Memorizing Planck’s constant with DALL-E

Planck’s constant used to be a measured quantity and now it is exact by definition.

h = 6.62607015×10−34 J / Hz

Rather than the kilogram being implicit in the units used to measure Planck’s constant, the mass of a kilogram is now defined to be whatever it has to be to make Planck’s constant have the value above.

Now that it’s exact by definition, maybe you’d like to memorize it. Using the Major system described here we could encode the digits as “Judge enjoys quesadilla.” [1]

As with the previous post, I’m using a memorization exercise as an excuse to play around with DALL-E. I typed “A judge enjoying eating a quesadilla” into DALL-E 2 and got back four images, as always. The best of these was the following.

First attempt at judge enjoying a quesadilla

The food in the image looks like a quesadilla, but it’s not clear that the man eating it is a judge, or that he’s enjoying himself.

Next I changed “judge” to “a supreme court justice,” hoping DALL-E would create an image that more obviously features a judge.

Here’s one of the outputs:

Second attempt at judge enjoying a quesadilla

This fellow looks more like a judge, and he’s obviously enjoying himself. Maybe he’s eating a calzone, but we’ll call it a quesadilla.

Not all the images created by DALL-E are as accurate as the ones above. I suspect there’s a lot of selection bias in the examples of images posted online. I’m contributing to that selection bias by showing images that were good enough to include in a blog post. I tried other images for blogging on other topics, and the results were not worth sharing.

So in an attempt at mitigating selection bias, here’s another image generated from the prompt “A supreme court justice enjoying eating a quesadilla.”

Young lady who is not eating anything

This young lady is wearing black, as supreme court justices are wont to do. And she appears to be enjoying herself, but she’s definitely not eating a quesadilla.

Incidentally, another possible encoding of 662607015 is “Judge enjoys Costello” as in Abbot and Costello. When I typed “A supreme court justice enjoying watching Abbot and Costello on television” I got the following creepy image.

DALL-E attempt at a judge watching Abbot and Costello on television

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[1] This mnemonic is a little bit of a cheat, depending on how you pronounce quesadilla. The sound of ll is sorta like that of a y in English. Here I’m using it to represent 5 just as the l sound does. Here in southeast Texas, I believe most people use the Spanish pronunciation, at least approximately. If you completely anglicize the pronunciation so that ll is pronounced as in pillow, then you can use the mnemonic with no qualms.