I wasn't planning on making a sequel to this post. Frankly, I didn't think there was much else to say.

But then I was reading What If? 2 by Randall Munroe. This is not a paid promotion or an advertisement, but GO FRIGGIN READ IT. And the first one, for that matter. In one of the sections, he brings up in a footnote that the distance light travels in one nanosecond is roughly 11.8 inches: a distance, he notes, that is "frustratingly close to a foot," and then jokingly proposes we redefine the foot to exactly one light nanosecond.

So of course I'm going to do that right here and now.

First up, we need the speed of light. 299,792,458 m / s: a frighteningly strange number. In most science classes you'll round it to 300,000,000; or 2.99e8 if you aren't a casual.

Next, we need to convert that to feet. I totally did this completely be hand and didn't use google converters to get 983,571,056.43045, which I'm going to round to 983,571,056 to give the future generations something to complain about.

There we have the speed of light per second in feet; but we need to crunch it down to one nanosecond. To do that all you need to do is shift the decimal up nine slots, giving us about 0.9835... feet. I used another handy-dandy calculator series of hand calculations to get roughly 11.802 inches.

Wonderful! We've successfully proven that Mr. Munroe was correct. Now we can move along to the cooler bits.

So what happens if we redefine the foot to exactly one light-nanosecond?

Well, my friends.

The foot would go from how we know it today

to just about almost as big as we know it today.

In other words, I need a visual. Unfortunately, most paper isn't quite a foot on the long edge, so I found a 6-inch notecard instead (and completely on accident, too. I was planning on scaling one foot down to an inch but got lucky).

So here's six inches:

Compared to how long six inches should be:

So what happens to our other units when we make this conversion?

Well, everything (in the imperial system) becomes approximately 0.0165% smaller. If we kept the mile as 5280 feet (which is the worst number), then the length of it would change to about 5192 Old Feet (si).

I looked up the new feet-to-meter conversion, hoping it would be a bit closer to a 3:1. Now instead of 3 feet making up 0.9144 meters, 3 feet makes up 0.899 meters; which is so close to just flat-out 0.9. This actually comes out surprisingly close to simply 35.5 New Inches (si) (it's roughly 35.406). For all intents and purposes, we could simply say a meter is "three feet minus half an inch," which is way better than "so, like... three feet? But... wait. Is it more or less? *Looks up conversion* okay, so... one meter is 39.37 inches. So like... three feet plus three point three inches, I guess? Or maybe three point four... I dunno."

So we did it, right?

hahahahahahahahahahaha

hahaha

no

No, there are more units in the Imperial System that we use all the time.

Okay, but, for the record, I won't be going into all of them. If you want to, go ahead and multiply them by 0.9835. By all means, go redefine the "chain" and the "furlong" or whatever the heck a "twip" is. It's a bit more complicated to convert units of area and volume, so I'm going to go into those next.

First up: the acre.

This is defined as 4840 square yards, which is just about as unhelpful a number as it gets. It isn't even a perfect square: it's roughly 69 (nice) point 5701 yards across, assuming we have a perfectly square acre. That makes 208.71 Old Feet (si), or 2504.52 Old Inches (si) on edge, which are both numbers we can plug our handy-dandy converter onto. We get a brand-new acre side of 205.2666 Old Feet (si), or 68.4222 Old Yards (si). Squaring that, we get 4681.597 square yards for one acre.

I was wrong. That number is just about unhelpful as it gets.

But we'll get to fixing that later. Next up we have our primary unit of volume in imperial: Fluid Ounces. These are how we define pints, quarts, and gallons... and also "gills," apparently. A fl oz is roughly 1.7339 cubic inches, which is awful. Fortunately, it's still just math, and -

WAIT! FADRAN!

We can't just change the definition of a fluid ounce that easily!

Why's that?

Because it's defined by one 160th of a gallon, or how much space ten gallons of water takes up! If you changed the fluid ounce, you'd have to change literal friggin water: another near constant of the universe!

