Branches are distinct.

Let’s say you have a main and a dev branch, and you periodically merge dev into main. Because of fast forwarding (on by default) the main branch is completely gone from the history. If you then add bug fixes and project branches it becomes a tangled mess really quickly and it’s nearly impossible to understand the structure by looking at the tree.

On mercurial every branch is named and distinct forever. You don’t have to try to understand what happened to the project since it’s obvious by looking at the tree.

Now there are ways to have a clean git history, but afaik you either need to make sure nobody ever messes it up or have everyone rebase everything and only keep the history of the main branch.

When working in a hyper structured organization that may work, but for more casual developers (scientists, students) that aren’t system experts and where you have messy history, mercurial default settings are less confusing, easier to learn and produce better results.

It makes the history clearer.

Surely it could be rewritten in Fortran if performance is really a concern.

No, git has labels on heads of branches. Once the head moves you loose the information. It also makes for a more messy history, which I believe created the whole “rebase everything” philosophy to cope.

Care to explain your comment for a layman?

From my limited experience mercurial is way more intuitive than git. The big one is named branches are a thing instead of an abstraction.

I mostly worked on the physics side, being a physicist. But I did dug up a reference for you. You can start from there: doi.org/10.3310/phr03110

I did my PhD on light pollution. I don’t have the references on hand but it is well known in the field.

It’s not actually less safe. No study was able to show a link between light and safety.

So I did some digging and the use of 1-second pendulum as a unit of length predates the metre by about a century. It’s very possible it informed the choice of ratio to use when defining it properly, like we did with the recent definition change.

It’s all on Wikipedia if you want to dive in yourself.

The mass cancels out.

I don’t know if it’s purely a coincidence. The meter comes from the Earth’s circumference (1/10 000 000 of the pole-equator distance) and I believe the second is much older, which points to a coincidence.

I’m not hauling this as the ultimate time keeping method. Friction in the system will mean you need to readjust it anyways. It’s just a neat fact that pi^2 ~= g

It’s only 0.3% off. You probably have more uncertainty on the length of the pendulum.

Also, noon is when you set your clocks based on the sun.

How do you count on your hands in base 60?

A 1m pendulum has a 1 second half-period.

I do the same but Egyptian

I use Egyptian gods!

They tried. Their pirate game came out last year.

MD’s aren’t doctors. They’re bachelors with an ego.

Start setting one up.