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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"....

1/5

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/

@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.

@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.) 😆