Finally, Pandora’s box of units and scales that refused to sit comfortably in any other section. Many measurements considered for inclusion were screened out for being of restricted use or nebulous definition. The Garn, for example, is used by NASA as a unit on their scale of susceptibility to space sickness, an eponymous honour bestowed on Edwin Jacob Garn (b. 1932) who in 1985 became the first serving Member of Congress to go into space. Despite having been a Navy pilot with over ten thousand flying hours under his belt, he apparently vomited enthusiastically throughout his one hundred and sixty-seven hours in orbit.
Other exclusions included the mickey and the Lovelace from computer-speak. The former, an obvious nod to Mickey Mouse, denotes the smallest discernible movement of a mouse cursor, while the Lovelace scale measures user-dissatisfaction with the ‘clunkiness’ of a computer operating system – another eponymous honour, commemorating mathematician Ada Lovelace (1815–52), the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, who in the 1840s helped Charles Babbage (1791– 1871) to invent the first programmable computer. That said, with information ranging from the history of clothes’ sizes to the estimated calorific intake of Santa on Christmas Eve, there should be something in this section to either amuse or inform.
20/20 VISION
A measurement of visual acuity, 20/20 is popularly taken to indicate perfect eyesight, but in fact means no such thing.
If a person is rated as having 20/20 vision this only means that they can clearly see at a distance of 20 ft that which they should be able to. A person with 20/100 vision, for example, has to be standing as close as 20 ft to see what a normal person can see at 100 ft.
It has to be understood that we do not see with our eyes but with our brains, which interpret the messages sent down the optic nerve from the retina: it is the clarity of the data so transmitted that is rated on the scale. A person with perfectly normal and healthy eyes can easily have seriously impaired ‘brain-vision’ after a stroke or a heavy blow to the head.
A dangerously misunderstood scale of ‘measurement’ which does not in fact relate to anything other than individual tolerance of the prevailing levels of sunlight. Nor is the SPF scale mathematical in its escalation – SPF 15 gives 93 per cent protection; SPF 30 gives 97 per cent protection; SPF 60 renders 98.5 per cent protection – so the higher up the scale you go the smaller the difference to choose between them.
The rating actually relates to the alleged time a user can remain in the sun without burning. If you can normally stay in the direct sunlight of a given strength for about twenty minutes without any protection and without starting to burn, then repeated applications of SPF 30, for example, claim to allow you to remain in that sunlight for thirty times longer.
But that is about ten hours, which does seem risky. Alternatively, if you are more sun-resistant and able to take one hour in that same level of direct sunlight without burning, then repeated applications of SPF 30 should allow you to stay outside for thirty hours. Really? Providing the claims are genuine, SPF ratings only make sense when related to individual tolerance to varying levels of sunlight.
Numerous trials have failed to find any better protection from more expensive products over supermarket own-brand lotions, so the best advice is perhaps to just save your money, cover up and stay pasty-faced.
The growth spurt experienced by humans in the first two years of life is responsible for about 50 per cent of the complete cycle, so if you double a boy’s height at that age you will have a good idea of his adult height. Girls develop more quickly, so the same calculation for them is made at eighteen months. Genetics also play a significant role in the determination of adult height, so another way to calculate this is to add together the heights of both parents and, in the case of a boy, add 2.5 in. / 6.35 cm and deduct the same for a girl, before dividing the remainder by two.
First established by the sculptors of ancient Greece, the human body can be measured in multiples of certain lengths and spans. The average person is, including their head, seven and a half times the length of their head, while most of the willowy and elegant prowlers of the catwalk seem to average eight times their head’s length. Again, the average person, from the ground to his or her hairline, stands eighteen times the width of their fist at the knuckles, with the Naomi Campbells of this world standing at something slightly over nineteen fists.
The usual perception of the ideal European female face dictates that the distance between the pupils of the eyes should be 46 per cent of the total width of the face at the temples and that the distance from the corners of the eyes to the corners of the mouth should be 36 per cent of the total depth of the face, as taken from the hairline to the tip of the chin.
The eyes themselves should be, from the inner corners, one eye-width apart and set the same distance in from the side of the head. The length of the nose should be no more than twice the width of the eye with the philtrum of the top lip set one eye-width below the tip of the nose. The mouth itself should approximate two eye-widths. Naturally, there are many women of considerable allure who stand outside these so-called ‘ideal’ parameters.
For some, the perfect male form is presented by the statues of ancient Greece as defined by Polykleitos (c. 450–420 BC), a sculptor who laid down a table of body proportions equating everything from the length of the limbs (and yes, that as well) to multiples of the length of the distal phalange, or the top section, of the little finger. The measurement of the fist across the knuckles, for example, should be three pinkie-tips wide. Although this might seem to be taking things a tad too far, it was a proportional measurement scale that worked, and one still used by sculptors today.
