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Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure: Difference between revisions
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[[File:Xkcdmonster.png|thumb|380px|link=xkcd|It was finally destroyed with a nuclear weapon carrying the destructive energy of the Hiroshima bomb.]]
{{quote|'''Are the radio-waves from objects in space any threat to us?'''
''No, they are extremely weak. The total energy collected by radio astronomers over the history of radio astronomy amounts to about the energy required for a mosquito to make one push-up!''
|'''Dr. John Simonetti''' of the [http://www.phys.vt.edu/~jhs/faq/quasars.html#q11 Department of Physics at Virginia Tech] }}
{{quote|"''This, recruits, is a twenty-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an ''Everest''-class dreadnought accelerates one to one-point-three percent of light-speed. It impacts with the force of a thirty-eight kiloton bomb -- that is three times the yield of the city-buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth! That means '''[[Memetic Mutation|SIR ISAAC NEWTON IS THE DEADLIEST SON OF A BITCH IN SPACE]]!'''''"
|'''Gunnery Chief''', ''[[Mass Effect 2]]''}}
How do you show someone the force of an erupting volcano via print, or the height of the Burj Khalifa over a 17-inch screen?
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Basically, any unit of measure that equates to something extreme in that property, but is still rather vague and hard to comprehend since the average person doesn't know what that ''is'' off the top of his or her head. Bonus points if the number of the unit of measure is still ridiculously large (e.g. 1,000,000 Hiroshimas) thereby defeating the purpose of describing it in those terms even if the unit was something people would intuitively understand.
This trope is for unusual units for quantities that have well-defined values in ordinary non-facetious units. If you measure an amount of something that usually is not given a numerical value at all, it is an [[Abstract Scale]]. See also [[Fantastic Measurement System]]. Compare [[Reviewer Standard Comparisons]].
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* There is a story by [[Carl Barks]] with [[Donald Duck]] and his nephews, where they are travelling into space via a virtual machine [[Gyro Gearloose]] made. Donald takes them to bigger places where he recreates earthly stuff on vast scales, constantly using comparative scales for his nephews and the readers to grasp. This is mixed with using objects of continuously lesser scales -first insects, than dust, snowflakes, etc- surpassing them. The story is called 'Donald's Big Imagination'. A grasshopper from Betelgeuse is imagined having 5 ocean liners on its back and the circumference of the star uses a time-scale analogy, namely "Earth's fastest rocket takes 100 years to fly around it".
== [[Fan Works]] ==
* Played for laughs n the short ''[[The Owl House]]'' fanmade comic/animatic [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX4e2YIONxo seen here]. Luz lets it slip that she can carry the groceries because they "weigh, like, two-thirds of Amity" [[Freudian Slip| (letting it slip that she found that out by carrying Amity)]] and then Gus, Hunter, and Willow start using Amity as a way to measure weight. Fortunately she seems to view it as [[Actually Pretty Funny]].
== [[Film
* The movie ''[[Armageddon]]'' uses this trope while describing the size of the asteroid.
{{quote|'''President:''' How big are we talking?
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** This makes it a whole lot more threatening than [[Dueling Movies|the other asteroid movie]], ''[[Deep Impact]]'', featuring a comet described as "The size of New York City, from the Battery to the Bronx."
** The opening narration also used the "Hiroshima measurement" when speaking of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Hilariously, even though they try to make it sound impressive, they ''[[You Fail Physics Forever|severely]]'' [[You Fail Physics Forever|underestimate]] the energy released by the real impact.
* Parodied in ''[[Team America: World Police]]'', where it is noted that an upcoming terrorist event, if it completes, would be "Nine Eleven times a hundred" - as is pointed out, that's 91,100 ("basically all the worst parts of the Bible"). Another is "Nine Eleven times a thousand" - 911,000. Kim Jong-Il described his ultimate plan, which involves simultaneous terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction across the world as "Nine Eleven times 2356," which nobody knows
* In ''[[Jarhead]]'', this is noted as a legitimate military tactic to quickly gauge distances: use things you know, such as the length of a football field.
