Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure: Difference between revisions

[[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?'''

 

 

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?

* 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".

 

 

* The movie ''[[Armageddon]]'' uses this trope while describing the size of the asteroid.

{{quote|'''President:''' How big are we talking?

** 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]].

 

* 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 lbs.

* The children's book ''[[How Much Is A Million]]'' teaches kids about large numbers in this manner.

 

* ''[[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.

* 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 [[Dungeons & Dragons]]'', 1st Edition, used the gold piece as a unit of weight. Your carrying capacity, the lifting power of a ''telekinesis'' spell, the load limit of ''Tenser's floating disc'', etc. -- all these were given in units of gold pieces rather than pounds. (At the time, 1 gold piece weighed 1/10 of a pound, so converting between pounds and gold pieces was rather easy, although it did make for some ridiculously heavy coins. When 2nd Edition came out, the weight of 1 gold piece changed to 1/50 of a pound and the notion of listing weight in g.p. was abandoned.)

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* 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 everyone's power by that amount}} and he claims that he could obliterate the heroes with the amount of power it would take to lift an eyebrow.

 

* 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.

* ''[[Xkcd]]'' gives us several of these [http://xkcd.com/526/ here].

* 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.

"yes sir, earth is literally under seige by planet fucking jupiter"

"OH SHIT" }}

 

== [[Web Original]] ==

* ''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).

 

* 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]].

* 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.

 

{{reflist}}