Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure

As it turns out, the Frequently-Made Comparisons Monster could only be destroyed with a nuclear weapon carrying the destructive energy of the Hiroshima Bomb.

Are the radio-waves from objects in space any threat to us?

No, they are extremely weak. The total energy collected by radio astronomers over the history of radio astronomy amounts to about the energy required for a mosquito to make one push-up!

— Dr. John Simonetti of the Department of Physics at Virginia Tech

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?

No matter how huge something may be, it's hard to wrap your mind around the scale of it without seeing it for yourself, or having some point of reference to compare it to.

That's where this trope comes in. A simple way to show the size of something is to compare it to something else that a lot of people are familiar with. That's why many documentaries, especially ones of the "World's Biggest Whatever" variety, will use measurements that compare things to familiar or historic events, places, and objects.

• Energy: Released by explosions and hurricanes: will be measured in atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. When trying to be slightly more specific, they use "kilotons of TNT". Electricity will be measured in "enough to power Manhattan/the United States/the world for Y amount of time".
• Height will be measured in Empire State Buildings, Eiffel Towers, Burj Khalifa, or Pyramids of Giza. Really big heights will be compared with Mt. Everest or any of the other famous mountains (Denali, K2, Anapurna, Matterhorn, etc).
• Volume and concentration will be measured in Olympic swimming pools or olympic stadion.
  • In the United Kingdom, volume is sometimes measured in Albert Halls (and as The Beatles told us in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1 Albert Hall = 4000 Holes).
  • In Australia liquid volumes are sometimes measured in Sydharbs (the amount of water it would take to fill Sydney Harbour, or about 500 gigalitres).
• The other type of volume is usually measured in terms of a rock concert, a chainsaw, a jet plane, or a gunshot.
• Lengths will be measured in trips to the sun, times around the Earth's equator, or distance between the Earth and the Moon. The mean distance between the Earth and the Sun is used as an actual unit of measurement, the Astronomical Unit (AU). Smaller lengths (comparatively speaking) might be measured as the distance between two points, e.g. "Enough copper wiring to stretch from Chicago to Minneapolis".
• Small lengths will often be compared to parts of the body, such as a human arm, leg, finger^note An example of this in biology is the Duodenum, the first section of the small intestine; its name is derived from the latin duodeni, meaning "in twelves", as it was found that the length of this section of intestine was roughly twelve fingers long! or hair. Also acceptable is the head of a pin, as in how many of what can fit on one. Also acceptable: amount that can fit in the eye of a needle or point of a pencil. Another uncommon one is how many of something can fit inside a period. (The punctuation mark, you pervert.)
• Medium-sized areas are measured in football fields or Walmarts. Large areas are usually measured in the UK as multiples of Wales, and in the US as multiples of Texas. Other regions commonly used include Switzerlands.
• Weight will be measured in sacks of concrete, Boeing 747 jumbo jets, VW Beetles (for some reason, it's always VW Beetles or Mini Coopers), or large animals (usually elephants and whales, or sometimes both [the tongue of a blue whale could fit 3 elephants on it]).
• Large amounts of money are generally measured one of several ways:
  1. as the length of that many one-dollar bills laid end-to-end, using one of the astronomically-sized length measures, e.g. "If the National Debt were in dollar bills and you laid them end-to-end, it would stretch all the way to the sun and back 9 times."
  2. in stacks of dollar bills (for truly large amounts, larger denomination bills may be used, such as $100 or 500 € bills) using one of the standard comparative-height measurements ("One million dollars would be a stack of dollar bills one and one half times as tall as the Empire State Building").
  3. by how much a person would have to spend per day/hour/minute/second without stopping for <however long> ("To spend a billlion dollars, a person would need to spend $1901.32 every minute without stopping for a year")
  4. contrasting against the price tag of some known to be pricey, usually impressive military, objects; e.g. "John Bezos's net worth is 200 billion dollars. That's enough to buy 23 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers."
  5. contrasting against the GDP of a country, which means all the money anyone made within the territories of that country over a time period, usually a year.
  6. contrasting against the total assets of a big company ("he has enough money to buy IBM four times over").
• Anything to do with zoology and especially paleontology will use the average human height, or occasionally the average human finger for smaller examples.
• Prehistoric animals will usually be compared, either in overall size, or in some specific measurement (e.g. bite force, tooth size), to Tyrannosaurus rex. Smaller dinos will be compared to chickens.
• A population will be measured by how many football/Olympic stadiums they could fill, or by how many times they circle the earth if placed end-to-end near the equator.
• Absurdly high temperatures will be compared to the Sun, the melting point of certain metal, or a (possibly self-cleaning) oven.
• Compressive and tensile strength is still compared to steel (e.g. spider's silk/nylon/carbon fiber is X times stronger than steel). Sometimes compressive strength is compared to concrete.
• Animal strength will invariably be compared either to how much a bulldozer can lift; or, for small creatures, to how much they could carry/lift/jump if they were blown up to human size (ignoring the problems being human sized would cause them).
• Intelligence in non-humans is measured in terms of human age, e.g., "Dogs have the intelligence of a three-year-old child," despite this not being an accurate assessment of animal intelligence.
  • Originally, IQ was determined by calculating someone's mental age, dividing it by their actual age, and multiplying the resulting number by 100.
• Computing power is compared to a particular electronic gadget, such as an iPhone or an Xbox.
• Electrical power is still often expressed in terms of 100-watt light bulbs, even though 60-watt bulbs are more common these days, and the equivalent LEDs use much less power.
• Fat and calories will often be given in units of cheeseburgers or large pizzas.
• Because any amount of radiation sounds scary, the BED was invented (Banana Equivalent Dose) to help people understand small amounts are inconsequential. xkcd touched upon it here.
• The size of vehicles are often given in terms of other vehicles.
  • For ships the standard is usually The Titanic or "an aircraft carrier".
    • Maritime disasters will also typically use the Titanic disaster a a yardstick to judge the death toll against, even for the small handful of accidents that exceed its death toll.
    • Ocean depths are also measured relative to the depth of the Titanic wreck site (about 2.5 miles or slightly under 4000 meters). The Mariana Trench, the deepest known ocean depth, is about 3 times as deep as the Titanic.
  • For smaller automotive sized objects, a VW Beetle will be the yardstick. For larger objects, (especially in North America) a Greyhound bus or a school bus may be the comparison. The British equivalent would be a Routemaster London Bus.
  • For aircraft, the go-to comparisons are the Boeing 747 (if it's large) and the Cessna 172 (if it's small).
• The total timespan of human existence (a few hundred thousand years) is often used to visualize geologic or cosmic timescales.
• On the other end of the spectrum, the blink of an eye is often used to describe very short timespans. Other short times include the time it takes for a hummingbird to flap its wings once.
  • Invert these, and you can also get frequencies.
• There are two common ways to describe the heat level of peppers. Experts measure by "Scoville heat units", but in Layman's Terms a given pepper will most often be described by how many times hotter it is than a jalapeno.

Basically, any unit of measure that equates to something extreme in that property, but is still rather vague and hard to comprehend since the average person doesn't know what that ''is'' off the top of their head. Bonus points if the number of the unit of measure is still ridiculously large (e.g. 1,000,000 Hiroshimas) thereby defeating the purpose of describing it in those terms even if the unit was something people would intuitively understand.

Many of the units on Wikipedia's list of unusual units of measurement are of this form.