Hrm. You're right of course, me.

Of course I am.

And beautiful.

Oh, shut up. *Blushes*

So now we've stumbled upon a new dynamic: fixing other imperial units of measurement. We've completely redone single-dimension units, but from what we've seen so far it's probably for the best that we do two and three-dimensional measurements individually as well.

Let's go back to the acre real quick. It's a unit of area, which means it can be defined in terms of squares. That means that we should probably find a perfect square that's pretty close to current definition and go from there. Currently it's 4640 square yards, so we want to be in the high-ish 4000s ballpark. I looked up a list of perfect squares and apparently there's a perfectly good 4624 that we can use, or 68 * 68.

I was curious as to how this stacked up in terms of Old Feet - y'know, to know how much the farmers have to re-measure their fields or whatever. 4640 Old Yards squared is... well, 4640 Old Yards squared. I don't really know how to visualize that. The same goes for 4624 New Yards squared, which comes out to roughly 4472.66688 Old Yards squared.

That's quite a way's off, isn't it? Nearly two hundred (old) yards squared.

So I went to the next perfect square. 4761. If we make the New Acre 4761 New square Yards, then it comes out to about 4605.183 Old Yards squared. Now we're only off by about 35 Old Yards squared, which I personally think is a great improvement

But that's not all.

Because you see

4761

is

So now we have to worry about gallons and pints and quarts and scud. Now, many of you should argue that we should just stick to metric units of volume instead of imperial. After all, one cubic millimeter of water (or "millileter") equates to EXACTLY one gram.

Here's why you're wrong.

One gram is not some magic number. It, as much as anything else, is a contrived unit. Now you might argue that one mole of a given element gives you its atomic weight in grams, and therefore the unit is still superior: but you're wrong AGAIN. You FOOL. I mean, look at Avagadro's Constant! 6.02214076×10^23? Do you call that clean? No! It, as much as anything else, is completely contrived. The gram is not magically equal to "exactly" something of something.

Basically what I'm saying is that you can't hate on gallons for being "ten pounds of water," because a pound is just as arbitrary a number as a kilogram is. Are the numbers associated with it worse? Yes. Is the metric system still way more useful in every situation ever? Of course! But that's as far as the superiority goes: both systems are still completely arbitrary.

'Course, the gallon was defined back in the 1800s. It needs some fixing, most likely.

For y'alls information, the gallon was defined first in 1824 as the volume ten pounds of room temperature water takes up (room temperature so that it hasn't expanded or contracted; ten because that's a good number). It was then quartered into - you guessed it - a quart, which was in turn halved into a pint. A fluid ounce is 1/20th of a pint (and a gill is 1/4 of a pint). A gallon is 160 pints. 

What this means is that we probably shouldn't change it, on second thought. It's based almost entirely on constants outside of the rest of the imperial system: and good constants at that.

But I was curious, so I started by figuring out how many New cubic Inches an Old Gallon would be. Wikipedia tells me a gallon is 277.42 cubic inches (correct to five significant figures). That means 6.519768931 inches on edge. Plug in our converter and BAM: 6.41436427437 inches on edge, or 263.913 cubic inches. Personally I think that "almost 264" is better than "277 and a half-ish." Still... it isn't that great a number.

It was then that I realized there was something else we could change in order to make ourselves a cleaner gallon:

The definition of a pound

because hoo boy is this one stupid.

Take a good look at this:

• Currently, a pound is officially known as an "avoirdupois pound."
• It is equal to 0.45359237 kg.
• It's also equal to 16 avoirdupois ounces. What is an avoirdupouis ounce? Arbitrary, is what it is.

We can do better. But where to start?

I decided to reverse-engineer this one. There isn't jack scud we can do about water's density (and believe me; people have tried), so let's use that. A gallon is roughly equivalent to 4.54609 Liters. That's pretty close to a better number: let's go from there.

Let's redefine a gallon to 4.5 Liters. That's a good number.