According to the latest figures from the Population Reference Bureau, there are about two billion children in the world. Even after deducting those of non-Christian faiths, this still leaves Santa having to deliver to about 15 per cent of that total. Allowing for 2.5 children per household that works out to 91.8 million homes.
Taking into account the various time zones and the rotation of the earth, this allows Santa a Christmas Day of about thirty-one hours during which he has to visit 822.6 houses every second. This allows him about one thousandth of a second to park on the roof, scuttle down the chimney and deliver the gift, consume his mince pie and milk and get to his next stop, averaging a speed of 650 mi./s / 1,046 k/s.
The distribution of the global Christian community gives Santa a journey of about 78 million mi. / 125 million km, during which he has to consume 91.8 million mince pies and, if every house leaves out but 200 ml (7 fl oz) of milk, he will also have to drink the equivalent of four Olympic swimming pools. This intake of 20,655,000,000 calories means Santa would put on some 2,950 tons in the course of the night, which he could work off by walking round the world twenty-eight thousand times. At least this explains what he gets up to for the rest of the year.
The average reindeer can haul about 136 kg / 300 lb and, allowing that each present weighs about a kilogram / 2.2 lb, this produces a sleighload of 321,300 tons, which would need 2,142,000 reindeer to pull it.
An object weighing 321,300 tons travelling at such speed would create enormous air resistance, subjecting the lead reindeer to fourteen quintillion joules of energy per second – little wonder they have red noses! All the reindeer would vaporize in 4.2 thousandths of a second, leaving Santa exposed to 17,500 g (g-force), which would pin him back in his seat with 4,315,015 lb / 1,957,258 kg of pressure.
Everyone in Santa’s path would be killed by the sonic shock waves his journey created. The deceleration at his first stop would whiplash him and his payload into space in a fraction of a second. Happy Christmas!
WOMAN VERSUS ELEPHANT
If the woman is wearing stiletto heels she will beat the elephant every time when it comes to the load that either can exert on the surface they stand on.
If a woman weighs, say, 45 kg / 100 lb, that body weight multiplied down to the point of one of her killer heels leaves her exerting over two tons of pressure per square inch or 315,000 kgf/cm2, which explains why such footwear is banned from all the ancient monument sites of Greece – as indeed it is from most buildings of historical interest around the world.
That 100 lb / 45 kg woman would be exerting about fifteen times the pressure per square inch of a two-ton elephant standing on just one of its broad feet. I am not suggesting for a minute that being stepped on by an elephant would be a pleasant experience, but even a sylph-like seven-stone woman standing on your bare foot would put the heel straight through it.
Now if you could get the elephant to wear stilettos you’d really be in business!
THE HYNEK SCALE OF CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
Dr Josef Hynek (1910–86) was a mainstream US astronomer hired by the USAF to debunk and defuse the 1950s panic over alleged UFO sightings. But, the more reports he studied the more his opinions changed to categorize such encounters on the following scale:
Close Encounter of the First Kind: visual sighting of a UFO within 500 ft / 152 m.
Close Encounter of the Second Kind: one involving electronic disruption, physical or mental distress in those present.
Close Encounter of the Third Kind: a UFO incident in which some kind of alien life is present.
Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind: UFO incident in which human abduction occurs.
Close Encounter of the Fifth Kind: one involving human–alien communication or interaction.
Close Encounter of the Sixth Kind: one involving the death of either human or animal life.
Close Encounter of the Seventh Kind: interaction that results in the creation of an alien–human hybrid.
THE TORINO SCALE
Professor Richard P. Binzel (b. 1958) of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) devised this scale in 1995 as the Near-Earth Object Hazard Index, but renamed it after attending a conference debating the likelihood of such incidents that was held in 1999 in Turin, Italy.
Level 0: applies to objects on a certain collision course with earth but ones so small that they will burn up on entering the atmosphere.
Level 1: an object bound for our corner of space but one which will pass with no possibility of collision.
Level 2: an object that will pass close enough to the earth to warrant its being monitored.
Level 3: an object with a 1 per cent chance of collision, or marginally greater, but only large enough to cause localized destruction.
Level 4: same as Level 3 but relating to objects large enough to cause regional destruction.
Level 5: an object on a more likely impact course than at Level 4 and one large enough to cause regional devastation. Needs monitoring to update the risk of impact.
Level 6: same as Level 5 but relating to objects large enough to cause something short of global catastrophe.
Level 7: same as Level 6 but relating to objects large enough to cause global catastrophe and on a far closer impact course.