This trope is for unusual units for quantities that have well-defined values in ordinary non-facetious units. If you measure an amount of something that usually is not given a numerical value at all, such as "evil" or "beauty", it is an Abstract Scale, or sometimes 20% More Awesome. See also Fantastic Measurement System.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Space Battleship Yamato 2199 describes the Floating Continent found on Jupiter as around the same size as Australia.
• Silver Spoon's Hachiken attempts to measure large measurements like hectares in Sapporo Domes. A Running Gag is that no-one ever actually knows, but compares it to something else (for example Vatican City or the Macross) only for Hachiken to realise he has no idea how large the new unit actually is.

Comedy

• A joke Hugh Dennis likes to use: "Did you know that every year, we destroy an area of rainforest the size of Belgium? WHY NOT JUST DESTROY BELGIUM?!"

Comic Books

• 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".
• In Asterix and the Olympic Games, the length of the Olympic track is specified as 600 times that of the foot of Heracles, which, together with a modern measurement in metres, is used to estimate what Heracles' shoe size would be.
• In a literal illustration of the trope name, Grant Morrison’s run of Justice League describes villain Asmodel’s heartbeat as being like “a hundred Hiroshimas”.

Comic Strips

• The Far Side had a panel inspired by writings about how fast a school of piranha can skeletonize a cow. He thought this was an odd thing to use as the standard unit of measurement, and since his comic regularly features cows anyway, this inevitably became the basis for a panel: Two cows in pith helmets and hiking gear are exploring the Amazon, and one of them reads the statistic from a guidebook, commenting "...now there's a vivid thought." The cows are standing in a piranha-infested river while reading this.

Fan Works

• Absolute Trust: During the Gaangs' adventures, Alec makes comparisons to Makapu Village as a measurement of the level of Stupidity they would be dealing with in a given situation.
• This Bites!:
  • When they notice that the Going Merry's talking audibly on the SBS, Pekoms says he wants no part of seizing the ship even if Big Mom wants it, stating that the antics of the Straw Hat crew are Emperor levels of crazy. At minimum.
  • During the escape from Enies Lobby, Nami's actions lead to Cross making one of these comparisons later on:
  Cross: You decided to fry ten battleships with enough voltage to power New York City, and yes that is impressive where I'm from!
• Louise and Cattleya measure how mean someone is in Overlady using Centi-Eleanores aka one hundredth as mean as their eldest sister Eleanore. Louise is shocked when Cattleya describes someone as being worth 80 Centi-Eleanores, given that most don't even reach 20.
• Kimi No Na Iowa:
  • The enhanced power provided by Fusou's railgun spell is represented by stating that the impact of a post-buff battleship shell is measurable in Tomahawk cruise missiles.
  • The Super-Strength and Super-Toughness of Charles Ausburne in warform is demonstrated by her kicking down a bunker door that can resist a battleship's broadside, then No Selling direct hits from abyssal battleship shells.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Abyss, Lindsey asks Lt. Coffey how many missiles are on the wrecked sub they are investigating:
  Coffey: Twenty-four Trident missiles, eight MIRVs per missile.
  Lindsey: [Beat] That's a hundred and ninety-two warheads, Coffey. How powerful are they?
  Coffey: The MIRV is a tactical nuke. Uh, fifty kilotons, nominal yield, say... five times Hiroshima.
  Lindsey: Jesus Christ. It's World War III in a can.
• The movie Armageddon (1998) uses this trope while describing the size of the asteroid. Notably the guy who makes the reference is just cutting to the chase.
  President: How big are we talking?
  Scientist: Sir, our best estimate is 97.6 billion—
  Dan Truman: It's the size of Texas, Mr. President.
• The Burning Sea: Trouble is looming for the Norwegian oil drilling industry. "Deepwater Horizon made an oil slick the size of Denmark, and we have 350 rigs."
• In Cradle 2 the Grave, the second-most powerful setting of the superweapon is described as "two Hiroshimas". The number-one most powerful setting is described as "new world order".
• The Day After Tomorrow: When the Vice President tries to decry Jack's warnings about the long-term consequences of manmade global warming as "sensationalism", Jack silences him by commenting that the Antarctic ice shelf which he saw breaking off in the movie's opening (stretching beyond the horizon due to its size) was "about the size of the state of Rhode Island," snarkily adding on that "some people might call that sensational."
• Deep Impact features a comet described as "The size of New York City, from the Battery to the Bronx. Or, put another way, it is larger than Mt. Everest." The opening narration also used the "Hiroshima measurement" when speaking of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Even though they try to make it sound impressive, they severely underestimate the energy released by the real impact.
• In Doctor Strangelove, the narration explaining the bomber wing to the audience showcases how serious the stakes are if the bombers reach Russia by mentioning that the nuclear bombs they carry have a higher combined explosive yield than all of the bombs exploded (in total) during World War II.
• Ghostbusters: Egon uses a convenient Twinkie to describe the current PKE levels in the containment unit. Ironically, he gets something about the size of Mr. Stay-Puft.
• In the film The Giant Claw, the Special Effects Failure creature is constantly compared in size to a battleship.
• In Help!, as The Beatles record a song in the middle of Salisbury Plain with the Army protecting them, the bad guys burrow underneath, setting a massive amount of explosives labelled in military-grade stencil "Equal to exactly one millionth of the explosives exploded in one week of the Second World War".
• In Independence Day, when describing the mass of the alien mothership, it's said to be "a quarter the size of the moon."
• In Jarhead, this is noted as a legitimate military tactic to quickly gauge distances: use things you know, such as the length of a football field.
  SSgt. Sykes: You take what you know, and then you multiply. Please don't use your dicks. They're too small, and I can't count that high. I don't wanna hear, "400,000 inches."
• The Soviet movie Operation Y and Shurik's Other Adventures has this personified in the construction foreman — he gives a lengthy speech consisting entirely of this trope, culminating in this exchange:
  Foreman: ...twice as tall as the world-renowned Eiffel Tower, or thrice as tall as the famous Notre Dame de Paris, incidentally, that's French for "Our Lady of Paris".
  Brute: [nonchalantly] Whose lady was that?
  Foreman: [taken aback] Our. Of Paris.
• The simple Russian peasants of Siberiade are a little fuzzy on how long a journey of 500 kilometers is, so it's also described as "six goose flights".
• Sunshine's Icarus Two is built around "a stellar bomb with a mass equivalent to Manhattan Island". (How heavy is Manhattan Island? That depends on how thick it is.)
• In Team America: World Police, a number of terrorist plots are described as being "9/11 times a number," usually followed by the value of that number multiplied by nine hundred and eleven.
  Kim Jong Il: [My plan] will be 9/11 time 2,356!
  Joe: My god! That's... I don't even know what that is!
  Kim Jong Il: Nobody does! ^note ...it's 2,146,316, in case anyone was wondering

Folklore

• Stories about Paul Bunyan are full of things that are giant-sized, but measurements tend to be purposely left vague. One story claimed that Babe the Blue Ox measured "42 axe handles plus a plug of tobacco" between his eyes, simply to give the reader a feeling of how huge he was.

