Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/27/1940s-footage-of-man-in-457mph.html
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Wait! “The End” came rather abruptly … what happened? How safe was it?
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Hmm, I see a business opportunity here: “Therapeutic air massage”.
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Did they test him to destruction??
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An accurate portrayal of me waking up each morning and reading the news.
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How are they sure it was 457 mph and not 460? Maybe the guy who went to 460 lost his cheeks?
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No, the test subject went on to become a star in Hollywood.
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I was really hoping someone had modified the footage so that at 457 mph it tore off all his tissue and clothes leaving just a skeleton
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That looks awful. Believe it or not, there is at least one pilot who survived an ejection while traveling faster than the speed of sound. He was so badly thrashed in the ejection that his leg was only attached by an artery. His weapons officer was killed by the same ejection.
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Why continue to use imperial measurements?
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The short answer is the US Congress has a long and distinguish tradition of not getting shit done.
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Neat how it specifies the altitude equivalent. Go go Bernoulli principle!
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Actually, we’ve been looking at the metric system, since the 1700s, when TJ sent a representative to France to get copies of standards.
Best not to be too hasty and make any rash decisions, ya know…
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The Nazis had something similar:
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it was the 40s
What’s that in metric?
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About 61 billion seconds or so
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4.212163486e+52 tp (Planck times) since 1946 (give or take a few months).
I once thought it would be cool to base all our measurements on Planck units. Then I realized how incredibly impractical it would be.
Using the metric system is the key to happiness.
In general, post-metric systems like the USA’s traditional (and most definitely not “Imperial”) measures were chosen because colonial Americans understood the inherent shortcomings of the anthropomorphic (ten fingers, ten toes) metric system, which most modern metric advocates are too ill-informed to comprehend.
I’m trolling, and yet everything I just said was factually correct! Is there an award for that?
