Social distancing needs to be a minimum of 12 feet. I can spit farther than 6 feet without even meaning to.
Edit! I meant to type 6 feet, not 26 feet
The reason it’s as low as 6 is because business owners wanted it to be that close because they wouldn’t be able to have as many people as they would’ve liked in their businesses if it was set to an appropriate number
Let’s do the math. Let’s name the points A B C D, where A and D are separated by 6 feef, and all other point pairs by 6 feet. There fore, ABC and BCD are equilateral triangles of side length 6 feet. This leaves two possibilities for the distance between A and D: either they are the same point, or their distance is twice the height of an equilateral triangle with 6 feet side. Since A and D are clearly distinct, we’ll go with the latter. That makes the distance AD to be equal to 6 feet times the square root of three, giving a value of sqrt(3) feet for one feef.
What dimensional space are the people arranging themselves in?
But seriously, this reminds me of a time at my former (FAANG) employer where HR sent out a 40-minute video about not being an asshole and avoiding lawsuits.
12 minutes or so in, they say “as the number of people in a group increases, the number of potential 1:1 interactions increases exponentially.” I thought “actually n(n-1)/2 but whatever”, and finished the video intending to get on with my life.
My inbox was FULL of engineers who were irate. “HR have proven themselves to be fools!” “I expect the company to never ask me to waste my time on their bullshit again.” “Once again non-technical people talking out their asses.”
HR sent a global apology for the error, asked everybody to not watch the video while they fixed it, and released a patched version the next day.
It bugs me that people will call anything with a positive second derivative “exponentially increasing”. I can do one better: it increases busy-beaver-y! Is that fast enough for people??
Metric is a product of the French Revolution, as well as decimal currency like cents. Some decimalization from the French Revolution didn’t catch on widely, like gradians for measuring angles or decimal minutes, hours, and weeks. The imperial units were standardized by various monarchies (hence the name).
It’s not compatible with their other units. E.g. 1 tesla = 1 Ns/Cm, but imperial uses poundfeet instead of newtons and feet instead of meters. Dimensional analysis with incompatible units is folly.