Literature

• 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.
• In Fred Saberhagen's "Berserker" series, the Berserker enemy A.I. spaceships are often described as the size of Manhattan Island. Which for a space ship is HUGE.
• New Scientist's Feedback column maintains a discourse on unusual units used in media and advertising lasting probably since its inception — London buses, blue whales, football pitches etc etc etc.
• The children's book How Much Is A Million teaches kids about large numbers in this manner.
• The problem with trying this sort of thing is lampshaded in one of the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, explaining that the titular guide (known for its breezy style) gets around the whole problem simply by stating "Space is big. I mean really big. You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts compared to space."
• Discworld: According to an advertisment in the The Compleat Ankh-Morpork City Guide, every bowl of Makewar's Crispy Nuts breakfast cereal contains the same amount of nuts as three squirrels.
• In the Skylark Series, instead of giving the hardness of arenak and inoson on the Mohs scale, or the strength of arenak and inoson in pounds per square inch at failure, they are said to be "500 (or 2000) times harder and stronger than the hardest and strongest steel".
• George Carlin's When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops? has a dialogue in two parts, entitled 'Tumor Humor', wherein a group of women and a group of men talk about the sizes of tumors taken out of an acquaintance's body. The difference illustrated is that the women compare to produce ("a tumor the size of a grapefruit") while the men use sports equipment ("a tumor the size of a basketball") as their baseline.
• In If the Shoe Fits from Mouse Math, there's a shoe in the People yard that the Funny Animal mice Albert and Wanda want to use as a clubhouse, but they don't know if it will fit in their home. Albert says they can measure it and Wanda points out that they don't have a ruler. Albert suggests they could measure it using his feet and comes up with "12 mouse-feet long," but when Wanda measures it, she gets "10 mouse-feet long." They realize that since their feet are different sizes, they got different numbers. They then try measuring it using cheese sticks and come up with 8 cheese sticks, only to get to the room and find that Albert has eaten most of the cheese stick. They finally settle on paper clips, which are all the same size, and which can't be eaten.
• In The Adventures Of Tom Stranger Interdimensional Insurance Agent, the titular insurance agent measures the level of danger in "Bear Grylls".
• In Rivers of London, Peter and Abigail have designed a scale for measuring the "intensity" of a ghost. The name they've given the unit is the "annie", presumably after Annie Sawyer from Being Human (UK).
• Parodied in the short story Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur by German author Wolfgang Herrndorf:
  Space is infinitely big. That corresponds to the area of an infinite number of soccer fields.

Live-Action TV

• Many documentaries on ships will give the size of the ship as measured in Titanics.
• Animal Planet likes to compare animals' caloric intake with numbers of hamburgers. Like, a vulture eats the equivalent of 50 hamburgers in one sitting. (Scaled down to the body mass of a vulture. If a vulture ate 50 actual hamburgers, it would explode.)
• In the '60s Walter Cronkite once pointed out that the Apollo space capsule had as much room for a three-man crew in bulky spacesuits as the front seat of a Volkswagen (then universally understood to mean a classic Beetle) meant for two in normal street clothes.
• The "How to be Well" public service announcements on Nickelodeon stated that one pecan pie has the same amount of fat as twelve cheeseburgers.

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• The Angel episode "Time Bomb" had the demoness Illyria threatening to implode and, according to Wesley's conservative guess, take out several city blocks. Angel requests an "unconservative" guess.
  "Rand & McNally will have to redraw their maps."
• Cosmos: A Personal Voyage:
  • In a chillingly poetic comparison in the last episode, Carl Sagan compared the total tonnage of bombs dropped in World War II — about 2 megatons of TNT — to the yield of a single modern strategic thermonuclear weapon (up to 100MT for a specially-made one, but 300-500 kilotons for a garden-variety mass-production model). Given the size of the world's arsenals at the time (25k US, 25k Soviet, 1k other ^note  The equal US-CCCP numbers being the product of the Détente period ) the tonnage of bombs and warheads we could theoretically drop in World War III, he said, would be "A world war 2 every second, for the length of a lazy afternoon." (Soviet stockpiles were suspected to be larger than the official figures, but in retrospect we know his overestimate wasn't too far off given that it really did come to about two-and-a-half hours' worth of WWII per ever two seconds). He then went on to (correctly) claim that the stockpiles were the equivalent of a million Hiroshima bombs.
  • In an earlier episode, he quoted another scientist saying that all the energy ever collected by all the radio telescopes in the world is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.
• Doctor Who: The Children in Need special "Time Crash" says, as a joke, that the explosion caused by the time crash will make a hole in the space-time continuum exactly the size of Belgium. The Fifth Doctor remarks that Belgium (as a unit of measurement) is a bit underdramatic, but a bit later uses it as a shorthand for the catastrophe, as in "Two minutes to Belgium!"
• 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.
• On How It's Made, when discussing the manufacture of steel coffins: "This requires 900 tons of pulling force — the equivalent of hoisting 27 fully loaded tractor-trailers."
• Killer Asteroids on the Science Channel describes asteroids' power in terms of Hiroshima bombs.
• Played with in M*A*S*H when Hawkeye needs an arterial graft for a patient:
  Hawkeye: These are too small, Kelly! These are spaghettini, I need rigatoni.
  Nurse Kelly: Rigatoni? Doctor, I'm half-Chinese, half-Hawaiian, give it to me in ethnic measurements I can understand.
  Hawkeye: A small egg roll.
• In Mission Jupiter on the Discovery Science channel, when describing how much radiation the Juno space probe would have to endure, they said it was built to "survive radiation equivalent to 100 million dental X-rays over the course of its mission." (Which is an odd choice. A dental X-ray uses a surprisingly small amount of ionizing radiation. A typical CT scan uses about a thousand times more.)
• The narration writers for The History Channel series Modern Marvels love these, even when they're less than helpful. Particular favorites are "the thickness of a human hair" or some fraction of it; aircraft carriers for size or volume; and football fields, or "Los Angeles to {insert appropriate city}" for distance. Before you can describe something's size in units of aircraft carriers, you first have to mention that an aircraft carrier is the length of 5 football fields.
• Parodied in Monty Python's Flying Circus, as part of a spoof documentary on Tchaikovsky.
  Graham Chapman: Well, if you can imagine the size of Nelson's Column, which is roughly three times the size of a London bus, then Tchaikovsky was much smaller. His head was about the same size as that of an extremely large dog, that is to say, two very small dogs, or four very large hamsters, or one medium-size rabbit if you count the whole of the body and not just the head.
• In an episode of MythBusters, Adam used a virtual hurricane of these in order to make distance comparisons; for example, he called 200 yards "two football fields" or "six M5s."^note M5 being the name of their primary workshop, which, true to Adam's statement, is about 100 feet from the front wall to the back While one of the comparisons he used for 500 yards was "the distance of your average restraining order."
• In the "Earth from Space" episode of Nova (PBS), they showed the brine released from freezing water in the antarctic cascading downward under water. It was said to be 500 times the flow rate of Niagara Falls. Earlier in the same episode, they described the energy absorbed by all the water vapor evaporating from all the Earth's oceans in multiples of the entire energy production of all power plants in the world combined.
• Planet of Dinosaurs did this straight three times. The Meteor Crater was made by a rock which hit the Earth with an impact like 4 Hiroshima bombs; The Tunguska Event (1908, in Siberia) was provoked by a mysterious body with a power of 1,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs; finally, the iconic meteorite of the End Cretaceous with its 10,000,000,000 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.
• The documentary Walking with Dinosaurs mentions the meteorite at the end of the Cretaceous as "hitting the Earth with a power of 10,000,000,000 Hiroshima bombs".
• In Chernobyl, Scherbina initially (and inaccurately) dismisses the amount of radiation coming from the disaster as "the same as a chest x-ray." Once accurate readings of the radiation levels are taken, Legasov points out that the fire is emitting the equivalent of two Hiroshimas every hour. And it's been burning for 20 hours already, and will burn for months.
• It's something of a Running Gag in Taskmaster for Alex to describe quantifiable task results with bizarre comparisons, such as the diameter of a bubble being "1/20th of Danny Devito" or the contents of a bag weighing "as much as half a dalmation."
• The German "science" show Galileo seems to imply that its target audience doesn't have an idea of any measuring unit and/or only wants to be entertained rather than educated.
  • Lengths are measured in trucks, trains, Cologne Cathedrals, Earth circumferences or distances between the Earth and the Moon.
  • Areas are measured in soccer fields or Saarlands (a quarter million soccer fields each).
  • Volumes are measured in bathtubs, truckloads or Lake Constances (a quarter billion bathtubs each).
  • Masses are measured in elephants, VW Golfs or mid-size cars in general.

