> Over 23,000 pieces are being tracked in low-Earth orbit to help satellites and the ISS avoid collisions - but they're all about the size of a softball or larger.
Why do they always do this, give a non-standard unit of measurement which 90% of countries in the world for no reference for.
Its like when they describe something as "X number of football fields" - Nice one, only one country plays and misnames Handegg. its useless to the rest of us.
There's a whole culture of mocking such units with invented ones.
My favourite so far would be "burger per square eagle", which is a unit of distance.
It's actually sort of a puzzle - you have to imagine how to interpret the units so that they match the result.
I remember starting off using someone's idea to take a bald eagle's average wingspan (2.7m - which is incorrect BTW). What follows is that the burger must represent volume - I modeled the burger as a half sphere with a diameter of 13cm, which yielded ~500ccm - sounded believable enough.
The only issue remaining was that the unit was very small - a small fraction of a millimetre.
Then again measuring things in megaburgers (per square eagle) sounds fairly natural - a lot like kilometres or kilograms.
Why do they always do this, give a non-standard unit of measurement which 90% of countries in the world for no reference for.
Its like when they describe something as "X number of football fields" - Nice one, only one country plays and misnames Handegg. its useless to the rest of us.