≈

May 2, 2019 10:15 AM

Enter a measurement, and the Measure of Things will return a list of physical approximations and comparisons. For example, 30 feet is half the length of a bowling lane; 4.5 stone is about as heavy as a Dalmatian; 100 hours is about nine-tenths of the voyage of the Titanic; five billion gallons is roughly 500 times the volume of the Capital rotunda.

The Measure of Things was first seen on Metafilter when FreelanceBureaucrat published it in Projects back in 2011.

posted by Iridic (32 comments total)

TIL that Napoleon was the same height as Oliver Smoot!
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 10:22 AM on May 2, 2019 [5 favorites]

I weigh two toilets.
posted by missmary6 at 10:39 AM on May 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

I am a multitude of cat scans.
posted by Fizz at 10:41 AM on May 2, 2019 [2 favorites]

I'm about one-and-one-fifth times as heavy as a Kangaroo. But they have much better biceps than I do.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:42 AM on May 2, 2019

Also 12 parsecs is about 950,000,000 times as long as The Distance from Earth to the Moon. Or one Kessel Run.

Spoiler alert, I didn't watch the Han Solo spin-off movie.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:43 AM on May 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

I just tried 3 different measurements that I really genuinely could use sort of everyday comparisons for, because people say them to me and I just don't have a good mental image of what they really mean, and it didn't recognize any of them (joule, watt, or hertz). It does seem like a fun page, but I guess I better stick to alternates of things I don't actually need clarification on. (Ah, I see, maybe those aren't physical enough?)
posted by Dorothea Ladislaw at 10:44 AM on May 2, 2019

I love this! I'm a little alarmed to know a full grown octopus weighs almost as much as I do though. Holy moly.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:45 AM on May 2, 2019

Even Also-er: I'm about one-and-one-tenth times as long as a Full Size Bed. Yeah, you don't say.

OK, goddammit, who posted this on a workday?
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:45 AM on May 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

Tried to enter "1 henweigh" and "1 henway" and got no response. I am 1 disappoint.
posted by Horkus at 10:51 AM on May 2, 2019 [3 favorites]

My tool of choice for these sorts of things is hosted over at The Register.
The Reg Standards Converter

Here's their introduction of the currency unit the Pogba from 2016.
1Pg is equal to the value of Paul Labile Pogba, the professional footballer, during a very specific timeframe. 1Pg is worth the approximate £89,300,000 when Manchester United paid as much to re-acquire their academy product from Juventus on 8 August 2016, but given the volatility of both the Sterling and footballers, it must be realised that 1Pg is not necessarily now worth £89.3m, nor would any other man called Paul Pogba be worth £89.3m... For instance, the second Paul Pogba could be an expensive and lazy sysadmin from Luton who is worth -£2,000 annually due to his habits of ordering office pizza from petty cash.
posted by Cris E at 10:52 AM on May 2, 2019 [4 favorites]

How many holes does it take to fill the Albert Hall?
posted by Floydd at 11:02 AM on May 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

You want that in Friedman Units?
posted by Kirth Gerson at 11:13 AM on May 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

I weigh approximately 20,000 times as much as a piece of letter-size paper (that is, 1 kangaroo)
While I agree with that, the website manages to state that a ream of 20-lb letter-size paper weighs 4 pounds. They get the right answer despite this.
posted by MtDewd at 11:16 AM on May 2, 2019

This is nifty. I'm nine tenths as tall as Andre the Giant and weigh as much as 500 hamsters.

I can see this being very helpful for getting my head around semi-common measures that I don't use much, like stone. Just yesterday I used this site (I disagree with a few of the examples and it's outdated but close enough) to explain to some non-IT people the scale of some new SANs I'm trying to purchase for their video storage. It was fun to see them get it when put in terms they understood.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 11:38 AM on May 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

joule, watt, or hertz

Joules and watts are actually related. A joule is a unit of work, typically a force applied over a distance. Wikipedia has practical examples that may help:

The energy required to lift a medium-sized tomato up 1 metre (3 ft 3 in) (assume the tomato has a mass of approximately 100 grams (3.5 oz)).
The energy released when that same tomato falls back down one metre.

That's something you can do at home. In a practical test, a joule is a tomato meter worth of energy.

The heat required to raise the temperature of 1 g of water by 0.24 °C.

That may be a bit abstract, but you may be familiar with the Calories in your food. A food Calorie (aka a kCal) is 4180 joules, and is the mean amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by 1° C [mean, because the energy required at lower temperatures is different from the energy required at higher temperatures]. I think that means you could work off a Calorie in your lunch by lifting a tomato four thousand times. There are probably faster ways to do the same amount of work. But also, you can't really work off Calories that way.