: What makes this particularly egregious is that about half of these "units" aren't even constant. For example, soccer fields are (probably, there is no official definition on Galileo's side) supposed to be one hectare, but German soccer fields can be anything from slightly bigger to not even half as big. The mass of a VW Golf varies not only with new generations every few years, but also depending on how much money you're willing to invest. The weight of a fully-grown elephant may vary by a factor of 2.5. The length of a German train may even vary by a factor of over 20.

Magazines

• Forbes Magazine once calculated the wealth of the world's richest billionaires, in units of Smaug's Dragon Hoard from The Hobbit.
• New Scientist's "Feedback" column likes keeping track of these units, occasionally responding to the odder ones by asking "but what's that in elephants?"

Music

• In the song "My Brother Sylveste", the title character has "a punch that can sink a battleship".

Podcasts

• In Relative Disasters the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is described as impacting with the force of 4,500,000,000 Hiroshima bombs.

Radio

• Used as a question in The BBC Radio 4 cryptic quiz show Round Britain Quiz: "If London buses times Jumbo jets equal Wales, why would Wales times Eiffel Towers offer a field of contest to Phelps and Spitz?" (Length times width equals area, and area times height equals volume, measured in Olympic swimming pools.)

Tabletop Games

• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1^st 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.)
• In Traveller spaceships are measured in displacement tonnes of liquid hydrogen (shortened to "tons"), since that's what they usually use for fuel and fuel tanks take up a large portion of a ship's volume, equivalent to 14 cubic meters. On deck plans a ton is represented by two 1.5 by 1.5 meter squares assuming a ceiling 3 meters high.

Video Games

• Katamari Damacy illustrates the size of your katamari in terms of an item you've previously picked up in that level. For example, your katamari might be the size of 320 watermelons, or 115 caramel candies, or 6000 blue whales (depending on the level).
• Mass Effect tends to use Hiroshimas to quantify the yields on starship mass accelerators, both in-game and in the Codex. One particularly memorable scene from 2 has a gunnery captain chewing out a pair of recruits about just how powerful the gun really is, how important it is to check their targets, and that with a gun that powerful, you do not "eyeball it".
  "This, recruits, is a twenty-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnaught accelerates one to one-point-three percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38 kiloton bomb — that is three times the yield of the citybuster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth! That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest sonofabitch in space!"
  • Also, in Mass Effect, Admiral Hackett will use it to describe the size of a tactical nuke attached to a recon probe launched during the First Contact War.
• Grobnar of Neverwinter Nights 2 starts using his team mates as a unit of measurement.
  Grobnar: No one really knows how big the Wendersnaven are. They could be thousands of Khelgars high!
  Khelgar Ironfist: What did I say 'bout usin' me as a unit of measurement?!
  Grobnar: Er, right, several Neeshkas high.
• Orion Prime requires launching nuclear missiles, and they explode with the energy of 50 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. The same text is repeated three more times to cover additional missile launches.
• In Plague Inc., your plague is measured by these, comparing the infectivity and death rates to the rate real life diseases spread and killed, such as HIV, Spanish Flu, or the common cold.
• At the end of every song in DanceDanceRevolution A, the game shows an estimate of how many calories you burned and compares it to the number of calories typically present in a common food item (paraphrased example: "The energy you used is 60% of a bunch of grapes").
• In Konami's 1982 coin-op Time Pilot, the remaining length of each stage (until the boss craft appeared) was shown as a number (including fractional ones) of the stage's enemies.
• Played with in League of Legends, which uses 'units' to describe the range of character attacks. The length of a 'unit' is consistent throughout the game, but was contextualised by the developers as one hundred units being roughly the diameter of Teemo, the Swift Scout.
• In the Geometry Dash Impossible Levels community, the level "Sloom", by Haydendom, has often been used as a memetic measurement of level badness, as it is considered one of the worst decorated levels on the Impossible Levels List.
• The Pokedex of Pokémon Red and Blue mentions that Raichu can electrocute an indian elephant and that Gastly can envelop one. Fangame Pokémon Clover took this and turned it into a Running Gag where the powers and abilities of many pokemon are measured in indian elephants.
• Final Fantasy: Speedrunners measure enemy EXP gains in term of Agamas, an ant creature found in a couple of locations (particularly, there are two side-by-side tiles where Agamas are a forced encounter and therefore make for excellent grinding).

Visual Novels

• Starting near the end of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All, Phoenix starts making a habit measuring the size of various pieces of furniture (or a safe) by how many Pearls he could fit on or in them.
• In Virtue's Last Reward, antimatter annihilation explosions are scaled up to the Hiroshima bombing multiple times.
  • During Alice's antimatter bomb explanation, she uses an example of an antimatter bomb that uses 350 mg of matter and 300 of antimatter, which would produce sixty-three trillion joules. She says this is roughly the same as the Hiroshima bomb.
  • Phi calculates that an antimatter reactor which uses 3.5 kg of anti-hydrogen produces an explosion roughly 10,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb.
  • The antimatter pant explosions, in which all 18 antimatter reactors in the world exploded simualatously, produced an explosion that was around 180,00 times that of the Hiroshima bombing.

Web Animation

• DEATH BATTLE! is justified in doing this as some of the calculation for the feats done by combatants enter frankly absurd numbers. Usually measured in "____tons of TNT" (kilotons, gigatons, etc.), followed by a point of comparison (with - surprise! - Hiroshima being a common usage). Exaggerated with battles like "Beerus vs. Galaxia", "Hulk vs. Broly", "Goku Black vs. Reverse Flash" and "Thor vs. Vegeta", where the combatants are so absurdly powerful that our universe has to be used as a unit of measure to describe their destructive power.

