Hilda Bastian
Warning: this sociology paper by Mike Michael is a rabbit hole, leading to other rabbit holes - fascinating, occasionally hilarious & sometimes downright bizarre...
It's about what the author calls "lay metrology".
That's describing measurements in terms that are presumed to give lay people a sense of the proportion - like saying something's "twice the size of Wales"....
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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09636625231186782
Inanimate Carbon God
@hildabast Aaron Reich, the science writer at the Jerusalem Post, is a master of this. If there's an asteroid about to pass the Earth, he will find some truly bizarre point of size comparison, e.g. "182 beavers", "100 Barbie dolls", "45 aardvarks". "3500 Bg Macs", to name only his most recents ones.
MarjorieR
@inanimatecarbongod @hildabast there are another set of standards for this - the EL Reg units.
However for celestial bodies the largest volume unit the 'Olympic swimming pool' is still a bit small so I expect we would need to invoke k, m, g and t multipliers as well.
They also have walnuts, grapefruit, chicken's eggs and footballs.
The weight measures are a bit more exotic: badgers, great white sharks, skateboarding rhinos, Australian trams and LINQ hotel recycling.
https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html
levampyre
@inanimatecarbongod @hildabast OMG, aardvarks are a thing, an animal, I mean. I always thought that was a made up word. (Sorry, not native in English.) 😆
Hilda Bastian
...From The Guardian "at 820 feet, the fatberg was ‘longer than Tower Bridge’ or ‘twice as long as Wembley Stadium’ and ‘the weight of 11 double-decker buses’."
Michael argues we presume too much with all this, & a #scicomm research agenda is needed.
Here's the link to his paper again: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09636625231186782
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Hilda Bastian
..."...who was used to measure the span of the Harvard Bridge (364.4 Smoots). Ironically, Smoots subsequently became the American National Standards Institute’s Chairman, and then the International Organisation for Standardisation’s (ISO) president. The Smoot, among other units, is (ironically) used by both Google Earth and Google Calculator."
The Smoot features in the Wikipedia List of humorous units of measurement, which Michael references:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measurement
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Hilda Bastian
...There I learned that donkey power is a third of horse power,
a Sheppey is the closest distance "at which sheep remain picturesque" (7/8 mile, if you want to know),
& a Muggeseggele is a Swabian reference to a housefly's private parts = a teensy tiny amount.
Finally, because I didn't know what Michael was referring to, I searched for "the London fatberg" (can't recommend!). Turns out it's a gross sewer obstruction - but also a good example of the weirdness of
journalist metrology....
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Hilda Bastian
...First I checked out the Wikipedia page to find out what metrology was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrology
In which I learned the first known standardized measure was the royal Egyptian cubit - the length of the Pharaoh's arm plus width of his hand. Standardizing managed to get the pyramids bang on....
Measuring by the body isn't unusual. There's the Smoot. From Michael's paper:
"The Smoot is the unit of length of 5 feet 7 inches equivalent to the height in 1958 of then student Oliver R. Smoot...
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Mans R
@hildabast https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html
clacke
Hilda Bastian
@levampyre @inanimatecarbongod And super cute!
Paul Carson
@inanimatecarbongod @hildabast I saw an article from NASA which mentioned an asteroid "the size of 14 flamingos".
As an Australian, I wanted to know the measurement in my local units so I asked how many cassowaries that was.
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