{{quote|'''SSgt. Sykes:''' You take what you know, and then you multiply. Please don't use your dicks. They're too small, and I can't count that high. I don't wanna hear, "400,000 inches." }}
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** It's also described as being over 550 kilometers in diameter, which gives it roughly [[Hollywood Density|20 times the average density of solid lead]].
== [[Literature]] ==▼
▲== Literature ==
* A children's book called the ''I Wonder Why Encyclopedia'' occasionally measures weight in terms of small cars despite also giving actual units and somehow deciding that cars weigh exactly one ton.
** The problem with this is that it's a moving target. A "mid-size" 1981 Dodge Aries and a "small" 2008 Toyota Yaris both weigh about 2500
* In [[Fred Saberhagen]]'s "[[Berserker (Literature)|Berserker]]" series, the Berserker enemy A.I. spaceships are often described as the size of Manhattan Island. Which for a space ship is HUGE.
* ''New Scientist'''s Feedback column maintains a discourse on unusual units used in media and advertising lasting probably since its inception - London buses, blue whales, football pitches etc etc etc.
* The children's book ''[[How Much Is A Million]]'' teaches kids about large numbers in this manner.
== [[Live-Action TV]] ==▼
▲== Live-Action TV ==
* ''[[How Do They Do It]]'' described a ship as "the length of three football fields" and "six times the size of the ''Titanic''" within one minute.
* ''Killer Asteroids'' on the Science Channel describes asteroids' power in terms of Hiroshima bombs.
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* Parodied in ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]'', as part of a spoof documentary on Tchaikovsky.
{{quote|'''Graham Chapman''': Well, if you can imagine the size of Nelson's Column, which is roughly three times the size of a London bus, then Tchaikovsky was much smaller. His head was about the same size as that of an extremely large dog, that is to say, two very small dogs, or four very large hamsters, or one medium-size rabbit if you count the whole of the body and not just the head.}}
* In the last episode of ''[[Cosmos]]'', [[Carl Sagan]] compared the total tonnage of bombs dropped in [[World War II]]
** He then went on to say that this was the equivalent of a million Hiroshima bombs.
* The ''[[Angel]]'' episode "Time Bomb" had the demoness Illyria threatening to implode and, according to Wesley's conservative guess, take out several city blocks. Angel requests an "unconservative" guess.
{{quote|"Rand & McNally will have to redraw their maps."}}
* These kind of measurements come up on ''[[QI]]'' from time to time. Apparently the UK purchases enough wrapping paper for the Christmas season every year to gift-wrap the island of Guernsey.
* One episode of ''[[The Colbert Report]]'' had Stephen rating Nazis on a scale of 1 to 10 Hitlers. [[Adolf Hitler]] himself got only 9 Hitlers because "[[Even Evil Has Standards|nobody gets 10 Hitlers."]]
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* ''Advanced
== [[Video Games]] ==
* ''[[Katamari Damacy]]'' uses this form of measurement to illustrate the size of your katamaris.
* ''[[Mass Effect]]'' tends to use Hiroshimas to quantify the yields on starship [[Magnetic Weapons|mass accelerators]], both in-game and in the Codex. The above quote is a gunnery captain chewing out a pair of recruits about just how powerful the gun really ''is'', to get them to "check [their] damn targets" before firing. Also, in ''[[Mass Effect 1]]'', Admiral Hackett will use it to describe the size of a tactical nuke attached to a ''recon probe'' launched during the First Contact War.
* Grobnar of ''[[Neverwinter Nights 2]]'' starts using his
{{quote|'''Grobnar:''' No one really knows how big the Wendersnaven are. They could be thousands of Khelgars high!
'''Khelgar Ironfist:''' What did I say 'bout usin' me as a unit of measurement?!
