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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/

...First I checked out the Wikipedia page to find out what metrology was: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrology

In which I learned the first known standardized measure was the royal Egyptian cubit - the length of the Pharaoh's arm plus width of his hand. Standardizing managed to get the pyramids bang on....

Measuring by the body isn't unusual. There's the Smoot. From Michael's paper:

"The Smoot is the unit of length of 5 feet 7 inches equivalent to the height in 1958 of then student Oliver R. Smoot...

2/5

en.wikipedia.orgMetrology - Wikipedia
Hilda Bastian

..."...who was used to measure the span of the Harvard Bridge (364.4 Smoots). Ironically, Smoots subsequently became the American National Standards Institute’s Chairman, and then the International Organisation for Standardisation’s (ISO) president. The Smoot, among other units, is (ironically) used by both Google Earth and Google Calculator."

The Smoot features in the Wikipedia List of humorous units of measurement, which Michael references:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_

3/5

en.wikipedia.orgList of humorous units of measurement - Wikipedia

...There I learned that donkey power is a third of horse power,

a Sheppey is the closest distance "at which sheep remain picturesque" (7/8 mile, if you want to know),

& a Muggeseggele is a Swabian reference to a housefly's private parts = a teensy tiny amount.

Finally, because I didn't know what Michael was referring to, I searched for "the London fatberg" (can't recommend!). Turns out it's a gross sewer obstruction - but also a good example of the weirdness of
journalist metrology....

4/5

...From The Guardian "at 820 feet, the fatberg was ‘longer than Tower Bridge’ or ‘twice as long as Wembley Stadium’ and ‘the weight of 11 double-decker buses’."

Michael argues we presume too much with all this, & a research agenda is needed.

Here's the link to his paper again: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/

5/5

@hildabast
Avast New Zealand!
Is it time to abandon the metric system?
Some thought required. I mean, the sheppey be weighted by breed: a Marino sheppey could be less than a Romney...

@statsguy Ha!

The 2m advice is one of Michael's examples.

@AndresCaicedo @hildabast
Did you know that 5'8" is the same thing as 4'20"? I'm not short, I'm actually really high...

@hildabast Surely the plural of smoot should be smeet.