Next up we take how much water can fit in that (4.5 kilograms) and divide that by ten.

A pound is now 0.45 kilograms.

Math is fun!

The New Gallon (si) is 274.607 Old Inches, or ~270.1 (270.0759845) New Inches. Much cleaner!

Let's review:

• The Foot has been redefined to "1 Light Nanosecond."
• All one-dimensional units of measurement are reduced by 0.0165%, or to 0.9835 times their original size.
• We overhauled the Acre, making it 4761 New Yards squared.
• The gallon has been redefined to 4.5 liters. The pound has been redefined alongside it to 0.45 kilograms.

Everything is better.

VOTE FADRAN FOR 2022 PRESIDENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL BEREAU OF WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

• A: Ay, ey, e (as in "egg"), ee ("yeehaw" but REALLY dang western), aha (if you don't give graham fifty extra syllables)
• B: Be, bee, beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, bea (as in bean), being (if you're british), and beh (if you're britisher)
• C: See, "joe mama" ( @Atusiff hijacked my keyboard )
• D: Dee, di, (this one's boring)
• E: Ie, ei, ee, e, i, y, ea, ey, ay (as in "cay"), eip (as in receipt), air (if you're from south carolina)
• F: Eph, eff, ough (if you slur it enough), eaf
• G: Gee, gie, gy, jee, Ji, dgy (as in edgy... y'know. Like Ji).
• H: ...this one is not a letter. You cannot convince me otherwise.
• I: Eye, ie, ai, y, igh... and also just I
• J: Jay, dgy (as in edgy... but if you're saying it in an edgy way), ja (jade), cha (chase, but you're a little drunk)
• K: Kay (why do we need K?)
• L: El, il (pillow, as said by a new yorker), 'ell (british hell), ail (jail, as also said by a new yorker), yl, yll
• M: Em, im (denim), M (as in M&M)
• N: En, an, in... all these letters that're just "let's tack a vowel on its sound" are so dumb
• O: Oh, o, ow, ough (poor O is just suffering)
• P: Pi, pee, py, pie
• Q: Queue
• R: Ar, arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (cue Pirates theme)
• S: Es, ess, ies (for a australian)
• T: Tea, tie, ty, pte (p t e r o d a c t y l)
• U: You, yeu, and also sometimes just U
• V: Vee and vi. Not much to say here.
• W: ...
• X: ...
• Y: Why
• Z: ...

And the mile? Five thousand two hundred and eighty feet??? What kinda number is that? Y'know, the word "mile" comes from latin "mille," meaning thousand. The mile was "a thousand paces" as the Romans defined it. Apparently it was five thousand feet back in the British 1500s, based on the furlong measurement, which itself was defined by the German foot! We can all blame Queen Elizabeth for taking our clean and easy 5K and ruining it, as she decided (for no apparent reason) that a furlong just had to be 660 feet instead of 625, so they had to make the foot an even shorter measurement, tacking 280 onto the mile.

Shoutouts to nautical miles, though. In feet they make no sense (6,076.11549), but it's supposed to be based on one arcminute of the Earth's circumference, meaning 1/60th of a degree: much cleaner!

But anyways, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's get back to the kings of the world of measurements: the Metric System.

Currently, the Meter is an SI unit, meaning Standard International or International System. There are seven of these units (Meter, Kilogram, Ampere, Kelvin, Mole, and Candela), all of which are based on a bunch of really confusing numbers (Speed of Light, Planck Constant, Elementary Charge, Boltzmann Constant, Avagadro Constant, Luminous Efficacy [of 540 THz radiation], and the... uh.... "hyperfine transition frequency of Cs"). I'm not gonna go into all of them, because frankly I couldn't care less about the definition of luminocity of exactly 540 THz in comparison to that one dysfunctional fluorescent bulb that likes to flicker on and off in my dining room.

