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Measuring what you are and what you do results in scores of odd amounts. Knowing that the outside temperature is 17.32 degrees or that your height is 181.95 cm feels incomplete and unbalanced. The Evening Calculator converts uneven figures to an even number in one or more, modern or old units.
The
output of your pedometer might be translated from 5,028.17 meters to exactly 1 league and 10 chains. Your monthly water bill could read as 110,000 US gills of water (13,013 liters) costing 3,000 Albanian leke (23.76 euro). Your sick baby has a temperature of 30 réaumur (37.5 Celsius) and is crying at a nice round level of 80 nepers (86.86 dB).
Without fractions or decimals life takes on a new sense of simplicity and continuance.
Another idea with fanciful equivalencies
Amazing_20Equivalence_20Calculator
[robinism, Mar 16 2005]
[link]
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good evening, good night and may your god go with you. |
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When this idea reaches it's inevitable 2.5 croissant limit, it could tell you that you have exactly 10 Babylonian Shekel of dough. |
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Use this to figure who's more even. |
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Why stop there? When you think about it, it's really all 1's and 0's. Either the baby is crying (1) or not (0); you have a fever (1) or not (0). Binary is the way to go; dispense with eight whole digits to simplify one's life even further. Hmmm, croissant (1) or bone (0) .... |
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Possibly alternated with the companion "Mourning Calculator" used to consider what you spent (or consumed) last night... |
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My son, early last year (so he had just turned 3), measured our cat, with my tape measure. He then proudly announced, "You are exactly 1 cat long, Zulu!" |
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It worked for me. I laughed for 5 minutes. |
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A long time ago, not so far away:
"I weighed myself, mummy!"
"What did you weigh?"
"My feet!"
Twenty years on, my mum hasn't forgotten this. |
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I want my car's speedo calibrated in furlongs per fortnight and cubits per leap-year. [+] |
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It should also have a feature that converts the number into unusual units of measurement in order to get a better perspective on things. Here's a couple of examples from New Scientist: |
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"Reader Buzzy Murray was so interested in the arrival of last month's National Chip Week (16 to 22 February) that he visited the British Potato Council's website (www.potato.org.uk), where he learned that: "We tuck into an enormous 38,000 tonnes of chips every week. That's the equivalent of almost 5500 double-decker buses." |
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MEANWHILE, the European Space Agency has got in on the act with new units of measurement for force and area. |
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An ESA press release about the Rosetta spacecraft, which will be meeting up with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and accompanying it on its journey, tells us: "Rosetta is equipped with 24 thrusters each delivering 10 newtons. That corresponds to the force needed here on Earth to hold a bag containing 10 apples." |
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Later, we are told that Rosetta's solar panels "span 32 metres tip to tip while, at 64 square metres, the surface area is comparable to that of a two-bedroom apartment". |
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Reader Jonathan Gebbie notes the happy coincidence that 1 newton equals exactly 1 apple-force. The only pity is that while this works on Earth, it won't hold true on comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. |
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"NO AREA of our lives attracts such a plethora of unusual units of measurement as waste disposal. Milford Harrison edits what he describes as a "thrilling" journal called Waste Planning, and he was so struck by the units that kept appearing in the press releases he received that he wrote an article about them. It includes such gems as: "Londoners are producing enough domestic rubbish to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool every 4 hours" (Museum of London, July 2003), and "About half of the tyres disposed of in Wales each year - enough to fill 444 double-decker buses - just disappear" (Environment Agency, April 2003). |
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Harrison published his article late last year, but the tide of idiosyncratic waste disposal units continues unabated. "In a year, we fill enough rubbish bins to stretch to the moon," claimed BBC TV's Countryfile on Sunday 21 March. And just in case viewers found this unit a little unwieldy, the programme gave an alternative, explaining that every hour the UK produces enough rubbish to fill the Royal Albert Hall in London. |
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So, that's a conversion factor of 8766 Albert Halls per moon-high rubbish-bin column. All we need to know now is the conversion rate of Albert Halls to double-decker buses and Olympic swimming pools - bearing in mind, of course, that, as the Beatles once told us, now we know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall." |
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"With reference to Feedback's unusual units of measurement (see Feedback this issue), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation current affairs radio programme As It Happens sometimes has not-too-serious stories from the UK. At the end of each they locate the place with reference to Reading, Berkshire, in units appropriate to the story. For example, one about a maker of traditional sausages in Grantham might end "Grantham is about 1 ½ million sausage lengths north of Reading." I have no idea why the custom started." |
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Standard comparative units of length/height and area in UK newspapers include the double-decker bus, Nelson's Column, and the area of Wales, though there appears to be no standard for volume (a cubic Cymru?). |
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