China plans city 'twice the size of Wales' It's official: the inexorable rise of China has rendered meaningless ancient units of area such as the square mile, as reporters struggle to express the extent of the country's megacities in terms the average reader can understand. Handily for the Telegraph, it can fall back on the accepted Reg standard – the Wales – in …
Football pitches (not a fan, can't remember the last time I saw one), olympic size swimming pools (likewise) or acres (roughly the size of a football pitch apparently).
Our local allotments are priced in poles. Why don't they just measure everything in poles, then we would know what they are on about.
The Blank Constant*
*The reaction most people give to anthromophicisations** of large units, especially when one anthromorphic unit is substituted for another
**set out in terms intended to relate to the human experience***
***Excluding Paris Hilton now decent 3D TVs are available and assuming the imminent availability of a decent USB Groin attachment.
Actually, it's probabably that the Chinese working in metric, which the Telegraph converted into the Newspaper Journalist System of Measures - you know, the one that uses Celsius for temperatures below the freezing point of water, but then Fahrenheit when it starts getting hot, because of course, they Newspaper Journalists know the best way of representing The Truth to their readership.
. . . Yeah, two 'Wales' but what's that in 'Olympic Swimming Pools' or 'tennis courts'?
How many 'double decker buses' long is the railway?
I can't get my head around 'two Wales' apart from maybe two 'National Express Hostesses Arses'.
("and it's hard to get by, when your arse is the size of a small countryyyyyyy")
Depends if you were trying to lick them all in one go, or sequentially due to an unfeasably large postal run. I guess the solution would be an automated and industrial grade spraying solution.
If not sequential then I guess the benefit would be that you'd probably never have to buy any stamps ever again. Although you'd be pretty pissed off if you'd bought 24,137,939,319 stamps from the Post Office and they suddenly made them obsolete in favour of some crap Blue Peter appeal type edition of stamps.
Or something.
You'd think the Welsh would be getting quite paranoid by now:-
The Chinese build a new city, twice the size of Wales!
An area the size of Wales was destroyed by forest fire!
In the Amazon rain forest, an area the size of Wales is being chopped down every day!
An area the size of Wales is experiencing severe flooding in Brisbane!
The Indonesian tsunami destroyed an area the size of Wales!
When the big one hits in California, an area of land the size of Wales will dissappear into the sea!
When we stop practising and get on with plan of 'permanent devolution' what will the unit of measure for area become?
I was lucky enough to take a day trip to Shenzhen from Hong Kong in 1983. There was one high rise building, an eight storey hotel, and the rest was mostly slums.
The Chinese govt tour guides were very proud of one thing: The giant water tap (ceremonial fake, I'm sure) at the side of a reservoir. They claimed it controlled Hong Kong's entire water supply. A nice bargaining chip.
Shenzhen is a lot bigger now!!
I also wonder if the "42 Million" will be the Official population. The Chinese people ignore the "One Child" laws as often as possible, and lie consistently to any government official nosey enough to ask; hence the 181 million people involved in the current census!!
Having dated women from Guangzhou I know that the unofficial population is about 4 - 6 million higher than the official one; with people living and sleeping in unregistered parts of factories, shops and office buildings (including one ex girlfriends parents).
Personally I dread the thought of smelling 42 million people worth of poops; Guangzhou stinks of effluent as it is!!!
(And Cabbage, every Chinese city stinks of cabbage)
Have the Reg got a unit of volume for mega poops yet?? Can I suggest the "Gordon"??
1 Gordon = 1 cubic km of Poop
After all, his surname IS Brown, and he was full of the stuff.
I get so confused, I used to understand the old imperial values,
height = double decker buses
length = double decker buses, or football pitches
area = football pitches
volume = swimming pools
weight = elephants
distance = times around the world, or from earth to moon
what is all this new modern measurements.
area = wales ?? WTF
The BBC used an analogy for our national debt as a number of Gerkins (building in london) worth of 10 pound notes stacked on top of each other. It just confused me as I got lost converting Gerkins into double decker buses.
Its worth listening for crap analogies in our dumbed down BBC news... at least one a day.
Wikipedia tells us that the Apatosaurus (to give it its correct name) was, on average, 75ft long. 36,078 * 75ft = 2,705,850ft or 512.471591 miles. Either the standard length of the measuring Apatosaurus is roughly 6 times bigger than average at over 453ft long or there is actually going to be 218,240 Apatosaurus worth of rail line to install, not 36,078. In future, instead of mucking about with silly 'modern' measurements we should stick to tried, tested and, above all, well defined measurements of Furlongs, Firkins and Fortnights.
It seems the Chinese representatives have been visiting large urban centers in the US, like Washington DC, the LA area, or NYC, and have mistaken suburban sprawl for "progress".
Having lived in some of those places earlier on, I'm glad I live where I do now*, where I can live in the woods, and still be less than 15 minutes from conveniences like a decent grocery store, bookstore, restaurant, or live entertainment (yes, REAL theater kids, not just watching the tourons, as we did in downtown DC).
Clearly, we need to book the Chinese reps. on a tour of Mall of America (during the summer of course), so they can "progress at its Zenith!", or something like that. Maybe send them to the Atlantis resort - send Mum and the kiddies off to the water park while Dad burns off the expense account at the casino...
See, as westerners we still have ample opportunity to ruin their culture and economy - we have first-hand experience right here at home! We just have to proactive and take advantage of this fine opportunity.
*No I won't tell you where I am. Some of you will try to move there.
has rendered meaningless ancient units of area such as the square mile». Mr Haines seems to have somehow failed to notice that the period he truncates reads in the orginal as follows : «The "Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One" scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.» 16000 square miles is the equivalent of 41440 square kilometres, which is probably the unit used by the Chinese. I leave the question of what it would be in Planck unit derivatives to Mr Haines' fertile (?) imagination....
Henri
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