Fun fact: while mainly dealing with insane precision machines, NIST have also designed a LEGO watt balance that you can use to determine mass based on the new SI standard in the comfort of your own home:

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aapt/journal/ajp/83/11/10.1...

(Open Access)

That's very neat. It relies on the accuracy of the electrical current measurements, though; it's not an absolute measurement from fundamental physics.

For that, NIST has a fundamental standard for the standard volt.[1] So the fundamental standards now are time (atomic clock), the speed of light in vacuum, and the standard volt. The meter is now defined in terms of the speed of light in vacuum and a time.

[1] https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2013/04/primary-voltag...

Has anyone here worked in a laboratory or other environment that uses these reference masses and requires this level of precision?

Not directly, but my research group has used referenced masses and a former colleague works on the NIST watt balance.

In commodity analysis, I depend on the mere existence and cascading chain of trust descending from this exact NIST kilogram, or any other NIST mass standard that may come along.

This is a tremendous benefit even if I am not required to make my mass measurements anywhere near the level of precision which NIST is capable of itself discerning. My target for precision is simply to be measurably better than the next best operator. NIST gives a final reference against which the quality of measurement can be correctly judged.

I have personally certified many billions of dollars worth of cargo in a way which is traceable to the NIST mass standard in particular, more so than most other single-handed individuals by far. Naturally, I started early which was an unfair advantage, but I recognized the need for traceability to a primary unquestionable standard, especially when I'm advancing the underlying measurement technologies in ways which are not being published or would be difficult for less experienced operators to grasp. From an extreme viewpoint, the only alternative would be to otherwise rely on superstition.

Turns out, without knowing it, I have spent years focused on avoiding the kind of difficulties that Theranos appears to be involed in, with their emerging testing technology in their field of analysis.

I prefer my results to be traceable to NIST before they emerge from the lab.

Insurance companies have always gotten a lot more upset over a slightly incorrect result in my field compared to the field of routine blood work.

It's worth watching the video just for the sound effects.

Wow the was... bad. I can get scientists want to bring SciFi to life, but this is a stretch.

In the second Artemis Fowl book, there is a centaur who uses a human laptop (magical creatures live in a technologically advanced society underground), and the first thing he does is mute it. He complains that humans are unevolved and have some sort of compulsion to make their products emit sounds and and lights.

Foaly was the best!

At first I thought, "Oh, these sound effects are kinda cool, to give the video a flair for the dramatic." There's not going to be any noise inside of the vacuum, but the initial sound effects were probably the noises that the contraption would make if it had air to propagate the sound waves.

But, as the video went on, the sounds effects just go more and more ridiculous. An alarm sound as the object is sent down a tube?! And the coup de grace was the lawn mower sound effect at the very end as the object was wheeled away.

Don't watch the video on mobile if you are bandwidth limited. It's 628MB for a 2 minute video.

Not quite sure how you got that number, but here are the real file sizes: 77 MiB (1080p), 49 MiB (720p), and 18 MiB (360p).

I did:

    youtube-dl 'https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/html5/html5lib/v2.47/mwEmbedFrame.php/p/684682/uiconf_id/31013851/entry_id/0_gaag5ixq?wid=_684682&iframeembed=true&entry_id=0_gaag5ixq'

And that was the filesize I got.

Pass youtube-dl the -F parameter to see all the video formats available. In this case:

    [info] Available formats for 0_gaag5ixq:
    format code  extension  resolution note
    hls-meta     mp4        multiple   Quality selection URL 
    mp4-467      mp4        640x360     467k , isom container, avc1, 29fps, ~9.29MiB
    hls-478      mp4        640x360     478k 
    mp4-664      mp4        640x360     664k , isom container, avc1, 29fps, ~13.10MiB
    hls-679      mp4        640x360     679k 
    mp4-904      mp4        640x360     904k , isom container, avc1, 29fps, ~18.00MiB
    hls-925      mp4        640x360     925k 
    webm-1436    webm       1280x720   1436k , webm container, v_vp8, 29fps, ~28.50MiB
    mp4-1453     mp4        1280x720   1453k , isom container, avc1, 29fps, ~28.90MiB
    hls-1487     mp4        1280x720   1487k 
    mp4-2455     mp4        1280x720   2455k , isom container, avc1, 29fps, ~48.80MiB
    mp4-3884     mp4        1920x1080  3884k , isom container, avc1, 29fps, ~77.20MiB
    mpeg-32358   mpeg       1920x1080  32358k , mpeg-ps container, mpeg video, 29fps, ~627.00MiB (best)

So, you're both right.

Why does the video have goofy sound effects?

It says under the video "All sound effects added; the actual process is extremely quiet."

At 2:04 I'm pretty sure I hear the sound of a Chrysler sliding door autolock.

More about the whole process:

http://www.nature.com/news/kilogram-conflict-resolved-at-las...

Kilogram conflict resolved at last (2015)

it's embarrassing that we use such a fragile process to establish a standard that is supposed to be used everywhere.

I'm not actually sure what you're insinuating here. Previously the standard WAS the "international prototype kilogram", all of which have drifted since creation (see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram#Stability_of_the_inte... )

The problem with this is it isn't even fragile, it's _not reproducible_. The worst part is that other SI units depend on the kilogram, so they all change as this drift occurs! After a certain amount of time, how will we know what a "real" kilogram is? See here for discussion of this SI problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram#Dependency_of_the_SI_...

The point of the watt balance approach is to make it possible for a lab to reproduce the kilogram without another kilogram reference. That's what this is about, and I don't really think it's embarrassing. I think it's very, very hard.

Why do we need these rare metals? Why not just use a block of ice generated from a known quantity of water, for example?

I'm not sure why ice would matter given that it should weigh the same as in the liquid form, but...

How do you measure a known quantity of water to within a few tens of parts per billion? Do you specify the proportion of light to heavy water? (For 'normal' water about 1 in 41 million.) What about contaminants in the water? There are so many uncertainties that it's impossible for all practical purposes.

The whole point of using 'rare' silicon is that we already have commercial processes for producing ultrapure, defectless, monocrystals of the stuff (for use in computer chips), so it's easy to reuse that technology for defining a kilogram.

The prototype kilogram was made of platinum-iridium because they are very nonreactive and fairly hard, so once the prototype was made it would be unlikely to be accidentally modified.

If you tried to use water ice as a standard, you'd find that its mass was changing all the time as the ice sublimated away, or humidity condensed onto its surface. It would be impossible to make precise measurements.

Because you don't want that lump of mass to change in any way while it is being used as a reference.

Are you aware of all the matter exchange processes that are continuously going on at the surface of water ice under normal conditions?

Necroposting, I know, but under what definition is silicon a "rare metal"?