Silly size comparisons Options

[djellison]

I believe NASA convention dictates that you have to describe the size as being a dime from X miles away, or the size of X across the continental USA

If you can get 'Tennis Court' and 'Washing Machine' in there, you win a NASA PAO Special Award.

Doug

[Alan Stern]

I believe NASA convention dictates that you have to describe the size as being a dime from X miles away, or the size of X across the continental USA

If you can get 'Tennis Court' and 'Washing Machine' in there, you win a NASA PAO Special Award.

Doug

Copy that.

[Rob Pinnegar]

I believe NASA convention dictates that you have to describe the size as being a dime from X miles away, or the size of X across the continental USA

There is plenty of room to have fun with this.

For example, it could be described as having the same angular diameter as a turkey vulture circling cloverleaf-interchange roadkill in Indianapolis, as seen from a railway boxcar in Terre Haute. Or some such.

[Bob Shaw]

There is plenty of room to have fun with this.

For example, it could be described as having the same angular diameter as a turkey vulture circling cloverleaf-interchange roadkill in Indianapolis, as seen from a railway boxcar in Terre Haute. Or some such.

Rob:

In the UK, the Standard Measurement of a large area is a 'Wales'. For smaller areas or volumes, such values as a 'Millenium Dome', an 'Isle of Wight' and - most popular of all a 'London Bus' have been used for many years (as have 'Fully Grown African Elephants'). The Millenium Dome measurement is now somewhat out of fashion, so no change there, then!

'Feedback' in New Scientist regularly reports on these Important Matters.

Bob Shaw

[djellison]

Oh - this is all set in stone stuff. The concept of ft or metres doesnt exit, things fit into one of the following sizes

Dime
CD
Washing Machine
Golf Cart
Family Car
SUV
Tennis Court
Football Pitch
Texas
Continental USA.


Any angle has to be express as a range to scoring a hole-in-one or the distance to which a dime would mark out that angle.

Power must be expressed in terms of 100w light bulbs

Anything larger than about 20 miles across must be overlayed onto the USA.

High speeds are expressed as X-minutes to cross the continent.

And then when this stuff is regurgitated by the press - any spacecraft or other piece of hardware is prefixed by it's cost.. (i.e. the $750M dollar this, or the $1.2 billion dollar that)



Doug

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Oh - this is all set in stone stuff. The concept of ft or metres doesnt exit, things fit into one of the following sizes

Dime
CD
Washing Machine
Golf Cart
Family Car
SUV
Tennis Court
Football Pitch
Texas
Continental USA.
Any angle has to be express as a range to scoring a hole-in-one or the distance to which a dime would mark out that angle.

Power must be expressed in terms of 100w light bulbs

Anything larger than about 20 miles across must be overlayed onto the USA.

High speeds are expressed as X-minutes to cross the continent.

And then when this stuff is regurgitated by the press - any spacecraft or other piece of hardware is prefixed by it's cost.. (i.e. the $750M dollar this, or the $1.2 billion dollar that)

You know, Doug, this topic sounds well-suited to the Peter's Evil Overlord List treatment.

Woohoo, can't wait Alan! Great news that NH took her first photos

Pluto Mission News
New Horizons Tracks an Asteroid
June 15, 2006
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/061506.htm

[ljk4-1]

Oh - this is all set in stone stuff. The concept of ft or metres doesnt exit, things fit into one of the following sizes
[snip]

And how else do you want to relay the size of objects in and about
space to the general public? Meters, kilometers, liters - they mean
nothing to most Americans, and the generally vast sizes of most
space objects are also little more than abstract concepts to the
human mind at best.

There was a recent image of Enceladus compared to Great Britain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PIA07724.jpg

I don't recall any comments about that, even though the two objects
have nothing in common except the same solar system.

[David]

There was a recent image of Enceladus compared to Great Britain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PIA07724.jpg

I don't recall any comments about that, even though the two objects
have nothing in common except the same solar system.