Level 8: collision certain; localized destruction if impact is terrestrial, or devastating tsunami if impact is oceanic.
Level 9: certain collision with an object larger than at Level 8, causing regional devastation or tsunamis of greater magnitude than at Level 7 if impact is oceanic.
Level 10: collision certain with an object large enough to destroy all life on the planet and possibly the planet itself.
Frustrated at the increasing number of failed executions such as the botched hangings of criminals such as Joseph Samuel (c. 1780–1806), when the rope snapped not once but twice at Parramatta in Australia, and John Lee (1864–1945) who survived three attempts at Exeter prison in 1885, a committee was convened in 1886 to work out the optimum rope strength and a table of drop heights correlated to body weight.
Chaired by Henry Bruce, Baron Aberdare (1815–95), father of Charles Bruce, the leader of the Everest expedition that claimed the life of George Mallory in 1924, it was first decided that the rope employed should be able to support 1,000 lb (454 kg) for five minutes without stretching beyond a 5 per cent tolerance. Next it was worked out that the drop energy should be at least 1,260 ft-lb / 1,708.33 Nm (Newton metres) to ensure death by broken neck but without detaching the head.
This proved excessive so, after a number of decapitations by such a jolt, the drop-energy was revised to 840 ft-lb / 1,138.89 Nm, but Aberdare’s meticulous scale of drop distances was, with minor adjustments, used for decades throughout the British Empire and, indeed, most of the developed world, and is still adhered to in Singapore.
Aberdare’s committee laid out a table starting at 8 st / 51 kg for women and teenagers, who required a drop of 10 ft / 3 m. Moving up the weight scale in incremental steps of 7 lb / 3.18 kg, an average of 3 in. / 8 cm was deducted at each step to finish at a drop of 6 ft 5 in./ 1 m 95 cm for those weighing 14 st / 89 kg or over.
CLOTHES AND THEIR SIZES
Standardized clothing sizes are comparatively recent, with true sizing standards being set in the 1940s. Prior to this, those with money commissioned bespoke clothing, while those less fortunate either made their own or bought second-hand clothes. That is why most nineteenthcentury European women of modest means got married in black. They knew their wedding dress would be the only one they could afford to have made for them and, with most men predeceasing their wives, it would later come in handy for a mourning dress. Unromantic, perhaps, but very pragmatic.
The first step to standardized measurements was forced by the American Civil War, which created such a sudden and enormous demand for uniforms that cottage industry gave way to factory production. Working to a size scale of shoulder width and height, the uniforms for the Union Army ranged from size 1 to size 10. This development did not escape the notice of publishers of mail-order clothing catalogues anxious to hit the domestic market.
The first size scale for women’s clothing instituted by the catalogues ranged from size 8 to size 40, but this was not an indication of body size – size 8 was made to fit the typical girl of that age. With this ridiculous scale clearly destined for failure, and the catalogues’ realization that returns were costing them over $10m a year, in 1932 they turned to the Department of Agriculture – a strange choice, but there it is – to come up with a solution.
The department hired researchers Ruth O’Brien and William Shelton to take fifty-nine body measurements from each of one and a half thousand subjects to produce a scale of twenty-seven sizes that proved too complicated to implement. Apart from that, the study was fundamentally flawed, in that all participants were white and from the lower socio-economic sector which, then as now, included a disproportionately high number of larger sizes. In 1948 the Mail Order Association of America made a wiser choice by turning to the National Bureau of Standards to institute a similar study of women serving in the US Air Force.
Although it took ten years to complete, this was the study that produced the now-familiar range of sizes 8 to 38, with overrides of T for tall, R for regular and S for short. That said, any woman who has bought clothes online or gone by the size tag in a shop will know that rarely pans out in practice. But things are set to change as online vendors – just like those early mail-order operations in nineteenth-century America – are faced with the fact that over half their sales are returned due to problems of size.
Three-dimensional digital body scans are already being promoted by firms such as Bodi.me so women can send out their measurements to calculate their size at subscribing online vendors, while eBay has set up its own bespoke service. More far-reaching than allowing people to mail-order clothes that actually fit them, this will allow Europeans to email their avatar and designs to the famously fast and remarkably cheap tailors and dressmakers of Hong Kong.
RICHTER SCALE
Devised in 1935 but now rarely used in seismological circles, Charles F. Richter’s (1900–85) scale for earthquakes was a logarithmic one that measured the amplitude of the shock waves as recorded by seismographs operating many miles from the event.