The Meter was originally (in practical settings) defined by a standardized pendulum's swing (with a period of two seconds), but then gravity and atmospheric pressure and other nasty stuff got in the way of that working, so the definition was swapped. I was actually pleasantly surprised to learn that the new original definition of a meter was - no joke - one ten-millionth of the distance between the Equator and the North Pole assuming a flat surface of a sphere.

It's like - what??? That number is SO CLEAN. To scud if it doesn't work 'cause Earth isn't a perfect sphere in any direction or because there's a slight stretch and compression force based on the tiniest fractions of gravitation between the planet and the sun over the course of our orbit due to the tilt on the axis - I LOVE that. It's such a CLEAN. SCUDDING. NUMBER.

Practical representations, of course, were created. Turns out everything mathematically important is kept in Paris, so the original physical standard of a meter was a platinum bar held there. It was eventually replaced by a series of bars (each made of platinum-iridium: the same stuff still used for physical models today).

Of course, however, no unit gets itself a perfectly clean slate. For a brief period of just over a couple decades, some loser decided to define a meter as wavelength of a specific transition in Krypton-86. What on earth does that mean? That sounds like there're at least, like, twenty prerequisites for measuring that sort of thing! We can thank Einstein for saving our sorry hides (again), though, as it was redefined to be 1/c (speed of light) in 1983. It's stayed that way since, and remains to this day one of the essential units of measurement across the entire world.

But...

That begs the question... how is the speed of light defined?

First of all, let's ignore the whole "we have no clue what the one-way speed of light is" thing. So long as we can arbitrarily decide that 2c/2 = c, then reality as we know it actually works. Y'alls do not want me to get into skepticistic nihilism and start digging through the rabbit hole of universal methodic doubt and cogito ergo sum. The speed of light was originally measured by a pair of scientists' efforts - Ole Roemer and Christiaan Huygens.

Roemer was observing the orbital period of the moon Io around Jupiter, attempting to better discern its period. He was studying it over the course of several years and came across an anomaly: there was a solid delay in the time between eclipse emergence (When Io came out from behind Jupiter, making itself observable) depending on the time of year. The delay could be equated to about eleven minutes overall depending on where Earth was during its orbit. In a stroke of genius, Roemer realized that the only explanation was that there must be a finite speed of light, and the distance between Earth and Jupiter changing throughout the year was delaying the light coming from the moon.

Huygens took Roemer's measurements and did the math, finding the speed of light to be approximately 2.10E8 meters per second. The correct measurement is 2.99E8 m/s (the difference came from an inaccuracy in the measurements themselves). Even with all the limitations of the era (it was the late 1600s), they were quite close to the actual standard. It was quite impressive, actually.

The first most precise calculations were by Simon Newcomb and his prodege Albert Michelson. They took measurements by lattices of mirrors and such, constantly zoning in closer and closer to the actual speed. Michelson first found the speed to be 299,910 ± 50 km/s before joining Newcomb, who narrowed it down to 299,860 ± 30 km/s. The most accurate of Michelson's experiements came out to be about 299,774 ± 11 km/s: a measurement found after his death.

While all those numbers are great and all, they're all based on the day's definition of a meter: one ten-millionth of the Earth's distance between the equator and the North Pole, or one of those platinum-iridium bars that they've probably still got locked up in Paris somewhere. Of course, the speed of light was narrowed on down and down, and eventually fixed to be 299,792,458 m/s at one of those big conferences where people that people decided get to decide stuff decide what stuff is.

But here's the problem:

299,792,458 m/s is defined by the meter, yes?

Do you want to know how it was fixed to that number?

By arbitrarily fixing it to that number...

...and then defining a meter by one over it.

Do you SEE THE PROBLEM???

The speed of light was defined by a meter, but then it suddenly swapped so that the meter became defined by the speed of light! I guess that equals signs go both ways, but that is THE MOST RECURSIVE mathematical phenonema to ever exist! You can't just decide that because one thing is one thing, that the other thing is that one thing too! If socrates is man and man is mortal, then Socrates is mortal... but that doesn't mean that because I'm man and I'm mortal that I'm Socrates! Socrates was a butt-ugly genius who talked too much and--

--kay, actually. Maybe I am Socrates. BUT THAT'S NOT THE POINT.

