In the World of Stupid Units-of-Measure...

Why is that "Professional Journalists" insist on making up units of measure? This is perhaps the stupidest thing I've seen in a while. Asteroid half the size of a giraffe strikes Earth off the coast of Iceland | Daily Mail Online

The space rock, named 2022 EB5, is believed to have mostly burnt up in our planet's atmosphere, but even if it had impacted the surface it would have done little to no damage because it was just 10ft (3 metres) wide, about half the size of a giraffe.

First off, the asteroid was about 10 feet or 3 meters across, give or take. Why do you need to come up with an asinine unit of measure, when most people could get by with an actual unit of measure? And what is the definition of the reference giraffe?

I have seen "Full Grown elephants," London double-decked buses, Blue Whales (in relation to an aircraft carrier), and the number of pint glasses used to describe cubic meters. In the US they talk about area in terms of football fields - including end zones. In the UK the talk about the number of football (that's what we call soccer over here) pitches.

Does it make it more understandable to know that 400 cubic meters is about equal to 700,000 pints of ale? When discussing the largest land-bound machine ever built, does it help to know it weighs as much as a certain number of elephants or jumbo jets? Do you know how much a jumbo jet weighs?

For small stuff they go in for the human hair, or a sheet of paper - both of which are meaningless, since not all hair or paper is the same thickness anyway.

I'm usually not sure if the effort to explain things in everyday terms means that the journalists are stupid, or if they just think their audience is stupid. In the case of the giraffe as a unit of measure I'm sure; the journalists are stupid.

One of the comments at the Daily Mail was asking for them to specify the size of the object in hamsters.

Twitter was also having fun with this: the original tweet from the Daily Mail generated some funny responses.