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How Long is That in Baked Beans?

baked beans measuring tape
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Baked Beans Measuring tape is a standard retractable measuring tape only instead of using inches and centimetres, this one is calibrated using a line of printed baked beans, each of which bears a numeral.

There are 465 beans in a standard 415g can. This means that one can of beans represents a basic unit of length, in the same way as that of a yard or a metre.

People like beans and understand them. In time, the Baked Bean will become a popular standard measurement of length.

xenzag, Aug 10 2017

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       Did you take all your tablets today ? You promised the doctor you would take your tablets.   

       If you don't take your tablets, you know what will happen. You'll have to go Back There. You didn't like it There, did you ?   

       Now, come on, take your medication... it's for your own good ....
8th of 7, Aug 10 2017
  

       //There are 465 beans in a standard 415g can.// No. Google told you that there were on _on average_ 465 beans in a standard 415g can. You can't base an entire system of measurement on an average.   

       You would also need a complete set of integrated units. Mass would have to be mass of a reference bean, probably stored by the French, which would irritate them greatly*. So that's OK. But then there's time, energy, electrical resistance, charge... everything would have to harmonised.   

       (*actually, I am rather surprised to see the baked bean being promoted by a French halfbaker.)
MaxwellBuchanan, Aug 10 2017
  

       Ha - you need all of that, but all I need is a can of beans. Feet and inches never made friends with pound and ounces, and only the weak willed use centimetres and kilos. (who's the Frog halfbaker as it's not me)
xenzag, Aug 10 2017
  

       [xen], it's no good bluffing. I have a very clear mental image of you, and it is the image of a short, angry frenchwoman, probably with untamed body hair.   

       Might I also point out that baked beans are English, not American, and therefore come in tins, not cans.
MaxwellBuchanan, Aug 10 2017
  

       Good luck if you ever come looking for me. My safety is totally secure.
xenzag, Aug 10 2017
  

       Remember to poke an airhole in that metal drum in the ground.
RayfordSteele, Aug 10 2017
  

       Trust me, the last person I want to find is a little angry frenchwoman.
MaxwellBuchanan, Aug 10 2017
  

       He was last seen stumbling through the migrant shanty towns of Calais (that was as far as he got) waving his arms around in the air wildly in a vain effort to deter the swarms of voracious cleggs that followed him everywhere. "I must not find that terrrible woman" - "I must not find that terrible woman" Earlier in his home town he had even tried to push someone under the wheels of a bus as he ran along the edge of the road, in the mistaken belief that "she" might be his imaginary angry frenchwoman..... this is an unfolding story that may only end in a dark room filled with talking hamsters punctuated by the incessant clatter of custard powered knitting machines.
xenzag, Aug 11 2017
  

       We will tell the doctor that you need a higher dose. A much higher dose ... and maybe one of those canvas blazers with the special long sleeves and leather straps ...
8th of 7, Aug 11 2017
  

       Oh dear, Mr Buchanan. You really haven't been paying attention, have you? It's almost as if you had a life, and didn't spend years picking up and squirreling away odd clues to half-bakers' secret identities, not to do which wouldn't do at all.
pertinax, Aug 11 2017
  

       It is when I appear not to be paying attention that you need to be at your most wary.
MaxwellBuchanan, Aug 11 2017
  

       ...   

       Pardon?
pertinax, Aug 11 2017
  

       ....and when you are paying attention that's when we need to be at our most weary. Ha
xenzag, Aug 11 2017
  

       Time is seldom measured in beans, although a clock could be devised based on the behaviour of the bean as it negotiates the digestive system of a standard human. A large hour glass could also be constructed containing many cans of beans. (preserved in some type of gaseous matter) These would slide glutonously under gravity through a narrow orifice into the lower chamber, the time being marked off on the walls with etched inscriptions.
xenzag, Aug 11 2017
  

       [Ian], halfbaking them is an entirely different thing.   