Web Comics

• This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip pokes fun at the tendency of science TV programming to do this.
• xkcd:
  • Randall Munroe gives us several of these here.
  • And then parodies the practice here.
  • In "Payloads" he gives first the mass then the lifting capacity of several spacecraft in terms of horses.
• In Goats, Phillip needs one of these to comprehend the number of people he's killing every time he creates and destroys another universe:
  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.
  Phillip: I can't conceive of a quantity that large. It's meaningless. You're speaking jibberish.
  Cornhusk: Each termination can be reduced to a function of 3.5 billion times the number of people exterminated by Adolph Hitler in your level's second world war.
  Phillip: Oh my God. 3.5 gigahitlers? Each time?
• Dave in Homestuck meditates on this trope over instant messaging:
  TG: like mr president theres a meteor coming sir. oh yeah, how big is it? its the size of texas sir
  TG: OH SHIT
  TG: or, how big is it? its the size of new york city sir
  TG: OH SHIT
  TG: sir im afraid the comet is the size of your moms dick.
  TG: OH SNAP
  TG: sir are you familiar with jupiter
  TG: you mean like the planet?
  TG: yeah
  TG: well its that big sir
  TG: hmm that sounds pretty big
  TG: i have a question
  TG: is it jupiter?
  TG: yes sir, earth is literally under seige by planet fucking jupiter
  TG: OH SHIT
• In this The Order of the Stick panel, Belkar's evilness is measured in "kilonazis".
  Roy: Who does the green line represent?
  Bureaucratic Deva: A hypothetical offspring of Cruella de Ville and Sauron. It's useful to have a baseline comparison for these things.
• The Non-Adventures of Wonderella: Author Justin Pierce explains in The Rant that an upcoming multi-part comic will be handled by adding extra panels to the bottom of a single page, rather than spreading it out over multiple pages. Then he starts measuring the length of the comic in "Toms":
  In other words, using Toms as a scale, the comic is currently a Tom Servo... though tomorrow it'll be a Tom Cruise. By Wednesday it'll be nearing a Tom Hanks, and by this time next week it'll be a Tom Selleck. Thank you for your tom.
• In Tag Dream, the kappa have repaired a damaged ring in such a way that it will explode if it receives an impact sufficient to kill a crow tengu 256 times.
  Aya: ...wait, you guys used me as the standard?!
• In Grrl Power, the ARCHON super-team demonstrates their powers for the press by attacking a tank donated by the military. Later, a supervillainess mentions that her powers can easily destroy a tank, and the author notes that "what it can do to a tank" seems to be a standard unit of measure for supers.
• In Spinnerette, Heather tells a reporter covering a protest about an antimatter experiment that if all the antimatter in the lab goes up in one big explosion, the result would be somewhere between "a firecracker and a mouse fart" (the amount of antimatter present was measurable in nanograms).
• El Goonish Shive: "Aw sweet! I'm a unit of measurement!"
• Housepets!: The Milton Ferrets are said to have a net worth equivalent to the GNP of three small countries or one medium one.

Web Original

• The 4 Hiroshimas website provides a widget that keeps track of how many Hiroshima atomic bombs of heat have been added to our atmosphere as a result of climate change. The number is over 3 billion.
• Technology discussion boards have used "Libraries of Congress," in reference to the physical U.S. legislative library of the same name, as a measure of storage capacity. Various actual figures are occasionally tossed around as a baseline (often hovering in the tens of terabytes), but they vary widely, and now that people with a cursory knowledge of computers are familiar with kilo, mega, giga and terabytes, the term is now used as a joke more often than not. An IBM commercial even had Avery Brooks pose the question, "How many Libraries of Congress per second can your software handle?"
  • A similar comparison was used in Snow Crash to describe the speed of the novel's fiber-optic data transfers:
    Narrator: In order to transmit the same amount of information on paper, they would have to arrange for a 747 cargo freighter packed with telephone books and encyclopedias to power-dive into their unit every couple of minutes, forever.
• Knowledge engine WolframAlpha is programmed to give a few examples when it gives an answer involving any sort of units. It doesn't always get the "well known" part right and does things like comparing lengths of time to equinox precession periods.
  • Giving it the request "volume of human body multiplied by human population" makes it return an answer in... "person liters". (460 billion personL, specifically, if you want to know.)
  • The query 1.15 teraelectronvolts is equated to (among other things) 1.2 times the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito.
• The Furry Fandom has historically had the "Meekometer" (sometimes just called the "Meeko"), used to compare the sizes of plush toys (20 inches, the size of a certain Mattel-made Meeko plush).
• When the fanbase compared the size of Super Smash Bros. Melee's "Final Destination" stage to that of Brawl, someone had the idea to use a character, cloned and stood end-to-end, as a unit of measurement. The result? Melee's was "thirteen-and-a-half Falcons long". Brawl's was thirteen. There was another attempt to use Samus Aran as a unit of height.
• The Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale page on this very wiki measures the distance to the nearest star in terms of U.S. National Debts worth of gasoline that it would take to drive there.
• An epic HP fanwar provided a unit of measure for insanity, thanks to one Lady Darkness insisting on being married to Snape on an astral plane: "One Ladark (...) is defined as the amount of batshittery necessary to believe a fictional character originating within the last 20 years is real and speaks to you. Most wanks can be measured in milliLadarks. This one hits about three."
• Tech news site The Register has its own units of measure:
  • Areas are measured in units of Wales, Belgiums and Democratic Republic of Congos, and Football Pitches (soccer fields). One Wales is a thousand MilliWales, one million MicroWales and one billion NanoWales respectively.
  • Force is measured in units of Norris
  • Lengths are measured in units of Linguine, Double-decker buses and Brontosauruses. One foot is approximately 2.1772 linguines, 0.0331 double-decker buses and 0.0022 brontosauri.
  • Temperature is measured in units of degrees Hilton. Zero degrees Hilton is 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius), the temperature of a comfortable room. One degree Hilton is defined as the amount of heat required to make an average person remove a layer of clothing (+10 degrees Celsius).
  • Volume is measured in units of Walnuts, Chicken eggs, Grapefruits, Bulgarian Airbags, Bulgarian Funbags, Footballs (soccer balls, not pigskin) and Olympic-sized swimming pools.
  • Weight is measured in units of Jubs — A Jub is 1000000 MicroJubs, 1000 MilliJubs, and 0.001 KiloJubs respectively.
  • Speed is measured in terms of percent of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum.
• In his science blog What If?, Randall Munroe has measured energy in megayodas (as a Call-Back to an earlier post) and altitude in giraffes. He's also subverted it, by noting that the entire population of Earth would take up an area "the size of Rhode Island" - and then exploring the consequences of his latest thought experiment actually taking place in Rhode Island.
• The old "Bill Gates Wealth" page, which dates from a time when Microsoft's stock price kept soaring upward with no end in sight, measured the rate at which Bill Gates earned money in units of how much money it would not be worth Bill Gates' time to bend down and pick up. E.g. assuming it took Bill Gates 4 seconds to bend over and pick up money, at one point it wouldn't have been worth his time to bend over and pick up $1000 — he'd have made more money by continuing on his way to work.
• Gaming website Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a running tradition of comparing a game's size to its equivalency in "Peggles", the total size of a copy of Peggle (21-ish megs).
• "The size of things: an ngram experiment" is an analysis of how size comparisons have changed over the past 200 years. Comparisons from nature have largely fallen out of favour, while sports analogies have emerged relatively recently.
• As one user on 4chan explained, a hitler can be used as a measure of death and financial value:
  One hitler shall henceforth be a unit of measurement equal to 6.0 x 10⁶ human deaths. Standard SI prefixes apply. Thus, Harold Shipman's achievements amount to 36 microhitlers. The true unity of the hitler as an SI unit is it allows useful unit conversions. For example, the EPA currently values a human life as being worth 6.9 million US dollars (6.9 megadollars). A simple unit conversion gives us 1 hitler is equal to $41,400,000,000,000 (41 teradollars). It can therefore be quantitatively established whether or not someone is "worse than Hitler". When congress failed to pass a stimulus bill in 2008 they market lost 1.2 trillion dollars in one day, roughly equivalent to 29 millihitlers. Joseph Stalin is the only human I know of who can be called worse than Hitler, as his achievements clocked roughly 5 hitlers. When your bank nails you with a 35 dollar fine, you can confidently tell the teller that they are currently fucking you over to the tune of 84 picohitlers and ask if they have a very tiny Auschwitz behind the counter.
• CBS News tweeted out a story about a huge stingray caught in Long Island Sound. Said stingray weighed 400 pounds and "was nearly the length of Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce."^note As several commenters noted, this bizarre comparison was probably an attempt to game the site's popularity algorithm. At the time the story was posted, there were numerous rumors circulating about Kelce dating Taylor Swift, resulting in Swift's enormous fanbase googling him. (Kelce is 6' 5'', or 1.96m, for reference.)