'''Grobnar:''' Er, right, several Neeshkas high. }}
* In ''[[Super Paper Mario]]'', when Dimentio first brings the heroes to Dimension D, He believes that his power has increased by 256 times, {{spoiler|though it actually increases
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* Faye in [http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=702 this] installment of ''[[Questionable Content]]'' claims to be a unit of measurement, but the formula is rather complex.
* [http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1804 This] ''[[Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal]]'' strip pokes fun at the tendency of science TV programming to do this.
* ''[[Xkcd]]'' gives us several of these [http://xkcd.com/526/ here].
* In ''[[The
* In ''[[Goats]]'', Phillip needs one of these to comprehend the number of people he's killing every time he creates and destroys another universe:
{{quote|'''Yakmeat''': Every time we run a simulation, we are literally creating an entire artificial universe to experiment with. And when an experiment is over, we're just turning off quadrillions of lives.
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"or, how big is it? its the size of new york city sir"
"OH SHIT"
"sir im afraid the comet is the size of [[Your Mom|your moms dick]]"
"OH SNAP"
"sir are you familiar with jupiter"
"you mean like the planet?"
"yeah"
"well its that big sir"
"hmm that sounds pretty big. i have a question, is it jupiter?"
"yes sir, earth is literally under seige by planet fucking jupiter"
"OH SHIT" }}
== [[Web Original]] ==
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* ''[[Cracked.com]]'''s go-to comparison for crazy behavior is none other than [[Gary Busey]].
* The [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]] page on this very wiki measures the distance to the nearest star in terms of ''U.S. National Debts'' worth of gasoline that it would take to drive there.
* An [https://web.archive.org/web/20121201091245/http://wiki.fandomwank.com/index.php/Snapes_on_an_Astral_Plane epic HP fanwar] provided a unit of measure for insanity, thanks to one Lady Darkness insisting on being married to Snape on an astral plane: "One Ladark (...) is defined as the amount of batshittery necessary to believe a fictional character originating within the last 20 years is real and speaks to you. Most wanks can be measured in milliLadarks. This one hits about three."
* Certain fans on the internet have made the [http://1d4chan.org/wiki/The_Henderson_Scale_of_Plot_Derailment Henderson], a unit of [[Off the Rails|plot derailment]], particularly of [[Tabletop Games|tabletop RPGs]].
* ''The Daily WTF'' community now has a unit for difficulty of refund - [http://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/23516/blakeyrat-has-to-send-a-letter-to-a-bank-a-tweet-story/45 Telstra], after "Australia's largest telco" evidently plagued with Conquest’s Third Law compatible corporate bureaucracy, dealing with which was described in ''series of'' [[After Action Report]]s of one member, ending in "[http://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/22975/telstra-the-inescapable-whirlpool-of-crushing-despair Telstra: The Inescapable Whirlpool of Crushing Despair]".
* ''The People's Cube'' team came up with units for Greenhouse Gas Emission/Carbon Credits: Cow Fart Unit and Kyoto (1 billion CFU) in their (satirical, of course) article ''[http://thepeoplescube.com/current-truth/volcano-releases-one-trillion-cow-farts-into-atmosphere-t1950.html Volcano Releases One Trillion Cow Farts Into Atmosphere]'' (that's one thousand Kyotos).
== [[Real Life]] ==
* As a less cartoonish and possibly more awe-inspiring alternative to the page quote, Carl Sagan described all the energy collected from outside the solar system by radio telescopes as "less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground."
* The yield of cataclysmic explosions is frequently measured in terms of number of Hiroshima equivalent, or occasionally in multiples of the sum total of all explosives used during [[World War Two]].
** They are almost always measured in kilo/megatons. That means that they are as powerful as that many thousand or million tons of TNT. Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was somewhere between 13 and 18 kilotons.
