Gregory's ServerEarly unit of computing power: one "kilogirl" was equivalent to a thousand hours of manual computing labor
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 @trickster @tulsi which book is this from? *prepares to hide in the corner in case it’s Hidden Figures* @trickster ...as depicted in this 2016 film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures which I watched while ironing, most likely... @trickster assuming that they could probably calculate about 1 FLOPS (because they were smart professionals and could do a difficult add/mul in their heads very fast for a human) 1 @trickster @bstacey While both of these terms are demeaning, I'd still like to see the conversion factor for a millihelen (the unit of beauty needed to launch a single ship.) @ridetheory oh, "kilogirl" is undoubtedly dehumanizing at worst and patronizing at best. The men had "man-hours". Girl's work could not possibly bear the same mark, and we can't just change the qualification of MAN-hours. Bleh. However, it is one of those rare episodes where women's work gets recognized. (thanks for reminding me of milihelens)  @trickster And those girls are still held under a glass dome in a Paris university!! !! When will we update the definition?!?! @trickster Girls are powerful. *is inspired and feels huge respect for those ladies.*  @trickster  I would make a simple estimate of around a full operation per 5 seconds on average (not including stuff that required the use of a table like sin/cos/tan/exp...) depending on the amount of significant digits, which would be 0.2FLOPS. That would put a "kilogirl" at around 720000 operations on average. That makes 10Mgirl around 1.7ms of runtime on a GeForce 1080 (it is a low estimate, because those girls were probably relatively faster at doing an exponential, and more accurate, than a 1080)  @trickster Also, the story of those women at NASA is told in the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures”. Highly recommended. |
From the excellent "Broad Band" by Claire L. Evans