The point, I think, is that these things really don't matter all that much. At the end of the day, it couldn't matter less to you or me how incredibly precise a meter is in relation to how wide your flatscreen television is. What matters is that your tape measure spans the distance and that the TV fits on your wall. I think it's important to remember that, regardless of how science has been honed to a razor-sharp edge of precision, all these measurements and definitions and units are all arbitrary anyways. People will never be perfect, and while the nanoscopic scale of what the heck a meter is or isn't works great on the papers signed by those folks voting about these thigns, but really couldn't matter less to you or me.

So with all that said, if you're going to come away with one thing, it must be this:

• YA Fantasy and Why I Stoped Reading It
• Are souls real? What about robots? [Feat. Brandon Sanderson's accidental obsession with Plato]
• Solving every problem

And potentially other things. We'll see.

Follow if ya wanna hear about these things!

Talk to most young authors nowadays: chances are they're a hard worldbuilder. They can throw together the foundations for a decent universe on the fly without a pen or pencil in just a few minutes. Chances are also likely that they read Brandon Sanderson--let's face it, who doesn't?

Is there a correlation here?

...

Yes. Yes, there is. The answer is yes.

Which is fine. Hard Worldbuiding is great; I would know. I'm a hard worldbuilder too. Heck, I'm right here at the Sandersite. But I don't need to write a blog post defending Hard Worldbuilding.

Now, most people aren't jerks (there's gonna be a blog post about that soon-ish too, actually). However, I've still met the odd folk infected with Worldbuilder's disease who knows absolutely nothing about Soft Worldbuilding (imma called it "Softy" from here on out) and are kinda mean to people who do it. This problem stems from misunderstanding (obviously): essentially, people will assume that Softies exist as just a weaker version of Hardies, which of course would be bad. Basically, what this means is that soft worldbuilders would simply be lazier than hard worldbuilders, and should be treated like such.

Which is wrong.

That's not what Softies are. It is not a form of Hard Worldbuilding with fewer details and weaker connections; it's a form of worldbuilding with a focus on a different aspect of the story.

Generally speaking, Hardies are very plot-centric. Take Mistborn, the Final Empire, for example; I mean, both the magic and the world are both there in the name! The plot is all about the nobles versus the skaa, and the exclusionary metal magic and creepy eye spike dudes. Why do you think they're called the Stormlight Archives; it's all about the Stormlight! Hardies are a planner's playground.

Sofites, on the other hand, cover a completely different side of the story: the tone.

Show of hands: how many of you read Mistborn and have tried to write a dark fantasy, nitty-gritty slog story? Based on what I've seen from the Shard, a lot of you have. Some are better than others (I'm thinking of Syn's Mystic-verse in particular), but it's easy enough to say that a lot of you have a half-murderhobo protagonist who gets down and dirty with some sort of oppressive force, using their magic to slaughter the evil and bring about justice in their own twisted way.

In the case that you rasied your hand, then clearly you liked the tone of Mistborn enough to try and replicate it. There's no problem with that; I loved Mistborn as much as the next guy. Its tone is so perfectly dark and gritty. The point I'm tryna get across here is that tone is crucial for a story--but it's often difficult to get across correctly.

A Softy story is almost always entirely tone-centric. They're meant to evoke more otherworldly feelings and internal connections rather than drive a hard plot along with logic and reason. If any of you have seen Studio Ghibli, try to imagine the strange wistfulness that every (good) movie always evokes: Spirited Away, Castle in the Sky, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Howl's Moving Castle, Kiki's Delivery Service, uhh... Ponyo (what was that movie? I love it to death but it was so weird). PRINCESS MONONOKE (I just watched that last night so I'm still kinda in the vibe). These movies never really expound on the details because that wouldn't help--heck, it'd even detract from--the immersion.

