Off topic

I realized today, while playing with unit conversion in Google, that I've been living a lie. Or at least I've been under the misconception about the unit Parsec.

The Other Johns and his nerdy friends would probably laugh at my ignorance, but truth be told, most of us, who haven't been to any other galaxies have no general use for this term. However, my brief encounter with games like Master of Orion and Dune has left me with an appreciation of units that you'll never use.

However, as I said, while I was playing with Google (I was really looking up how much one cup is in dl) I realized that I've been thinking that parsec is the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun, which is known as an "Astronomical Unit". This is of course horridly humanocentric, and cannot be forgiven by the Harkonnen and Ordos. It also reveals that I haven't really bothered to understand what a parsec really means.

As I suspect I'm not the only one who doesn't know this (though I may be the only one who doesn't know, but who cares), I'll make this clear: One parsec is the distance you need to go away from the earth and the sun, where the (mean) distance between them would appear to be one arcsec. One arcsec is 1/60th of an arcminute, which is 1/60th of a degree, which is 1/360th of your field of vision (FOV). That would mean 1/1 296 000 of your field of vision, or rather a little less than a dot. 3.08568025 × 10^16 meters. Pretty far. But hey, it's still an earthcentric measure!

Oh - and I should get back to work.