Each numerical step up the Richter scale denoted an event tenfold the strength of the former, so six would denote an event ten times the strength of one registering five but a hundred times the strength of four. The US Geological Survey estimates that there are several million earthquakes around the world every year, with most occurring in areas so remote that they go unregistered. Of the five hundred thousand quakes registered on seismic equipment only one hundred thousand are felt by the local population and less than a hundred cause damage.
Only in popular speech is ‘epicentre’ used to mean slap-bang in the middle. In seismology the term denotes that point on the earth’s surface which is directly above the fault-rupture but, as that epicentre could be miles above that point and with fault lines often slanting gradually up to the surface, the impact of the quake could be hundreds of miles away, while those standing above the epicentre notice nothing at all.
CAR ENGINE RATING
James Watt (1736–1819) met with resistance when trying to sell his steam engines to the mining industry, which used shaft pumps, powered by horses, to keep the network of tunnels free of flooding. To give himself a sales gimmick, Watt worked out that the average workhorse, attached to a pulley, could lift 550 lb / 250 kg through 1 (vertical) ft / 30 (vertical) cm in one second, so he rated his new engines by horsepower to give his equine-fixated customers some idea what was on offer.
With the first viable petrol-powered cars having been developed in Germany, France and Italy, engine capacity is traditionally given in litres or cubic centimetres, which is perhaps for the best as a seven-pint Smith doesn’t sound as sexy as a four-litre Ferrari (the Italian equivalent of Smith, a name denoting a man who works with fer, or iron).
There is a little-understood mechanism in the human brain which finds shapes presenting what is called the golden ratio of 1:1.618 more pleasing than any other. Perhaps it is nothing other than the narcissistic pleasure we derive from looking at ourselves, as the human face is a manifestation of the ratio which also pervades nature, to be seen in everything from pinecones to the patterns of hurricanes and the spirals of the galaxies.
The human eye will recognize a rectangle or any other pattern presenting such measurement faster than it will any other shape, which is why architects have used it in structures ranging from Stonehenge and the Parthenon to the Great Mosque of Kairouan and the façade of Notre-Dame.
Artists have always used it to define the dimensions of their finished work and it is even built into Western musical structure so we can ‘hear’ it. Most of the books you buy manifest a 1:1.618 format, as does the credit or debit card you use to buy them.
UNUSUAL MEASUREMENTS
BED – banana equivalent dose. Believe it or not, the humble banana is naturally radioactive, so its emission-level is used to gauge low-level or background radiation. Don’t worry, it would take thirty-five million BEDs to kill you.
BMI – Big Mac Index. As has the Mars Bar been used in the UK to measure the relationship between wages and prices, the fairly static price of the Big Mac is employed in the USA to see, for example, how many Big Macs equate to the price of a gallon of petrol today as compared to ten years ago.
CAR – a measure of 4 m / 13 ft, this is used to give braking distances.
COW-GRASS – an agricultural term for the area of pasture required to support one cow.
FINGER – a rough US drinks measure equating to the depth indicated by a number of fingers held against the side of the glass – two fingers of rye, for example.
HIROSHIMA – a measure used by geologists to describe the energy-release of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, or by astrologists for asteroid strikes with one Hiroshima equivalent to fifteen kilotons of TNT. Prior to this, the Halifax (3 kt TNT) was used, after a 1917 munitions explosion in that Nova Scotia town that flung a half-ton ship’s anchor four kilometres, or two and a half miles, into the neighbouring town of Armdale.
JIFFY – yes, it does exist, as a measure of 0.01 of a second.
LENGTH – mainly heard at the racetrack, this was originally a horse-length, or 8 ft / 2 m.
LD – or lunar-distance from earth, being 380,000 km / 236,000 mi.; this is used by space-agencies to define near misses of objects passing our planet.
MCG – Melbourne Cricket Ground, an Australian measure used to denote any large number of people, with one MCG indicating 95,000 – the seating capacity of said stadium.
OSP – Olympic swimming pool. If used of area this is 50 m by 25 m / 164 ft by 82 ft. If expressing volume, it is 550,000 imperial / 600,000 US gallons.
PONY – in the UK this is three-quarters of a fluid ounce (21 ml), but one fluid ounce (30 ml) in the USA.
SYDARB – Sydney Harbour, an Australian measure of large volumes of water, each sydarb being 0.5 km3 / 500,000,000 m3.
WALES – an area unit equating to the size of that country, 20,779 km2 / 8,023 mi2, and one used by rainforest conservationists. In the USA the Rhode Island is a much-used measure of 4,000 km2 / 1,545 mi2, while the CIA speaks in terms of Washingtons (DC), 159 km2 / 61.4 mi2. In Russia they discuss large areas in terms of the France, 551,695 km2 / 213,011 mi2.
