• LillyPip@lemmy.ca
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    3 days ago

    Everyone who’s dealt with kids knows you have to bisect the giraffe equally from nose to tail so everyone gets 2 legs, or somebody will cry that it’s unfair.

      • ElectricMachman@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 days ago

        But they’re the sort of British that yearns for the good old days, when we still had shillings and inches and diphtheria and jumpers for goalposts and no womens’ rights and all that great British stuff.

    • Jumbie@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      I was thinking this must be metric because only Europeans with their noses firmly in the air would get it.

    • the_crotch@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      Its time to retire the metric system in favor of something base 12. Base 10 is for children who need to count on their fingers, base 12 is easier to divide into quarters or thirds. Babylon was right.

  • absentbird@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    So like the size of a horse?

    The average horse is about half the height and weight of the average giraffe. Giraffes are just a really bad unit of measurement, males weight about 400kg more than females and there is a wide height difference over their global population, they are technically four different species we just all call giraffe 🦒

  • TheSlad@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    Also, most people dont even have a good grasp on how big giraffes are anyways!

    I once went to a zoo that had an elevated platform extending into the giraffe’s habitat so that you could stand face to face with them. Their heads are as big as a normal human, like 5 feet from crown to chin!

  • Kirca@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    This is why real scientists use the only reasonable real world measurement - a perfectly spherical cow in a vacuum.

  • Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone
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    3 days ago

    Even if you think height divided by two, why even describe it that way? Giraffes are tall, but not so unfathomably tall that something half its size is incomprehensible. That’s 7-9ish feet. You couldn’t say the size of Andre the Giant?

    • Lumidaub@feddit.org
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      3 days ago

      The Youth Today don’t know who that is. Then again, do they know how large a giraffe is? We may never know.

      • logicbomb@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Then again, do they know how large a giraffe is?

        Just today, I learned a handy way of visualizing the size of a giraffe. If you took that asteroid that struck off the coast of Iceland, and made a copy of it and put the two of them together, that’s about the size of a giraffe.

        • FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network
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          3 days ago

          In his show Taskmaster he is well known for both writing tasks and making jokes through intentionally obtuse language and uncommon phrasing. Frequently the “obvious” interpretation of a task turns out to be non-obvious, or the answer to a riddle is this kind of nondeterministic situation that trips up the contestants and makes for better funny.

          Which is to say, the author of the headline is a troll, and did it internationally to bait this very kind of conversation. You won’t know which way they sliced the giraffe unless you read the entire thing! Of course, after you do, you still won’t know.

          • Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone
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            3 days ago

            Ah, no wonder the Wikipedia page didn’t help… the top result when I searched was for a cult leader named Alex Horn. Thanks for the explanation!

            • Okokimup@lemmy.world
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              2 days ago

              The above explanation is correct, but specifically, he uses weird measurements. Like if a task involves counting a distance, he won’t use something reasonable like meters, but how many rubber ducks long.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      People usually measure asteroids by mass (but then, those people are already abnormal, so who knows?), if so, it’s something around the size of a cow.

      Or maybe they could use metric…

  • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    And is it half the volume, mass or a dimension? Because I’ve never tried neither blending or carrying a giraffe before (I never got invited to those parties in uni) so I have no grasp on volume or mass.

        • BillBurBaggins@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          It kind of does if you half the volume. If you end up with the hypothetical gas filled half of a giraffe then it’s less mass than if you end up with the meat filled half.

          Unless you were only trying to convey volume to begin with then yes it doesn’t make a difference.

          • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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            2 days ago

            An astroid the mass of the meat half of a giraffe and the volume of 5kg of somewhat dry duck feathers…

            I’m beginning to think that it would more relatable if it was just stated in kg or m^3 instead

          • WIZARD POPE💫@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            Which part of the giraffe is filled with gas though?.

            Are we talking about a cube that is drawn around the giraffe for it’s volume or are we talking about the volume of the giraffe if you submerge it in wter and measure the displaced volume?

            • BillBurBaggins@lemmy.world
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              2 days ago

              No part, thats why I said hypothetical. But it’s the only way to make sense of the claim that volume Vs mass is an issue.

              Hopefully we’re not imagining halving the bounding box around the giraffe including the air

  • meme_historian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 days ago

    One standard volume giraffe of course, i.e. the volume in m³ an average giraffe would fill (at room temperature and sea level), when passed through a blender. And then half of that

    • psycho_driver@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      The scientists had to go through many more proportionate animals before discovering that half a giraffe was a near perfect match for the size of the asteroid.

      • meme_historian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 days ago

        As it turns out, the emergence and popularization of Zoos during the Victorian era was largely driven by the work conducted at the Royal Institute for Volumetric Measurements in London.

        Similarly the expansion of the British empire was mostly driven by the need to find ever larger exotic animals in order to establish comparative volumetric weights for the ever larger ships and constructions of that era.

        “25.678 standard volume foxes”, was starting to become a bit unwieldy when describing a cargo vessel’s size.

      • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Nah, there’s a list somewhere of typical weights, dimensions, volumes, etc. of common items. They just put in their value and it pops up. They’re nerds first, and scientists second. You KNOW this exists somewhere, and they all have it bookmarked.

  • satanmat@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Dear gods

    How far will these Americans go to not use the metric system… ffs

    • Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com
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      3 days ago

      Daily Mail are the sort who think adopting the metric system let all the foreigners into Britain and led to the downfall of empire. Probably in that order.

    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      Your bigotry has blinded you so much you couldn’t even see the two biggest, boldest words in the picture.

      • satanmat@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Oh no; I saw it was the DM… I just assumed that the writer must have been American.

        You are SO correct, as I should have realized by the giraffe unit of measure.

        I’m at a loss as to the Venn diagram where giraffe and imperial would overlap…