** Wikipedia also uses the [[wikipedia:Tsar Bomba|Tsar Bomba]], the biggest nuke ever made, to measure the eruptive power of the [[wikipedia:Krakatoa|the Krakatoa eruption]]. (Hint: 1 Tsar Bomba = 3,125 Hiroshima bombs, and 4 Tsar Bombas = the Krakatoa eruption)
** The energy released by a large meteor impact (like the one that killed the dinosaurs) is often likened to collecting all the nuclear weapons in the world to one spot and exploding them all at once, then repeating it about 1,000 times within the same second (for a more precise comparison, the energy released by the impact of a meteor with a
*** Most geologists get a little tired of this. The energy of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and bolide impacts is primarily transmitted into the ground as compressional and shear waves, or lifts ejecta into the air. The actual destructive effects of these phenomenon are far less than detonating some imaginary bomb that contains the same amount of kinetic energy, since in a nuclear bomb that energy is released mostly as gamma rays that directly heat the atmosphere causing an explosion as the air expands to cool itself. The total kinetic energy released is not equivalent to the actual effects of the release. Detonating a 1 megaton bomb will cause far more damage to human structures than a 1 megaton volcanic eruption or a 100 megaton earthquake, even when a lot of the bomb blast's kinetic energy is lost to space and the upper atmosphere.
* In America, many people will emphasize how small or remote a town is by listing the miles to nearest Wal-Mart, McDonald's, major grocery store, or multiplex.
** Hint: You're never farther than 115 miles from a [http://www.datapointed.net/2010/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdonalds-sept-2010/ McDonald's]
*** This doesn't include Alaska. If it did, it'd be a ''lot'' further than that.
*** under
** City size can also be described similarly; [[Buffy the Vampire Slayer|Sunnydale]], for instance, is "a one Starbucks town."<ref>Despite the fact that the town contains a university, airport, and ''castle''.</ref>
* In America, Rhode Island's status as the ultimate in mass land-area equation technology is legendary, it having been founded for just such a purpose by the British to convey meaningful analogies of claimed territories to the Throne. If the area being described is too big to be measured reasonably in Rhode Islands, it's often measured in Connecticuts, South Dakotas, fractions of a Texas or fractions of an Alaska.
** ''Our Dumb World'', an atlas by the Onion, describes Rhode Island as being "[[Shaped Like Itself|roughly the size of one Rhode Island]]", which is to say: about 1/3 the size of Puerto Rico, or 76 times smaller than Portugal.
** ''The CIA World Factbook'' describes the land area of ''every'' country in the world this way: "about half the size of Texas," "about the size of South Dakota" and in one or two cases "approximately three times as big as The Mall in Washington DC." Justified, in that the ''World Factbook'' is primarily written as a resource for US policy makers, and in any case the Factbook also gives the exact measurements in square kilometers.
*** Actually the ''World Factbook'' is mainly a public resource, not a policy maker's resource, making the prioritizing of user-friendliness more understandable.
* PJ O'Rourke once [[Lampshaded]] this trope, on a tour of a US Navy vessel, and came up with a few comparisons of his own, deciding for instance that the ship contained [[Comedic Sociopath|"enough rope to hang every Democrat elected to Congress since the Johnson administration."]]
* For height, the preferred unit in the US is the Empire State Building. The Eiffel Tower is also used fairly often. For geologic height, it's Mt Everests.
** [[British Newspapers]] prefer to include a range of comparisons to whatever the subject is, including a double-decker bus, Big Ben (St Stephen's Tower), St. Paul's Cathedral, Canary Wharf, The Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the Petronas Towers and any other really famous skyscraper.
*** [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/vulture_central_standards/ Mercilessly parodied] by online [[British Newspapers|British Newspaper]] ''The Register''. Be warned that some of the examples listed may be [[Not Safe for Work]]
** Mt. Everests occasionally appear as a unit of mass or weight. One science special declared that if all the mass in a single wooden matchstick were converted to energy, it would be enough to lift Mount Everest 20 feet off the ground.