       And [xenzag] garavity is related to garbanzo bean forces, which is not the same thing as baked bean bodies.
normzone, Aug 11 2017
  

       iPad very good at inventing words.
xenzag, Aug 11 2017
  

       Shouldn't we be using halfbaked beans?
MaxwellBuchanan, Aug 11 2017
  

       ^ You should post that...
8th of 7, Aug 11 2017
  

       I've half a mind to do just that.
MaxwellBuchanan, Aug 11 2017
  

       That leaves .16% of your mind doing nothing. Could it not be put to some useful purpose, like examining grains of talcum powder for traces of miss France?
xenzag, Aug 11 2017
  

       The popular myth is that the average person uses only 10% of their brain. The fact that you use 100% of yours as a doorstop is not necessarily an improvement, mon amie.
MaxwellBuchanan, Aug 11 2017
  

       Cows been chasing you around the fields again? Try running in zig-zag lines and loose the French maid's outfit. Wales is not a great place for this sort of thing either. Have you ever considered roof-top tent wrestling as an alternative? Yes - you can use a tent that's been made in France, and Yes - the cows can watch. (from a safe distance, though they do clap a lot in all the wrong places)
xenzag, Aug 12 2017
  

       All beans have magical properties. If you eat enough of them, you can produce fire from within. If all of the beans currently sitting in cans on supermarket shelves throughout the world were joined up end to end, the resulting line would reach as far as Neptune.
xenzag, Aug 12 2017
  

       I suspect that is not true. Heinz (and they should know) tells me that 1.5 million tins of beans are sold in the UK every day. We can reasonably extrapolate that to 5 million tins per day, worldwide. We can generously double this to account for other manufacturers.   

       We can also assume that the world has at most a 10 day supply of baked beans, given average retail turnaround times.   

       Therefore, at any one time there are 100 million tins of baked beans in existence. Even if we assume that these are all large tins, that equates to only 5 x 10^10 individual beans in existence.   

       The average length of a baked bean is about 1cm, so the beans would reach about 5 x 10^8 m, or 500,000km whereas the typical distance from Earth to Neptune is about 4.4 billion kilometers - almost nine hundred times as far.
MaxwellBuchanan, Aug 12 2017
  

       That's where the bean-propelled boost comes in to play. It's something like ion propulsion.
RayfordSteele, Aug 12 2017
  

       //You can't base an entire system of measurement on an average.//   

       Not with that attitude you can't
Voice, Aug 12 2017
  

       Oh yes, i should have specified a starting point for the beans reaching Neptune. I did of course mean that the beans would reach the exact remaining current distance between the exploratory satellite BsF7 and the planet Neptune, which just happens to be 500,000 kilometers. (of which I know nothing, but I did know a helpful baker would carry out the required calculation) The number of beans required to reach my cousin's pet goldfish, who is also called Neptune and lives in Lincoln Nebraska, is the same, but with a very different starting point.
xenzag, Aug 12 2017
  

       I quite like the idea of practical measuring devices that use units we can all understand. A measuring jug that lists fractions of an Olympic swimming pool, a weighing scale that reads in African Elephants, etc.
mitxela, Aug 13 2017
  

       Don't forget the standard European swallow airspeed measurement.
RayfordSteele, Aug 13 2017
  

       Wales is often used as a unit of size. "Trumps" represent an index of idiocy. Shipping containers are a standard for volume, so we could expect them to become a fundamental. I would promote any index except the totally moronic metric system that means nothing to anyone with a creative outlook. I'm happy to have made a measuring tape with baked beans printed end to end on it. The beans can all have visual variations, but as long as their lengths remain as an exact constant, the tape will function perfectly. Ultimately it's a halfbaked idea, which is why it's here and not on the shelves of the toolshops.
xenzag, Aug 13 2017
  

       // standard European swallow airspeed measurement //   

       That implies the existence of a unit of mass based on a Standard Coconut (which are, of course, non-migratory).
8th of 7, Aug 13 2017
  

       I thought "how long in baked beans" would be a measurement of time; but it would be highly variable based on dosage and intestinal flora.
lurch, Aug 13 2017
  
      
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