Web Videos

• City Nerd: The subscriber count was always done using the biggest stadium they could fill, up until What Makes Lifestyle Centers Bad for Cities: Investigating Heinous Land Uses, Episode 3 which used Michigan Stadium and was the final video including subscriber count because it was the biggest stadium for which good satellite imagery was available.
• Dragon Ball Z Abridged:
  • It has a Running Gag with Vegeta using Butt-Monkey Raditz's power level of 1200 as a unit of measurement during the Vegeta arc. For the record, Nappa is worth 5 Raditz, while Vegeta himself is worth 15.
  • When Vegeta and Nappa start growing Saibamen, Vegeta comments that their power level is the same as Raditz's, so that they can grow Raditzes. Cut to Raditz going "I. Hate. ALL OF YOU."
  • Later on "Raditz" somehow starts being used as a currency; the fast-food restaurant Spacey's even has a "Raditz Menu".
• This YouTube video measures the size of the largest known star in terms of how many years it would take an airliner to fly all the way around it.
• Twitch Plays Pokémon has the "Wattson" unit of measure. One Wattson (or WA) is equivalent to twenty-three attempts to defeat a single NPC opponent by the Mob. So far, five trainers(including Wattson himself) have reached Wattson ranking of one or more WA, with record belonging to Drake from Hoenn Elite Four at 1.39 WA, or 32 attempts. ^note If one counts Elite Four as a single opponent, then the record still belongs to Hoenn Elite Four with whopping 4,48 WA (102 attempts), which is sometimes called 1 Em.
• Happens to a lesser degree (of both extremity and known-ness) in LoadingReadyLive #34's Wasabi Roulette. When told half of the replacement dishes have "extra wasabi", Paul's understandable question is "How much extra?" Alex gives his response as "Heather wasabi."
• Outside Xbox: Jane gives the sadness of events in video games in deaths of Mufasa.
• In the blogs on StephenVlog, Mallory uses pepperonis to measure how spicy food is.

Western Animation

• The Leap Frog educational DVD Scout and Friends: Adventures in Shapeville Park featured mice called "measure mice" used as part of a song number about measuring. "Look at Penny jump / How far can she go? / We can use the measure mice and then we'll know / Line them up and count them up, place them end-to-end! / Her jump is two mice long! That's how long!" The mice were cute and the song was catchy, but the problem was that no real-world units were given to relate just what "two mice" was. Some felt this may have been done to avoid having to get into confusion between metric and imperial units, but more than one reviewer and commenter on Amazon.com felt the idea of measuring with mice was somewhat bizarre.
  • As opposed to common-sense units of length, such as the foot size of a long-dead king, or one ten-thousandth of the distance between the north pole and the equator.
• In the South Park episode "More Crap", the European Fecal Standards and Measurements measures the size of craps in courics (named after Katie Couric), and one couric equals 2.5 pounds of poo.
• In a Family Guy cutaway, Peter is working as Jackee Harry's personal shopper and is confused by some of her requests, such as a desk of Cheez-Its.
• In "The Whale Episode" on Sid the Science Kid, the buzz-phrase of the day was "nonstandard measurement." It all got started because Sid wanted to know how someone could measure the length of a blue whale. Teacher Susie taught the kids about the idea of "nonstandard measurement" and also that there were certain rules - like that they could use objects lying around to measure things or even themselves, but the units all had to be the same within a particular measurement. Gerald had the idea that they could use him to measure things and they found out that their classroom was "14 Geralds" long.
• The Smurfs are described as being "three apples high", supposedly meaning a smurf's height is that of three apples stacked. Not very precise, but it does confirm that they are quite small.
• In the Ready Jet Go! episode "Measure for Measure", the kids decide to make a scale model of the solar system in the yard. They use Sunspot as an astronomical unit.
• One episode of Curious George was about George preparing the Man in the Yellow Hat's birthday party, but purchasing the wrong-sized cake, decorations, etc. While trying to prepare this stuff, George ends up taking a nap and has a dream where everybody uses George as their sole unit of measure.
• In "STEM Strong" from Mack & Moxy, half a mile is measured as "440 Macks." Mack is an anthropomorphic moose.
• In Craig of the Creek, the kids use backyards as a unit of measuring distance, which doesn't make sense because backyards are different sizes and have different lengths and widths.
• Work It Out Wombats!: In "Measure for Measure," the wombats need to measure Ellie's head to determine how big her new hat needs to be. They first use apples, then jellybeans to measure her head before they use a ribbon.

