Ah, but how many one pound bags of concrete could it hold??
Why bags of anything? This is a poor way of communicating weight. Just say "a modern passenger car".
Further down the drain we go.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.10332
If you put your finger in front of a garden slug it may try to eat it, it's a very odd sand-paper sensation but I never knew why.
I know people like to talk about “how smart” the butterfly or whatever is for “adapting itself” to whatever environment, and it is cute, but there is a practical engineering choice between delicate design and brute force.
What an odd example. A mid-sized car would have been much clearer.
;) I like these easy breezy Late Friday threads!
The whole thing seems very confused. Anyway let’s build space elevator?
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article/12/105/20141...
The links given in TFA are broken.
White, of course; that way the statisticians can dye them any color they want. But for ultra high precision I do recommend the Boeing system. But be sure to use the older models, before private equity firms replaced all the metal parts with zipties. If you can't find a quality Boeing (plausible), consider 1.1 Blue Whales (tricky).
fnordpiglet was being deliberately humble with the decimals. It's accurate down to the semi firkin. Not to be confused with a quarter Tod.
Ignore the redundant bike shed comment, as that fits precisely 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar. Anyone with a bike should know that.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/As...
In the “for what it’s worth” department, Brits called it soccer too. I have no idea why they swapped to football recently.
I still don’t know how they even compare.
Is that cooked or raw spaghetti?
Then they made some very slopjob AI ads. Superick but I keep buying them. :|
As hinted at by its 2017 postscript, this article is a mess of incommensurable comparisons.
> 10x stronger than the jaw of a dog
> 20x stronger than a human jaw
> as strong as the jaws of a great white shark
?
Much better!
3.3 kilopounds? That's a lot
-Jarhead
Can we just use Kilograms?
.1 lb sugar is 1.6 oz (net), and we'll need to wrap it in paper. I estimate about .5 of an ounce? So we're spending approximately 10% of the weight in packaging. Our nominal 33000 pounds of sugar just got 10% heavier.
At least we haven't resorted to those little sugar packets, which would be colossally worse!
Or rat (snail/slug) lungworm
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/teen-paralysed-even...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_and_assisted_suicid...
Woah that must weigh almost 3,301 pounds!
I'd like this to be expressed in units of pallet(s) of standard cinder blocks.
A car is more easier to picture for me.
What else does sugar come in? If not bags? I don't think I've ever bought sugar in something other than a bag.
I hate sugar in food, but some recipes use sugar to balance acidity (e.g. tomato ketchup).
Do you not go to supermarkets or grocery stores?
How often has anyone ever seen 3300 bags of sugar together in their lives, do you think?
That's the usual measurement of size in the States and it's absolutely unbelievably ridiculous.
> Alternatively, as Prof Barber explained, it can be compared to a single string of spaghetti holding up 3,000 half-kilogram bags of sugar.
So the professor used an item that was familiar to his English audience (1500 kg=3307 lbs), then the Smithsonian writer tried to be helpful in converting the units, but switched to an item far less familiar to an American. I don't think I've ever bought a 1lb bag of sugar here, while a 500g bag is a little small but normal in the UK.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31500883
https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-white...
Is that by weight? By volume? Are we comparing uncooked (brittle) or cooked (flexible)?
Even so, spaghetti strand is not known for strength or tension resistance even when considering the weight/size/volume.
I can't at all understand what this comparison is meant to visualize for me, so it is obviously failing.
It's holding up 3300 pounds. Pounds is a unit of weight.
> Even so, spaghetti strand is not known for strength or tension resistance even when considering the weight/size/volume.
That's...kinda the point? We have something we don't give two thoughts about (slug tooth) comparable in scale to something not known for strength or tension resistance (spaghetti) holding up to something ginormous as if it's magic. Clearly, we should study slug teeth more!
Imagine if a strand of spaghetti can hold 3300 pounds. It's not possible with spaghetti but with slug teeth, it is! Now imagine the possibilities!
Space elevator?
Does a 35,786 km "strand of [slug-tooth] spaghetti" hold its own weight?
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