I’ve been bored and dillydallying around with the Google Calculator. I read all of the sites that have found nifty features but I never saw this one and searching google for “inf arcseconds” brings up less than nothing!
170 ! = inf arcseconds
Anyone know what this means?
Inf is short for infinite. The Google Calculator thought you were asking about infinite numbers of arcseconds.
I reckon its tried to give you 170! in arcseconds (i.e. convert 170! degrees into arcseconds which are 1/3600 of a degree)and due to the very large nature of 170! it’s come up with an infinty as an answer.
Google is doing two things here:
Since 170! is such a large number (approx. 7 × 10[sup]306[/sup]), Google throws up its hands and just calls it infinite – inf when it does the unit conversion.
By the way one second of arc is pretty small; it takes 3600 arcseconds to add up to one degree; one arcsecond of latitude on our 8000-mile wide earth is only a 100 foot trek,
I see it now. MC Master of Ceremonies already noted the conversion into arcseconds, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Google is trying to do some weird unit conversions involving inches and seconds.
This query gives:
Note: compare my last query with the OP’s original query:
Mine: 170!+seconds+in
OP’s: 170!+in+seconds
You use “in” when converting from one unit to another. For example, 170! seconds in hours. In this case, the OP didn’t want to convert units.
This gives the correct answer that the OP was looking for:
It’s nothing to do with inches. Note that “168! in seconds” works just fine.
Now theoretically, the right answer to this is “1.497e+312 arcseconds”. I guess when the result is unitless, it interprets “seconds” as “arcseconds”, which is reasonable.
The thing is, IEEE double-precision floating point numbers have an upper limit of 2[sup]1024[/sup] = 1.798e+308. Any number bigger than this will be infinity.
And I’m guessing that it’s considering the original figure to be in radians, not degrees. Confirming this: The query “1 in seconds” turns into “1 = 206 264.806 arcseconds”. This is the correct conversion from radians to arcseconds. And anyone in a technical field will also agree that it’s correct to interpret an angle of “1” as meaning “1 radian”.
Meanwhile, when Demostylus entered “170! seconds in”, the Google parser read that as “(170 factorial) (seconds) (inches)”, and assumed that he wanted that put into standard units. Apparently, Google’s standard units for “time * length” are “m s”, or meters times seconds, so it converted the inches to meters, and left the seconds as is. Since there wasn’t a conversion forcing its interpretation of the units in this case, it kept the seconds as seconds, rather than arcseconds.
What it comes down to is that Google actually seems too smart for its own good, here. In each case, it finds a valid answer to the question, and doesn’t realize that it shouldn’t have found an answer and instead returned an error. The answer was right; the question was wrong.