Perhaps not exactly to your purpose, but this was my comment on the picture earlier this year.

[djellison]

I don't recall any comments about that,

We joked about it at the time, hoping that Enc. didn't actuall crash into the UK any time soon.

All very tongue in cheek ljk - I don't have any real problem with using analogs for scale definition, I just find some of them quite funny.

Doug

[ljk4-1]

My concern was and is the relaying of science to the public. Since the
US space program is supported by the government and taxpayer dollars -
and many of them have poor science backgrounds - the easier they can
be made to understand the significance of spending billions to send
spaceships to distant worlds, the better for science.

Too many people (and I have run into more than my share) think that
all that money spent on space is wasted and should be used to help the
people on Earth. They don't realize or care how relatively little NASA
gets from the government pie. Most other agencies would go through
NASA's annual budget in months.

To keep this on topic, imagine how the average person would and will
likely react to that image of the little planetoid from New Horizons. To
us it is an amazing accomplishment, but to them they'll look at that
fuzzy little blob and say "How many millions did we spend for THAT?!"

I can recall "getting" the true size of Olympus Mons shortly after its
true nature was revealed by Mariner 9 when they compared it to a
map of Arizona, and the darn thing covered the whole state!

http://tes.asu.edu/EDUCATION/activities/95...arth_diags.html

[elakdawalla]

Yes -- the overuse of the "it's like scoring a hole in one from Los Angeles to New York" one causes even my space-ignoramus husband to roll his eyes. And it kind of detracts from really astonishing placements, like Opportunity rolling neatly into Eagle crater -- that really was like a hole in one.

So cool to see those photos from MVIC! Congratulations to the New Horizons team!
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/061506.htm
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPho...s/asteroid.html

--Emily

[dvandorn]

Oh - this is all set in stone stuff. The concept of ft or metres doesnt exit, things fit into one of the following sizes

Dime
CD
Washing Machine
Golf Cart
Family Car
SUV
Tennis Court
Football Pitch
Texas
Continental USA.

You forgot a very important one, though I admit it's outdated and no longer in use. But, from the mid-60s to just a few years ago, any feature on a moon or planet that's in a range of 200 to 300 meters across was referred to as "about the size of the Astrodome."

I think it was only with the demise of the actual Astrodome structure that NASA PAO pulled that particular chimera from their playbooks...

-the other Doug

[tasp]

{apology for going climatological here instead of 'space'}

In the US midwest, hail sizes are usually cited as 'grapefruit' or 'softball' sized for the really big stuff.

I have heard 'peach ' and 'baseball' size used too.

Smaller stuff is commonly described as 'dime' (!) 'nickel' and 'quarter' sized.

Sacagewea sized never came into vogue.

Sometimes a specific dimension is given, if memory serves, 1 inch or 1 and a 1/2 inch being the most common cited.


Uusally neglected in these reports is the wind speed. Worst hail I experienced personally wasn't very big (dime sized) but driven by a 35 MPH horizontal wind. Ouch!


Are hail sizes standardized around the world? I suspect not.



{BTW, local weathercasters really brag up their respective super doppler radars and such. A couple even claim a 'hail mode'. Would such refinements of a radar system be useful for scanning those possible methane storms at the south pole of Titan?}

[dvandorn]

I've also heard (and seen!) hail described as pea-sized. I'd be willing to bet that this is the size I've seen most frequently, of all the hail I've ever seen falling...

-the other Doug

[AndyG]

Oh - this is all set in stone stuff. The concept of ft or metres doesnt exit, things fit into one of the following sizes

Dime
CD
Washing Machine
Golf Cart
Family Car
SUV
Tennis Court
Football Pitch
Texas
Continental USA.

You missed out the (presumably EU-preferred) Belgium. A unit of measurement equal to 1.469 Waleses, according to this wonderful site.

Andy