And now you know everything you need about the reasoning behind traditional units! 
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The Masons obviously.
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Also, the step length of a seraph is different than that of an archangel. I can never remember which one is shorter, though.
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Just whatever you do don’t ask how many can dance on the head of a pin
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Who am I, Isaac Newton?
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… a manuscript, an eighteenth-century handwritten British household cookbook … Among recipes … was one for [a powder meant to treat epileptic fits], which included serving sizes: “as much as will lie upon a shilling,” for an adult; “as much as will lie upon a sixpence,” for a child.
From The New Yorker
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In the forty-eight years that she’s lived in the West Village, the owner of the iconic cookbook shop has never ordered delivery.
Is that some sort of achievement? I have never ordered delivery in my life either (except as part of bigger groups where the group ordered a pizza). And she’s in her 70s. I bet most of her age group haven’t.
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Having lived in NYC, I can tell you:
- Kitchens in most apartments are small, even to the point of being virtually nonexistent;
- There are almost always at least a half-dozen restaurants within sight of the front door, and many dozens within 3-4 blocks of the building;
- Delivery is (or at least used to be) free;
- Actual grocery stores are not much larger than bodegas and thus have limited available ingredients, especially for ‘ethnic’ food options.
End result: it is usually cheaper and more varied to order delivery rather that go to multiple stores to buy ingredients and then try to cook them in a tiny kitchen.
So yes, someone living for 48 years in the West Village who has never ordered delivery really is a unicorn.
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Best part wasn’t even the VW-Bus sized piece of space junk. It was the “it’ll burn up…we hope” at the end!
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reminds me of the bumper sticker on my old vw bus:
This, Too, Shall Pass
just not on any kind of incline! that would definitely burn up!
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Lots of weird comparisons in this thread, but not so often they actually bring back ancient Greek units of measurement.
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Okay, this one is vague. Is it a high school-sized stadium, small college-sized stadium, or U of Michigan-sized stadium? They need to be more specific.
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The meteor which hit Texas employed the far more standardized unit of a corgi (“well, they lacked Dr_Pepper sponsorship, didn’t they?”) and, being already in mammal units they went with the “baby elephants” for …mass? (or weight? hmm “these are space baby elephants, so let’s assume mass”)
Corgi-sized meteor as heavy as 4 baby elephants hit Texas - NASA
The meteor in question struck the Earth near McAllen, Texas with the energy equivalent of 8 tons of TNT, but there were no reported casualties or damages.
FEBRUARY 21, 2023 10:39
(if one reads through carefully one learns that a one corgi appears to amount to about 60cm …and armed with that we can compute: 60cm in diameter by 454kg puts it at a density of 4g/cm^3, or about half that of iron’s – or ‘meh’ for meteors)
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