Real Life

• The yield of cataclysmic explosions is frequently measured in terms of number of Hiroshima equivalent. In practical terms, the radius of "total destruction" (meaning all buildings destroyed and all living beings killed) was about one mile out from Ground Zero, the Shima Surgical Clinic. Up to two miles out, almost all buildings were reduced to rubble or severely damaged, and thousands more people died from the blast wave and flash heat. A modern hydrogen bomb has a total destruction radius of ten miles within which almost everything would be disintegrated.
  • They are almost always measured in kilo/megatons. That means that they are as powerful as that many thousand or million tons of TNT. Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was somewhere between 13 and 18 kilotons.
    • It would take about 4 kilotons of TNT to fill an Olympic swimming pool.
    • One gram of antimatter would annihilate with matter in an explosion with energy equivalent to roughly two Little Boys.
  • Wikipedia also uses the Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuke ever made, to measure the eruptive power of the Krakatoa eruption. (Hint: 1 Tsar Bomba = 3,125 Hiroshima bombs, and 4 Tsar Bombas = the Krakatoa eruption)
  • The energy released by a large meteor impact (like the one that killed the dinosaurs) is often likened to collecting all the nuclear weapons in the world to one spot and exploding them all at once, then repeating it about 1,000 times within the same second (for a more precise comparison, the energy released by the impact of a meteor with a 10km diameter is about 100,000,000 megatons. The Hiroshima bomb was 0.016 and Tsar Bomba 50 megatons).
  • Project Rho has a handy [1] listing energy release in joules, equivalent mass of TNT and example phenomena that might cause such an event.
  • It is worth noting that comparing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in general to nuclear explosions is quite imprecise, and has been known to irritate some geologists. Earthquakes tend to distribute energy across a wide area, but nukes are an adequate approximation for explosive volcanic eruptions (like Mt. St. Helens, or Thera) and meteor strikes (like Tunguska); one need only compare the depth of a crater or radius of a blast to see.
• In America, many people will emphasize how small or remote a town is by listing the miles to nearest Wal-Mart, McDonald's, major grocery store, or multiplex.
  • Hint: within the 48 contiguous states, you're never farther than 121 miles from a McDonald's.
    • under 40km in Germany! source. Unless you count Helgoland, where the nearest restaurant seems to be in Cuxhaven, some 60 km away.
  • City size can also be described similarly; Sunnydale, for instance, is "a one Starbucks town."^note Despite the fact that the town contains a university, airport, and castle.
  • In the U.S. and Canada the distance between two cities is often stated in the time it takes to drive from one to the other, for example, London (Ontario) is about two hours west of Toronto.
    • Relatively small intracity distances, usually when walking or trying to find a place when driving, are often given in "blocks". A block is formally defined as a plot of land surrounded by streets. Informally in urban areas, it usually means an intersection with a traffic light (i.e., 2 blocks away is after two traffic lights)
• In America, Rhode Island's status as the ultimate in mass land-area equation technology is legendary, it having been founded for just such a purpose by the British to convey meaningful analogies of claimed territories to the Throne. If the area being described is too big to be measured reasonably in Rhode Islands, it's often measured in Connecticuts, South Dakotas, fractions of a Texas or fractions of an Alaska.
  • Our Dumb World, an atlas by the Onion, describes Rhode Island as being "roughly the size of one Rhode Island", which is to say: about 1/3 the size of Puerto Rico, or 76 times smaller than Portugal.
  • George Carlin quipped that you could build "two Rhode Islands and a Delaware" on the land that's currently being used on golf courses in America.
  • The CIA World Factbook describes the land area of every country in the world this way: "about half the size of Texas," "about the size of South Dakota" and in one or two cases "approximately three times as big as The Mall in Washington DC."
• PJ O'Rourke once lampshaded this trope, on a tour of a US Navy vessel, and came up with a few comparisons of his own, deciding for instance that the ship contained "enough rope to hang every Democrat elected to Congress since the Johnson administration."
• For height, the preferred unit in the US is the Empire State Building. The Eiffel Tower is also used fairly often. For geologic height, it's Mt Everests.
  • For Sydney, Australia, it is the Sydney Tower.
  • British Newspapers prefer to include a range of comparisons to whatever the subject is, including a double-decker bus, Big Ben (Elizabeth Tower), St. Paul's Cathedral, Canary Wharf, The Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the Petronas Towers and any other really famous skyscraper.
    • Mercilessly parodied by online British newspaper The Register. Be warned that some of the examples listed may be Not Safe for Work.
  • Mt. Everest occasionally appear as a unit of mass or weight. One science special declared that if all the mass in a single wooden matchstick were converted to energy, it would be enough to lift Mount Everest 20 feet off the ground.
• Welsh comedian Rhod Gilbert has commented on BBC newsreaders' practice of describing areas of land as being the size of Wales:

  I know what you're thinking when you say it: "An area the size of Wales, [angrily] but not Wales!"

