Whereas i am far more comfortable with the likes of watts, joules, metres and kilogrammes than i am with horsepower, yards and pounds, there are people out there, by whom i am in fact surrounded, to whom SI units are hard to relate. This is very frustrating.
One reason for this is the names of the units and the fact that they are homonymous with everyday items such as feet, nails and stones. Suppose then, that a child grew up with a breed of dog or cat called a kilo which had a mean mass of around a kilogramme, or were able to wander around a garden of metre flowers, dwarf sunflowers which grew to a height of a metre on the whole. Then there's the kilowatt, which is a particularly precisely bred horse or ox which can exert an average of a kilowatt of power, or the closely related tonne, another breed of horse which happens to have a mass of around that, and so forth.
An organism with very precise characteristics is probably impossible to produce, but one with mean characteristics close to the units concerned seems more feasible, with the proviso that drastically sexually dimorphic species would have to be avoided.
It shouldn't be too difficult to arrange, and for all i know the plants, animals and fungi are already out there. They just have the wrong names.-- nineteenthly, Feb 22 2010 http://www.google.c...r%22&meta=&aq=f&oq= [hippo, Feb 23 2010] In the same spirit. SI_20arthropods [AbsintheWithoutLeave, Feb 23 2010] This I like.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 22 2010 How about the Tesla, a really attractive type of chinchilla?-- MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 22 2010 The killerwhale - one thousand whales.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 22 2010 Your luddite neighbours will fight back by keeping a cage of furlongs in the back yard.-- wagster, Feb 22 2010 // This is very frustrating //
We feel your pain. But don't worry, it's Ok to cull people like that. It's not cruel, it's part of the natural cycle.
The Millipede would lend itself perfectly to this concept and could even be train ed to roll up like a measuring tape for convenient transportation.-- 8th of 7, Feb 22 2010 Yes, that's a bonus of the Metric/SI system.
Besides, the metre is already based on the circumference of a line of longtitude passing through Paris, and thus is a Menagerie Lion running round the Earth ...-- 8th of 7, Feb 22 2010 I thought the meter was now calibrated towards some distance covered during 1/299,792,458 seconds of light travel, or some such.-- daseva, Feb 22 2010 Ah, but inspired by some french-centric geography.
Reminds me of a highschool substitute maths teacher we had who insisted that 22/7 was a more accurate value for Pi than the "3.1415923......" number our calculator would spit out (or even the overly-long calculus method of deriving pi - [shudders in memory])...-- Custardguts, Feb 23 2010 It's interesting that Google has 72,000 hits for the phrase "as heavy as a bag of sugar" (see link), which is what people (in the UK) say when they want to convey the idea of a kilogram.-- hippo, Feb 23 2010 Thanks for the unaccustomed enthusiasm. It's not genetic engineering by stealth but it could be naming because even now there are yard-long beans and inchworms. It's a combination of a fairly conservative breeding programme and renaming the results. So, you can either look at it as having two reasons for deletion or two slightly less than half reasons, adding up to maybe one percent less than a whole reason for deletion, or in other words a centireason less than a whole one. My task now is therefore to go out and breed a centirational beast.-- nineteenthly, Feb 23 2010 // breed a centirational beast.// Cocker spaniel.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 23 2010 Yes, or a red setter.-- nineteenthly, Feb 23 2010 I'll take joules anytime...-- xandram, Feb 23 2010 171 mm seems much more impressive than 6 and 3/4".-- RayfordSteele, Feb 23 2010 random, halfbakery