as I type!  

I love how UKC threads can take amazing tangents! I expected people to reminisce about childhood adventures etc, but we are on moon landings and the metric system! Lol

At a Durham university adult education course back in 1982 we had to program an air traffic control simulation involving rectangular to polar coordinate transformation and back for every point plotted on a large VDU display (iirc it was 1024x1024 resolution, very rare for the time, bleeding edge hardware and amazing to us plebs - a Perq).  At quadrant boundaries the aircraft split into two tracks heading at 45 degrees to the original  bearing, ie at 90 degrees to each other.   I discovered that this was simply because we were using single precision floating point PASCAL variables instead of double precision.  So what the consequences of assuming 2.5 cm would be boggles the mind!  Even though I never learned my times tables at school I could remember 2.54 cm from being about 9 or 10 and never forgot it.  In my mind you remembered it because after the 2.5 the number sloped slightly downwards, pictorially thinking.

my memory is that it was confusion between feet per second and metres per second

in them days there were just "landings" and "soft landings"

The middle part of your post has convinced me maths is best left to those who are good at it!  

The first and last parts are more my level.  

they were also the first to land an unmanned lander, retrieve a soil sample, and return it to earth, not to mention their unmanned lunar rover.

I occasionally picture a UKC Speaker saying 'order order' in vain attempts to bring threads back on topic again.

I can remember playing at building a den in the woods with friends of mine, and climbing trees and generally faffing about outside, and cycling out to the Peak from my early teens with friends.

Edit: Playing together like children naturally do without adults intervening is important developmentally, to do with learning how to negotiate and resolve conflict, and assessing risks when doing things outside. Accidents are meant to be too, if they're not too serious, in helping to build the ability to bounce back from setbacks, I've been enjoying seeing parents spending more time with their children who live on my road, seeing their parents relaxing and them 'vibe together' outside.

The error is a mere ~4 million miles...

it would have been smaller in the early Universe

btw, the likes dislikes appear to be quantum fluctuations, the normal outcome being short lived virtual particles, and which thus usually have a net value of zero but occasionally give rise to a real Disputron that hangs about a bit