mental_floss magazine
SUBSCRIBE >
GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS >
DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTIONS >
subscriber services >
My friend Dave pointed me to this brilliant weirdconverter. When people used to ask me my weight I used to reply 137 pounds. That’s all in the past, though (the English system is so last year. And also all the years before that.). From now on I will say one of the following:
“How much do you weigh?”
“Roughly 30.07196 chickens. Or, you know, 1.2454 Jennifer Anistons.”
Of course, if your friends don’t use the Aniston as a measure, there are other options. Weirdconverter can also figure out how much you weigh in NASCAR tires, sheets of paper, hockey pucks, whale testicles, Tom Cruises and a bunch of other decidedly unmetric standards.
Link via Boingboing. Thanks Dave!
In high school, I had pasted a converted spedometer on my dashboard so I could measure speed in miles per “Hey Jude”.
posted by Bill T. on 6-6-2007 at 8:46 am
Reminds me of the Harvard Bridge that is measured in Smoots.
posted by Jason! on 6-6-2007 at 3:16 pm
Hahaha! The testicle of a right whale weighs 250 chickens!
I wonder if it tastes like chicken too…
posted by Olivier on 6-7-2007 at 3:49 am
I weigh 1.19 Mangesh
posted by TDave on 6-8-2007 at 3:18 am
Long ago, I downloaded the King James Bible as ASCII text. It weighed in at about 4.5 Mb. Since then, I have taken to comparing computer memory capacity in terms of KJV Bibles.
I remember when the Space Shuttle was first being launched, and a science correspondent for one of the TV networks said that he was tired of comparing the size of rockets in terms of football fields. He then gave us the length of the Space Shuttle in tennis courts.
posted by Daniel Kim on 6-9-2007 at 7:32 am
Hmm. I most certainly am an American female but appear to weigh in at about 0.6445672191529 of one.
That just blew my mind, man.
posted by Amanda on 6-10-2007 at 2:18 pm