I know how big a London bus is, how tall The Empire State Building is, how heavy an elephant is, if you tell me something is the size of Wales I get the gist.
But.... Iceberg the size of Bedfordshire breaks off from Antarctica.. Now that's random !
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Anyone have the first clue how big Bedfordshire is ???
(25 posts) (16 voices)
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That certainly is a crap one for comparison in our minds. Had a jigsaw puzzle of the counties when I was a kid (some don't exist now and there's been a few changes) but I recall it being a relatively small one. And I lived in Luton for a bit. I say lived. But I would reckon Bedfordshire was about the size of Greater London, so why not use that? Or say slightly larger than all the space inside the M25? Or five 63rds the size of Wales - then everyone would know instantly.
Had a crack a few years ago at trying to help folks get a sense of millions vs billions vs trillions. I used physical cash a reference I thought most would be able to (and might like to) imagine. A thousand quid in fresh new tenners was about an inch. A million was the height of a double decker bus, to use a measure you're familiar with. The 'height' of a billion was - if you put it on its side - the distance relative to driving the length of the M1. A trillion was like flying from London to the States and passing a perfect stack of tenners laid on its side all of the way.
No one has ever put a trillion in standard cash denomination in one place at one time. But a couple of multi-billionaires have asked their 'special' banks to put a billion Dollars in cash in a room so that they could come and see what it looked like. And touch it. And possibly do other things to it.
Posted 1 month ago # -
Can I just salute everyone here for some seemingly effortlessly witty, joyous, non-argumentative Funny- grinned my socks off; thanks all!
Posted 1 month ago # -
Nice one, Filthy. Starts off pretty dull, but 6 to 10 are ace.
- Peninkulma, Finnish: the distance a barking dog can be heard in still air (about six miles).
- Abingdon Green gazebos: the level of a political crisis.
- Time: Scaramuccis. Anthony Scaramucci served as the White House director of communications for 11 days.Still smirking at the biscuit toss measure of distance. Is there a co-op sub here where we come up with our own ridiculous ones?
Posted 1 month ago # -
Good link, FR, thank you. I also like the Biscuit Toss. I wonder who, on here, is going to be the first person not to give one?
As an aside: why can't we have interesting spamverts on our site, like they do, instead of the tedious, moronic rubbish we usually have to suffer?
Posted 1 month ago # -
Fragments of the meteorite that landed last night are said to be the size of an orange. Now that works.
US news sites often compare geographical areas to the size of US states. I guess that there are 50 of them of varying sizes, so it's superficially a good idea - there's often one that is roughly the right size. But apart from knowing that Texas and California are big, and Maryland and D.C. are small, I'm not sure that most Americans - or anyone else - learn much from being told something is 'the size of Nebraska'.
Posted 1 month ago # -
Some moons ago on here, Fletcher proposed that a cardboard cut out of Hugh Pym should be used as a unit of measure for the 2m social distance.
Yours truly also established a 'Mogg' as a unit of measure for a waste of space.
Both things still make me laugh. I'm still trying to get my head around all the coronavirus in the world fitting into a coke can and how many coke cans would fit into an area the size of Wales? The mind boggles.
Posted 1 month ago # -
For those of you who don't follow me on Facebook (i.e. almost everyone) I posted a similar thing a while back trying to compare amounts of money. Yere tiz:
Sometimes it’s hard to get your head around the figures we hear every day on the news. Depending on what you do or are doing, money means different things. If you are buying a house you may be thinking in hundreds of thousands. If you are buying a round of drinks you think in pounds. Few people think in billions though. So I thought I’d have a go…
£10s. What you may have in your pocket or your granny puts in your birthday card.
£100s. About the most you might have in hard cash.
£1000s. The terms you think in when talking about monthly ins and outs or buying a car.
£10,000s. The terms you may think in for annual salaries or the top prizes in TV quiz shows.
£100,000s. The terms normal people think in for house prices.
£1000,000s. Businesses, and not small ones either. Big lottery wins
£10,000,000s. Getting hard to grasp. Big company amounts.
£100,000,000s. £1m, plus £1m, plus £1m one hundred times… Beyond almost everyone’s thinking.
£1000,000,000s Billions. Boggling amount. Only governments and a handful of super-rich think in these terms.
£10,000,000,000 One thousand, million times more than you have in your pocket.
£12,000,000,000 THE AMOUNT OUR GOVERNMENT SPAFFED AWAY ON USELESS TRACK AND TRACE SYSTEMS BY GIVING IT TO THEIR CRONIES WHO HAD NO IDEA WHAT THEY WERE DOING!Posted 1 month ago # -
Oh and Bedfordshire; It's about half the size of Dorset. Hope that helps.
Posted 1 month ago #
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