The kinetic energy of a 56 g tennis ball moving at 6 m/s (22 km/h).

So have somebody throw a tennis ball at you. That's a joule.

Lastly, and this is where things get fun:

The amount of electricity required to light a 1 W LED for 1 s.

That's right, a joule is a watt-second. Actually, a watt is defined the other way, as a joule per second. Take one second to lift one tomato one meter, and that's one watt. Lift ten tomatoes at once (or one tomato ten times as fast), that's ten watts. Your electric bill comes in another unit, the kilowatt hour, or the number of thousands of joules per second worth of energy you consumed in the last month, all added up. Wikipedia again: "when a light bulb with a power rating of 100W is turned on for one hour, the energy used is 100 watt hours (W·h), 0.1 kilowatt hour, or 360 kJ. This same amount of energy would light a 40-watt bulb for 2.5 hours, or a 50-watt bulb for 2 hours." Calculating the number of tomato-meters worth of lift equivalent to the energy you consume in a month is left as an exercise.

Hertz is the number of times per second a wave returns to the same point. You can hear Hz (like an orchestra tuning to A-440, or the hum of a power station as you drive by), and you can sometimes see them (fluorescent lights flickering at 60 Hz, or a guitar string lit by a strobe). Hertz defines the frequency of a repeating cycle.
posted by fedward at 11:49 AM on May 2, 2019 [7 favorites]

I think that means you could work off a Calorie in your lunch by lifting a tomato four thousand times

I'm getting on the horn with Big Tomato about a unique health care marketing opportunity.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:52 AM on May 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

Laden or unladen? Including the mezzanine or not?
posted by zaixfeep at 12:01 PM on May 2, 2019

Does not convert miles per gallon to rods per hogshead.
posted by BeeDo at 12:27 PM on May 2, 2019 [3 favorites]

Related: (Less Than, Approximately, Greater Than) a podcast from MeFi's own Alex Goldman (and Reply All/Gimlet).
posted by stevil at 12:32 PM on May 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm about one-three-thousandth as tall as a Kilimanjaro. I'll take that.
posted by Quasirandom at 12:36 PM on May 2, 2019

My weight is equal to twenty-five million sesame seeds.

And that's why they call me Tahini!
posted by not_on_display at 12:47 PM on May 2, 2019 [2 favorites]

Came for the Wales comparisons, was not disappointed.
posted by Steakfrites at 1:01 PM on May 2, 2019

My baby is almost half a Danny DeVito tall! (She's already past half a Gary Coleman.)
posted by madcaptenor at 1:42 PM on May 2, 2019

I'm about one-three-thousandth as tall as a Kilimanjaro. I'll take that.

You also don’t rise above the Serengeti, I suppose.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:14 PM on May 2, 2019 [3 favorites]

Well a kangaroo would kick my ass but I could totally take an octopus in a fight
posted by supermedusa at 5:50 PM on May 2, 2019

How many Danzigs is Alan Parsons?
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:45 PM on May 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

$20 SAIT
posted by not_on_display at 8:11 PM on May 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

You ever driven the entire length of I-80 6.5 billion times? Back and forth, day in day out. You've earned a lotta Cumby's points.

You my friend have driven a parsec.
posted by not_on_display at 8:14 PM on May 2, 2019

Yeah, but can it calculate the amount of turkeys it would take to fill a given area?
posted by Justin Case at 10:47 AM on May 3, 2019

As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!
posted by not_on_display at 2:31 PM on May 3, 2019

Does not convert miles per gallon to rods per hogshead.

For that we have units:

$ units
Currency exchange rates from www.timegenie.com on 2016-06-21
2954 units, 109 prefixes, 88 nonlinear units

You have: miles/gallon
You want: rods/hogshead
* 16800
/ 5.952381e-05
You have:

posted by Stoneshop at 11:32 AM on May 4, 2019

explain to some non-IT people the scale of some new SANs I'm trying to purchase for their video storage.

A discussion on the size of storage and backups elsewhere on the Internet touched on using media more permanent than magnetic bits, never mind pits in plastic with a reflective layer, and one of the participants pondered how much space 1.4 petabyte would take, transcribed on vellum.

Couldn't help there, but using paper tape as the medium you'd need a bit over 700 cubic meter per terabyte, as paper tape can hold 10 bytes per square inch. With the paper being 0.1mm thick this would result in a data density of 100 bytes per 64.5 mm^3, or roughly 1478MB per m^3. So that's 709 m^3 for a terabyte, a cube a little under 9m each side. 1.4 petabyte would then take about 11.5 Albert Halls. Working out the number of holes per Albert Hall is left as an exercise for the reader (assume that this is raw binary data, with every byte having four bits set on average).
posted by Stoneshop at 12:06 PM on May 4, 2019