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Some people are just more comfortable with good old familiar units like baby elephants per corgi. What do they even use for that in the metric system? Millihectares per decilitre or something? Whatever.
“0.012 m3 meteor weighing 400 kg hit Texas”
Boooooring.
you could also say 12L meteor weighing 400kg … which is pretty cool, imagine 12 cartons of milk weighing the same as 4 fairly large people
1.5 fairly large people. You’re talking to Americans, remember.
I mean they were probably already confused by the L and the cartons of milk …
Soda is generally sold in 2L bottles here, with single liter bottles growing in popularity. Alcohol is usually sold by the ml, though in units like “fifth” and “handle.”
Milk though, milk is sold in half-pints (not sure why they don’t write cup), pints, quarts, half-gallon, or gallon. I like to pretend a quart is a shrinkflated liter though.
For non-metric users, three gallons of milk is probably more accessible. 400 kg is 880lb, which is roughly 12x as dense as water, which is the wild part (or it feels like it, that could be a totally normal density for stone, I’ve already put too much effort in for napkin math on a shitpost)
So palladium is has a density of 12.02, which it’s price per ounce a little under 2000 CAD, that “corgi” is worth ~$27,846,525.99 CAD at current prices.
In your example of why the American system is bad resort to using the American system because nobody had any context?
Check mate atheists.
So it’s roughly the size of a bucket.
Well. A corgi-sized bucket, anyway. Not one of the bigger ones, great dane or so.
Couple of buckets if it’s corgi size.
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I mean, it’s basic knowledge isn’t it? If you know e=mc2 you’d better also know (be)4=c
Billaneters
Unironically though more people really need to understand the utility of using highly composite numbers as units of measurement. It’s not like the number 12 got picked randomly out of a hat.
What will we call a half ton? George Washington: 4 baby elephants.
Americans will measure anything except use metric 😂
Is nobody bothered about how un-corgi-sized the meteor on the picture is?
AI is a curse…
nah, we understand that a lot of material burns off
The most fucked unit of measurement I’ve seen is your mom.
Had to check that it’s actually plausible.
Assuming a corgi is 0.4m long, 0.3m tall and 0.2m wide and that a baby elephant weighs 120kg that gives the meteor a density of 20000kg/m³.
There are only a few elements denser than that, but it’s possible.
The meteor was, according to NASA, about 2 feet across and weighed 1000 pounds. So their baby elephants are on the lighter side and their corgis are fairly normal size.
I’m going to assume a sphere, 60 centimeters in diameter, and a weight of 450 kg. Volume of the sphere is 113000cm3, which gives us a density of 3,9g/cm3. That’s heavier than most rocks (silicon at 2.3), but much lighter than iron (7.9).
Wouldn’t it just be iron?
Possibly, astrophysics is usually about order of magnitude and while iron is only 8000kg/m³ it’s within error margins.
And of course, it depends on how chubby the corgi is.
And how malnourished the baby elephants are. I mean, there are 4 of them, that’s a big litter for an elephant. Perhaps they aren’t all suckling as much as is normal because the mother elephant isn’t producing enough milk for 4. Maybe the mother elephant is sickly, after such a difficult birth. God, what if she even died?! The poor things will starve!
Considering elephants birth one at a time after like 18 months…
I assumed a very rectangular shape.
Assume a rectangular corgi.
A spherical corgi is just a corgi, so that really just complicates it.
iron and iridium, and nickel probably.
Corgis (adult) are pretty much one size, but are we talking newborn or year-old baby elephants? At what age does “baby” graduate to “toddler” in a species that stands and walks within an hour of birth?
Asking the real questions
20,000kg/m³ is 20g/cm³, and only a couple of elements are that dense. But it’s not reasonable that a meteor is solid uranium, platinum, gold or osmium.
It’s probably mostly iron. But, but that would mean only 2 baby elephants per corgi, not 4.
Amerikkkans (well, Tekkkans) will do anything but use the Metric system.
So edgy
I know right? It’s like they’re toddlers who never grew up, except in this case they never grew out of Obscurantism.
People clown on these kinds of headlines as if the average metric user has an intuitive feeling of what size 0.012 cubic meters is.
That’s 12 liters, or about 3 gallons.
So about the size of my bathroom trash can, or the size of my mother-in-law’s corgi, then.
Tell the diameter
To be fair, if you pick your scales such that the numbers read ridiculous, nothing has an intuitive feeling. There’s nothing much intuitive about a plane flying at an altitude of 16 thousand feet either, no matter how much they closetedly fetishise footstuff, in just about the same way there’s nothing much intuitive about measuring the size of a star in meters.
Pilot here: in a weird way, a thousand feet is a unit. “Five thousand, Five hundred feet” is processed kind of like 5.5 altitudes. Bonus: traffic patterns are typically flown at 1000 feet AGL, so 1.0 altitudes, so pilots see that distance a lot.
Several Texan articles I found about this meteorite used the metric system.
Listen, I was raised on the banana scale so all this talk is foreign to me!
Mixing units of measurement here; corgis are metric dogs.
Are you sure? Aren’t they Bri’ish, so they’d be gallons, but weird slightly small gallons?
I need a banana for scale.
According to some searching a banana is 100 - 150 cubic centimeters, while this meteor was .012 cubic meters, meaning roughly the volume of 80 - 120 average bananas (mashed). The meteor weighed 400kg while an (again, perfectly average) banana weighs 100 - 130g. This means that the weight of the meteor is between 3076 - 4000 bananas. So let’s call it the weight of 3500 bananas in the space of 100, or roughly 35x the density of your average earth banana. (Lemmy bananaticians or bananologists, please correct me if I did bad math.)
Would be a great fit here
The hate for the french is everywhere 😓😓😓
So that’s, what, around 7 loaves of Wonder Bread weighing the same as one and a half gorillas?
you have to adapt to the target audience… look where that asteroid hit.
You know well that Americans have only a very loose grip on units and reality. That’s why they use imperial and “elephants per football field” like units.
You mean you can fit 4 baby elephants inside a corgy? Damn…
I mean, density wise, yeah
If you try hard enough you can fit anything inside a Corgi.
Neutron star corgi
