A topic for cataloging desperate attempts to use any unit of measurement besides metric.
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The balloon was around 200 feet tall, about four times the size of the Snoopy balloon that flies in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
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Obligatory post #1:
https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html
Welcome to the Reg online standards converter, which allows instant conversion of commonly-used metric and imperial standards into approved Vulture Central units, and vice-versa. To get started, simply make your selection from the list below and you’ll be offered three sets of fields: Imperial, Metric and Reg. Enter the desired figure into any one field, hit calculate and you’re in business.
Not all conversions will work perfectly. This is because here at the Reg Standards Bureau, our priority has to be preserving the accuracy of our own units. Accordingly, all our conversion factors are Reg standards.
To maintain our own high standards, we’ve had to shave a teensy bit of accuracy off everyone else’s. For instance: there are 8 furlongs to a mile, which means 25 miles should convert to 200 furlongs. But it actually converts to 199.something furlongs. As our technical wizard explains: “To turn a mile into anything else, it first needs to be converted into linguine”.
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Obligatory post #2:
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Wow. That’s the length of around 73,000 average-length ants.
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Same author as the other JP articles.
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And for those asking in advance, the metric used is the total length of an Atlantic bluefin tuna fish at its maximum possible size.
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This whole phenomenon is just too much fun. Sure, the metric system may be more accurate for some measurements, but figuring out how many animals big some random item is also requires math skills. It’s vary algebraic-your first variable is which animal is going to be the unit of measure.
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For sure. I use metric for everything as it stands but I am definitely moving over to, say, pomeranians from now on.
ETA
I should say I have a giant Pomeranian. He’s 10kg so that would really throw people off.
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I don’t limit myself to animals. My algorithm for measuring things bigger than say, a car, and smaller than a city is to:
- take measurement in metres
- multiply by 1.0936 to determine length in yards
- divide by 22 to determine length in cricket pitches
For anything smaller than a car it goes:
- take measurement in centimetres
- divide by 2,54 to determine length in inches
- divide by 38 to determine length in maximum-permissible cricket bats.
(Edited to correct a division/multiplication substitution error)
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So, a football nut, huh?
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Why don’t they measure space rocks in 2L pop bottles?
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Almost a year in the making, the image has an area of 102,040,171,200,000 pixels — 290 times larger than the current record holder. At one pixel per inch, it would wrap around the Earth 2.7 times. If printed out at 15 DPI, a fairly common setting for large billboards, the image would be as tall as 16,408 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other. If 3D-printed, the image could (hypothetically) be used to bat the International Space Station out of orbit
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