• Eohippus, the tiny ancestor of horses, is almost universally described as "about the size of a fox terrier". What makes this case particularly interesting is that this comparison is considerably more well-known than the size of a fox terrier itself, at least among paleontologists. Stephen Jay Gould wrote a lengthy article on the origin of this meme. Today, the "fox terrier" comparison is outdated. So now textbooks just say Eohippus was "about the size of a modern dog". Granted, there's such a wide size range among modern dogs that this is rather less helpful.
• The snipers in many armies are trained to judge distances with their eye, by getting them to think about a specific distance that they personally know a great deal about. Due to the nature of people who work as snipers, this often results in the distance being measured by eye in terms of "how many football fields long".
  • Exploited, in a way, by stadiametric rangefinders, which offer a grid which you lay over the silhouette of the target to deduce the range to it based on the angular size of a typical object of that category, e.g. a 1.7 m standing soldier or a 15 m fighter jet.
• And every dinosaur's brain is about the size of a walnut.
  • Similar to the above, it's common (mostly in documentaries) to compare the size of anything prehistoric with the size of a dinosaur. For instance, you typically won't get through a documentary talking about marine reptiles like Mosasaurus or Tylosaurus without having the narrator mention how it was "X times bigger than a T-Rex".
• One measurement for caloric content is to compare foods to the equivalent number (or fractional number, as the case may be) of McDonalds Big Macs (540 calories in the US, 27% of the average recommended daily caloric intake). Discussed in one Pvp strip, where Skull notes that even monsters do that (one plump Bavarian kid is apparently equivalent to 500 Big Macs).
  • A somewhat more peculiar measure: The Economist invented, and uses, a measurement called "The Big Mac Index" to compare currencies; since McDonalds is very strictly standardized, the price of a Big Mac directly corresponds to what it costs for the restaurant to serve it; as such, comparing the cost of a Big Mac to currency exchange rates can tell you when a currency is under- or over-valued.
    • In some places (like Italy) the measurement is skewed by the very large, nearly 100%, "tax on junk food": a Big Mac in Florence may cost 6.5 euros (7.88 USD), while the same Big Mac in Vienna, where junk food is not taxed, only costs 3.5 euros (4.24 USD).
• Astronomers routinely measure the parameters of stars in increments of "solar luminosities/radius/masses" as well as "solar masses" for heavy objects^note Most notably black holes where solar luminosity and/or radius are too big or meaningless. The masses of extrasolar planets are usually measured in increments of Jupiter masses or Earth masses.
  • Features on other planets are often compared to features on Earth. For example, the Sputnik Planitia on Pluto is "the size of Texas".
• Inverted. When the atomic bomb was first dropped on Hiroshima, Time magazine described it as seven times the power of the Halifax explosion. In fact, Halifax was the standard people used for explosions, until Hiroshima supplanted it.
  • A regular example at the Halifax memorial museum. The Halifax explosion is described as the biggest single explosion before the Trinity Test in July 1945 and the bombing of Hiroshima a month later. Even today, it remains the largest non-nuclear explosion ever - even the biggest deliberate conventional explosion by the military was only 100 tons, while Halifax is estimated at 2.9 kilotons (in comparison, the recent Beirut explosion in 2020 was only estimated at 0.8 kilotons).
• In the US, hail is never described in terms of its actual size. You will never hear the weather guy on the TV describe "quarter-inch hail". Hail is always described in Hiroshima-style measures—dime-sized hail, quarter-sized hail, golf-ball sized hail, tennis-ball sized hail, etc.
• Number of deaths will be compared with the Black Plague or the Holocaust. For example, people often assume that the Black Plague of the 14th century was the worst pandemic ever. The Spanish Flu killed twice as many people in a shorter amount of time. It's also used to try and impress upon people the importance of AIDS research. Another example is trying to explain to Americans how deep of an impact WWI had upon its populace. What with wiping out a whole generation of young men and all.
  • The Black Death vs. Spanish Lady comparison shows two different ways of looking at how deadly a disease outbreak is: The former is very bad in terms of proportion of the population killed, the later in terms of total number of deaths. The Black Death killed, over a span of approximately ten years, about one person in three in Europe, making it one of the most lethal disease outbreaks of all time. The Spanish Lady killed a much smaller fraction of a much larger population, taking many more total lives (more than were killed in WWI, in fact, but with less dramatic social impact because they were more scattered through the population instead of being heavily concentrated among young men).
• Late night hosts began measuring time in "Kardashian Marriages", a unit of approximately 72 days.
  • Political satirists refer to 'the Friedman unit', after Thomas Friedman's habit of predicting that "the next six months" would bring victory in Iraq.
  • More modern political satirists measure time in "Scaramuccis", after Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump's first White House Communications Director, who engaged in all sorts of wacky and unprofessional behavior and was fired after only ten days on the job.
• In the world of writing things very small, which is exactly as fascinating as it sounds, the standard unit is 'bibles per square inch'.
• "The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measurements," described in MAD #33, is largely similar to the metric system, but with different base units. The standard unit of length, the potrzebie, is defined as the thickness of MAD #26 (2.263348517438173216473 mm). The Potrzebie System was sent in to MAD by then-19-year-old Donald Knuth, who became a famous computer scientist. This is also a case of Fantastic Measurement System, though based on a real-world item.
• This article on renewable energy, on page 2, measures how much land each type of renewable energy would require in units of New Jerseys.
• This article from The Other Wiki lists several of them.
• Theoretical physicists frequently write their equations in terms of Planck units, units derived by setting each of 5 fundamental constants of the universe equal to 1. While these units have the distinction of being "natural," in that they're not bound to an arbitrary quantity like the size of the Earth or the mass/oscillation speed of a particular atom, their magnitudes make them completely impractical for everyday measurements. The Planck unit of length, for example, is about a hundred-quadrillionth the width of a proton, and the Planck unit of temperature is about 10^25 times the core temperature of the sun. In addition to this, by being bound to abstract constants, they will never need a physical unit that can change due to wear and tear, erosion, or other factors.
• In the game of Twenty Questions, players would usually ask if the object in question is bigger than a breadbox. Few people own breadboxes anymore, but then again few people play Twenty Questions either.
• This article describes a microscopic bead that spins "half a million times faster than a domestic washing machine and more than a thousand times faster than a dental drill."
• The temperature on Venus is typically described as either "hot enough to melt lead" or "hotter than a self-cleaning oven".
• Many common units of measurements likely started this way. For example, an "atm" is the pressure of sea level Earth's atmosphere, a "bar" is an amount of pressure about that of Earth's atmosphere, but consistent with metric units. Temperature scales were based on boiling and freezing points of water — Celsius sets 0° and 100° at those points for distilled water, while Fahrenheit originally had 32° as the freezing point of water and 96° as human body temperature.^note Fahrenheit gave 32° as the freezing point of water, 96° as the average body temperature of a human being, and 212° as the boiling point of water. However, scientists who came after him could not set a scale that got all three of those values to correctly line up with the things they were measuring, so they took the two they could measure precisely — the freezing and boiling points of water — and adjusted the third accordingly, giving us the modern standard of 98.6° for human body temperature. (And human body temperature varies enough from individual to individual that the best you can say is that it's 37°C plus-or-minus 1°C; 98.6°F is a ridiculously overprecise value.)
  • The prosaically-named "astronomical unit" is defined thusly: 1 AU is the average distance between the Earth and Sun. It's used primarily for measuring orbital distances, logically enough.
• Needles prevent hedgehogs from combing out parasites on them. Thus parasitologists came with a "hedgehog-hour" — the number of ticks a hedgehog collects after 1 hour walk in a tick-infested area.
• All scientific units of measure are based on some property of some physical object, most commonly water.
  • This was changed for the metric system in 2019. The main problem ultimately was that the kilogram, which many other units derive from, was still based on a physical object: a block of platinum-iridium alloy called the International Prototype of the Kilogram. Over the ~150 years it was in use, scientists noticed that copies of it deviated over time, meaning it was not stable and thus, if used to calibrate devices, could result in inaccuracies on the order of micrograms ^note While this isn't useful in most everyday measurements, it's extremely important in the medical field where many treatments, such as those with Type 1 diabetes, have doses in this range. All base units in the metric system were redefined to use constants, including mass.
• The smoot is a unit of length defined as the height of MIT Alumnus Oliver Smoot (5'7"). The MIT chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha adopted this unit of measurement when they wanted to figure out the length of the Harvard Bridge between Cambridge and Boston, by laying Smoot on the sidewalk, end over end, and marking every ten smoots with chalk. The marks are refreshed (in paint) every year, and the Massachusetts Highway Department even scored the concrete surface of the sidewalk on the bridge at 5-foot-7-inch intervals instead of the conventional 6 feet.
• In the US Army air defense course and manuals, "football fields" are mentioned as a unit of measure to lead enemy aircraft. Why? A lot of young men (before 9/11, air defense was closed to women) would have played American football at some point in their lives.
• Storage devices for computers are often measured in quantities of files commonly stored now. Such as a 16GB thumbdisk holding 30,000 images or 5000 hours of music or 300 hours of video. All of some standard quality. Sometimes they're compared to other storage formats, like 4 DVDs or 23 CDs or 11,000 floppies.
• In the late 18th century James Watt used the term "horse power" to compare the output of his steam engine to that of draft horses. Centuries later, we're still measuring car engines in horsepower.
• Comparisons of penetrating power of Armour Piercing weaponry will inevitably involve millimetres of Rolled Homogenous Steel Armour, even though no two steel armour plates are exactly alike (e.g. riveted, cast, stamped or welded; soft or hard and brittle alloys...), and nobody uses simple steel armour anymore anyhow.
• Speeds are often described in terms of the time it would take to cross a given distance at that speed. For example the TGV (operating speed up to 320 km/h or 200 mph) would take 15 hours from LA to New York City. If there was a rail line built to that speed, that is.^note Given that very little of the US network is electrified, it would probably stop somewhere in Pennsylvania (on an east-west journey) shortly after the end of the catenary
• The Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro is the largest stadium in Brazil, and was the location of many important sports moments. Since so many people are familiar with the stadium and its size, many people use it to compare the size of something, as in "That could fit inside the Maracanã", or "That's about the size of two Maracanãs".
• Elementary school mathematics textbooks, such as those by Houghton Mifflin, will teach students the basics of length measurement by having them use "paper-clip units", i.e. measuring how long something is by lining up identically-sized paper clips along the length of an object, or simply using a tear-out ruler from a workbook with paper clip graphics printed on it.
• Measuring the speed of a vehicle, projectile, planet, spacecraft, etc. in mach units or warp units is this. Mach 1 is the speed of sound, so Mach X means "X times the speed of sound". Warp 1 is the speed of light, also known as c, so warp Y is "y times the speed of light".
• Pegasus Mail author David Harris, who has written a lot of program code in his time, defines one "WaP" as being 71,500 lines of code — that being the length of the Oxford World Classics edition of Tolstoy's War and Peace. For instance, Pegasus Mail itself is 227,428 lines, or 3.181 WaP.
• Especially on the internet, the Harry Potter series (or sometimes just the longest of the books, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) is used as measure of length of fanfics and other works of literature. Not only is it something a lot of readers are familiar with, it coincidentally is only just north of a million words (specifically 1,084,170), making it a nice measuring stick. Atlas Shrugged and War and Peace are also popular when describing the length of door stoppers.
• A strange example is to be found on the London Underground, where every emergency staircase, regardless of height or of number of steps, is equivalent to a 15-storey building.
• In the days of the great ocean liners, it was common to compare their length to well-known landmarks, such as skyscrapers or Trafalgar Square.
  • Among ships, "Titanics" is often used when comparing length.

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