* Welsh comedian Rhod Gilbert has commented on BBC newsreaders' practice of describing areas of land as being the size of Wales:
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** A somewhat more peculiar measure: ''The Economist'' invented, and uses, a measurement called "The Big Mac Index" to compare currencies; since McDonalds is very strictly standardized, the price of a Big Mac directly corresponds to what it costs for the restaurant to serve it; as such, comparing the cost of a Big Mac to currency exchange rates can tell you when a currency is under- or over-valued.
* Astronomers routinely measure the masses of stars and other heavy objects in increments of "solar masses". The masses of extrasolar planets are usually measured in increments of Jupiter masses or Earth masses.
* Inverted. When the atomic bomb was first dropped on Hiroshima, [[Time (magazine)|''Time'' magazine]] described it as seven times the power of the [[wikipedia:Halifax Explosion|Halifax explosion]].
** A regular example at the Halifax memorial museum. The Halifax explosion is described as the biggest single explosion before Hiroshima.
* [[The BBC]] (and other news sources) are noted for being fond of expressing measurements in terms of objects rather than any kind of units. In Britain these often include double-decker buses for length and football pitches for area, stepping up to 'the size of Wales' for larger areas, with slightly different ones being used in other countries. There's actually a fairly sensible reason for this, seeing as Britain has a somewhat peculiar relationship with the metric system; it's the only official system taught in schools, but businesses are perfectly entitled to use imperial ones for official purposes if they ''really'' want to and a surprising number still do. However, occasionally they throw in comparisons to things which surely the average person would have no idea about, such as "the volume of an Olympic swimming pool", "the size of a blue whale" and "the power of a Concorde".
** US news channels frequently give lengths and areas in terms of (American) football fields. They never specify whether or not they're including the end-zones, which is a significant difference, making this more confusing than clarifying.
* Television meteorologists will give sizes of hail in much the same way, generally using sports equipment, usually ranging from golf ball-sized to softball-sized hail. One anecdotal case from the Ozarks had a person calling in about "cellphone sized hail" that had newscaster trying to guess whether they were thinking tiny flip-phones or huge Blackberries.
* The [[wikipedia:Smoot|Smoot]], a measurement available in [[Google Earth]].
* Energy (or work, since it has the same SI dimensions) can be measured in Burning Libraries of Congress.
* The stone-furlong-fortnight system (on the analogy of centimeter-gram-second and foot-pound-second) is an in-joke of science fiction fandom. If you are going to cling to "traditional" units, why not go ALL the way?
** At the Millennium Philcon business meeting, a BNF who shall be nameless moved to amend an "X miles distance" clause to "2^10 furlongs". This was duly debated For: "It's fannish." Against: "It's stupid."
* The [[wikipedia:CN Tower|CN Tower]] in Toronto has a segment of glass floor in its observation deck, with a view directly downward for some 113 stories. To reassure the frightened, there is a sign next to it expressing how much weight it can support, measured in terms of every creature from ducks to elephants.
* Obviously, this sees much use in [[Loaded Words]] trickery. Torn apart e.g. in "[https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/23/getting-cooked-by-hiroshima-atomic-bomb-global-warming/ Getting 'Cooked' by Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Global Warming]" on '' Watts Up With That?'', using some conversions to compare apples with apples.
* The service 1-800-Got-Junk? uses the comparison of eight standard refrigerators to describe the volume of their trucks.
* In February 2023, ''The Jerusalem Post'' [https://www.jpost.com/science/article-732223 helpfully translated] NASA's sedate description of the size and mass of a meteor which had landed in Texas into far more obvious and everyday terms:
{{quote|According to experts from NASA's Johnson Space Center, the meteor in question was just over 60 centimeters in diameter and weighed half a ton (or around 454 kilograms).
To put that in context, a baby elephant could weigh as much as 113 kilograms, according to experts from the Denver Zoo. This means that despite its diameter only being around the length of average Pembroke Welsh Corgi, the meteor still weighed as much as four baby elephants.}}
* In early 2022, a news article [https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/adelaide-afternoons/half-a-giraffe/13800376 described an asteroid that impacted the earth as "half a giraffe" in size].
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