Lemme whip out an example that people have actually seen, though, so I can go into more detail: Spiderverse.

To start, imma just say that this movie is the best frikin cinematic masterpiece of a singular film ever created (it's tied with Castle in the Sky, by the way, for first place in my grand tier list of movies. Endgame would be higher, but it's too perfect and also not much of a standalone, so I keep it away). Now, to start, this is a comic book movie: it's not exactly designed for cold hard reason. However, a lot of Marvel films are very hard worldbuildy anyways (Iron Man and Captain America, for example, are farther on the harder spectrum than, say, Shang-Chi and Doctor Strange), so I honestly couldn't care less. Anyways, Spiderverse leaves that amazing, wistful gut feeling in you like nothing else; every time it gets to the final scenes and everything awesome has already happened I'm always just aching for more. But that's not created by the hard physics of multiversal travel and Spiderman powers: it's created by Miles Morales' and all the other Spidey's arcs.

Tone is captured by the atmosphere of the setting as well as the characters and their emotions. It's almost as all-encompassing as a theme, and manages to capture your world not in a fancy picture frame but through a different lens. Every story needs it; but Softies are almost always 100% focused on it.

When I first started writing, I never really focused much on the Tone. Iconar Collective was just a boogaloo of hard magic and worlds. I never focused on trying to set a vibe to the whole thing; I was too bent on showing off this epic world that I had created. But, of course, dropping exposition left and right isn't writing: hence why the first act is so goshdarn terrible.

It's easy to learn and memorize facts: how to properly plot and pace a world, how to give a character an arc, how to develop of a solid world. It's less easy to learn the writing itself: theme, tone, voice, and all that. And it wasn't until I started trying out Softies that I really got a hang of decent prose. Before I wrote Wishing Away and a myraid of other little storyettes, I'd never focused how to write a decent setting or strike a certain mood. I'd go completely minimalistic for how everything and everyone looked, leaving the reader with a blank image of pretty much nothing in their head. All they got was magic and facts. But now I go into paragraphs upon paragraphs of detail explaining just one or two things so it's very clear just how this particular place is supposed to look and feel.

Currently I'm working on another Hard Worldbuilding project (the itch came back to me), but all my dabblings in the Softy realm have given me more experience in theme, tone, and even just prose itself than jotting down details in a notebook ever would.

So if you take anything away from this at all, then just give a Softy a try. Crack open a google doc and try to hit the tone instead of the details of the world; flesh out as little as you can, and just focus on your character. If you can figure it out, it'll give you the most experience a piece of writing ever could.

* * * * * *

Thanks for reading! This might've made absolutely no sense because I'm terrible at explaining things, but if you've gotten this far, then good for you!

I'm going to create a thread in Creator's Corner dedicated to developing Softies so people can ask questions that I'll hopefully answer in time. I've been meaning to make one for awhile, actually. And no, I'm not only making it now so I can have the 1000th topic in the subforum. I'll edit in the link as soon as it's made.

Don't die!

~ Fadran

I have a friend whose mindset is very similar to my own in terms of knowledge. With so much stuff out there, isn’t it a little mean that we only get a few decades to look at it? He’s of a firm belief that if something exists, then it can be experienced; and he wants to experience it all. I’m of the same mind, learning all I can about whatever I can. I’m not quite as good at it as he is, but overall I think I do pretty well.

That’s why I decided that this thing should exist: so I can just talk about the stuff and why it matters. With so many things out there in their infinite complexity, there’s so much that we can miss. And to be completely honest, I don’t want to miss any of it.

I plan to talk about scientific discoveries, laws, and theories. I plan to talk about the arts and why they matter. Broad-scale anthropology, styles of society, types of cultures; The implications of everyday things on the level of generations; Growth, change, learning, knowledge itself; Philosophical ideologies and processes; literally anything that I can think of that seems to matter—which is everything.

So welcome to Unnecessarily Overcomplicated!