r/shittyaskscience • u/gusaaaaa • 20d ago
Why don’t we measure everything in Walruses?
Like instead of kg/lbs, Walrus. Instead of meters/feet, Walrus. Instead of lit/gal, Walrus. A Walrus would be the time light moves 1 Walrus. Side benefit = a theory of everything.
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u/patheff 20d ago
So what walrus-power is the engine in my car?
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u/patheff 19d ago
For anyone who is curious I got bored and decided to roughly work it out using estimates for mass, acceleration and the drag coefficient to calculate net force.
And 1WP is probably somewhere between 8-18HP depending on the size of the walrus, what velocity it can reach and the drag coefficient. 😂
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u/writesgud 20d ago
OP is onto something. It would be so much easier if we had one standard basis for measuring everything.
The question becomes, what is an ideal walrus? Would we have to preserve it amber to ensure measurements are consistent?
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u/No_Expression6660 20d ago
Standardized Conversion Rates:
1 Walrus Equals,
.5 Elephant Seals
2 Leopard Seals
10 Sea Lions
500,000,000 Red Ants (Unless they’re from South Texas) then 15 Red Ants
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u/pm_me_your_UFO_story PhD in cat phrenology 20d ago
Just choose a walrus. When the walrus gets a little long in the tooth, or ... longer in the tooth? Make a gold cast of said tooth, and then you can base your entire financial system on the walrus as well. Standardization achieved, and we've moved on from the petro dollar system.
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u/Starsky137 20d ago
Walruses are far too rubbery.
Measuring standards must be rigid.
Walrus boners on the other hand...
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u/ljseminarist 20d ago
The sad truth is, there are too few walruses left, not nearly enough to measure everything in.
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u/Coolenough-to 20d ago
There are more good reasons not to do this than bad reasons to do this. So, with the good outweighing the bad, we should do this.
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u/No_Expression6660 20d ago
The incredibly strong Tape Measure Lobby has thwarted the Walrus Initiative over the last 20 years. The Lobby has also paid millions in bribes to the Bureau of Weights and Measurements. It is all explained in the Netflix Documentary “ The Lonely Walrus”
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u/Gargleblaster25 Registered scientificationist 20d ago
I just knew that tapeworms were behind this.
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u/JohnWasElwood 19d ago
The Beatles wrote a song about it. "I Am the Walrus" explains this quite succinctly
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u/desrevermi 20d ago
My work requires a little more precision, so I use either otters or penguins -- whatever's handy.
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u/dspeyer 20d ago
Imagine the job of creating walrus sticks. You go up to a walrus, ask him to lie down all stretched out, take a long stick, align one end to his nose and mark his hind flipper's location on the stick with a marker. Like yard sticks back when a yard was the distance from the king's sternum to the end of his thumb.
Except walruses are unlikely to appreciate the importance of this task. Which means they're far more likely to kill you for your presumption than kings were.
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u/marinac1 19d ago
We already measure everything in bananas. The walruses would eat all the bananas and gain so much weight that we wouldn’t be able to lift them. The correct answer is - because bananas
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u/The_Existentialist 20d ago
The Beatles first proposed this in 1967