You must have scary lawyers
Because it's now back to cubic metres.
BBC adopts El Reg units
We're delighted to announce that the Beeb appears to have got with the programme and adopted official El Reg units. In this report on the "lake that has formed under a glacier on Mont Blanc, and threatens to flood the St Gervais valley", the Corporation quantifies the potentially-deadly body of water as apparently containing " …
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Check out the photo caption
Olympic swimming pool units still used.
And if they had changed anything because of El Reg, surely they would've added something to the picture description?
Looking at the wrong place
It's on the first picture's footnote. :)
Congratulations on your new role as a tax-payer funded quango...
The value for money I get from ElReg easily beats most of the UK content on BBC3/4....
Is it just me...
...or is 26 Olympic-sized swimming pools just not that impressive on a 'flood the valley' scale? I mean, OK, pools are big if you want to install them, but they're gonna be a hell of a lot less impressive when you pour them out over a *whole valley*. You ever have one of those kiddie pools in your yard? Looks pretty impressive until you tip the thing over and it goes, "Goosh!" into about 20 square feet of yard and disappears in 2 seconds.
Call me when it's 260 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
What's Next...
scientists using "boffin" as their official title? Everyone talking in alliteration sub-titles? Oh, the humanity...
I for one welcome
I for one welcome our new El Reg measuring overlords.
What about this?
What's that volume in baked beans?
Heinz ones preferrably
Re: What's that volume in baked beans?
Depends whether the beans are in the solid or gaseous phase.
El Reg to the rescue...
Thanks for the refresher on the El Reg standardized conversion system as I'd not seen it for a while. I'm just about to build a new kitchen and was getting worried that I'd have to revert to a more obscure unit of measurement such as the millimeter.
I do recall
my time in GEC, when we issued one report with the time as MicroFortnights and the distances in MilliFurlongs.
But yes, it is good to recal the el Reg units.
26 pools flood a valley?
So it only takes 26 olympic swimming pools to flood a valley does it?
Volume of water in olympic swimming pool = 2,500 m3
Volume in 26 pools = 62500 m3
Area of valley of valley (random guess of really small valley 100 acres) = 100 * 4 047 m2 = 404700m2
Depth of flood = 62500/404700 = 15 cm. Raging torrent then!
Or does someone not know the difference between meters cubed and cubic meters? Back to school for you.
Bottle it !
I'm surprised nobody has thought of bottling all that lovely fresh French glacier melt-water - ow envigorateeng, ow sparkleeng, eet gives you weengs you know!
As a point of order
It's hard to picture in your mind the 65000 cubic metres of water as a 65x100x10 metre basin, as it's such an inconceivably abstract rule of measurement.
On the other hand, for geeks like us 112,984,512 Bulgarian airbags are equally abstract. It becomes much more concrete if you think of it in terms of 56,492,256 distracted Reg readers.
Mine is the one with 'The Joy of Sex' in the pocket, in case I would ever need a manual... o
That's all very well
If you actually have an Olympic sized swimming pool in your impoverished borough. Most of us have never seen one.
Next you'll be reporting on....
a BBC Big Fact Hunt.
I'll drink to that :-D
Stuff the measurements...
Stuff the measurements, what I want to know is are they just going to throw this water away or are they going to do the sensible thing and bottle it for sale to rich mugs in posh restaurants at an ridiculous rate?
With glaciers now being something of an endangered species, it'd go down a bomb!
<-- Cos I'd rather have one of these to a similar quantity of Glacial meltwater...
title
Ever wondered why poncy mineral water is so expensive?
Spell 'Evian' backwards.
this
is how you report indisputable evidence of global warming. Huh!
Global warning indeed
"it was a cold snap that was thought to have frozen the natural drainage routes"
What?
The BBC nicking someone's idea and passing it off as their own? Never!
</sarcasm>
Prior art?
This one:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/guides/456900/456932/html/nn3page1.stm
containing "The Drigg store currently contains 960,000 cubic metres - equivalent to 384 Olympic swimming pools - of waste."
is from 25th November 2006, according to Google.
Dumb equivalents
What is an Olympic sized swimming pool?
Expressed in gallons or litres it's pretty meaningless, which also applies to cubic yards or metres to a lesser extent..
Best, I think, would be to describe a three dimension volume.
Three hundred Eiffel Towers stacked one on top of the other is another dumb representation.
Agreed
Three Eiffel Towers stacked on top of one another are only slightly taller than one Eiffel Tower.
They were designed to be nested.
Apparently.
@ david w & peter 45
Except it's not going to just magically arrange itself tidily at an even level right throughout the valley, is it? It's going to come surging down *through* the valley. Likely taking trees, people's houses, unfortunate engineers, etc with it. Frankly, if I saw 26 swimming pools worth of water *coming right at me*, I reckon it'd scare the bejesus out of me.
@David 30
"...if I saw 26 swimming pools worth of water *coming right at me*..."
You write that and mean "flood". I read that and think: "Hmmm, all we need here is a really, really big race track and 26 motorised Olympic-sized swimming pools and we have ourselves a new sport".
Never mind the quantity, feel the impact
I think the problem here is not so much the total flood, but he effect of being hit by 26 olympic swimming pools of water in one go.
What's the El Reg equivalent of the Richter scale? I'm trying to think of something involving Dawn French impacting on something, but that just makes my brain curdle.
Breathtaking
"a breathtaking 112,984,512 Bulgarian airbags"
Presumably 56,492,256 pairs.
Even allowing for the beer-goggles affect, that would be somewhere in the region of 25,000,000 'supplementary restraint systems'.
Truly staggering party that would be!
Although I must confess that I wouldn't know where to look
.
.
.
first
;-)
It means about as much to me...
It means about as much to me as saying that an Olympic Swimming Pool contains 1/26 of an Mont Blanc under-glacial lake
What I don't get..
..is what precision is applied to the measurement of "Olympic swimming pools" exist.
An Olympic swimming pool is water, plus the whole bricks-and-tiles thing to contain that water , pumps, filters, large container with chemicals., high chair to see the swimmers better, diving boards. You take all that together and the shape of it is actually quite awkward as a measurement..
/pedant
All that
And life guards, swimmers, lane dividers, receptionists, changing rooms and the childrens pool (Hopefully without children as it will probably not flood until after the school holidays). Imagine that flooding your valley. The will be rubber rings and swimming caps all over the place. It'll make a right mess.
I believe it is a criminal offence...
To measure anything in Olympic or Paralympic units without obtaining an official IOC licence, which is done through a complex ritual involving dispatching gold frankinsense and myrrh (but especially gold) to the four corners of the world and swearing eternal secrecy on Lord Coe's ring.
This linguine standard....
I want confirmation on this: is that "cooked" or "uncooked" linguine?
BBC is out by a factor of 10^11
The ever reliable Wackypedia reports on the last flood from said glacier as:
"In 1892 a GLOF released some 200,000 km3 (2.6×1014 cu yd) of water from the lake of the Glacier de Tête Rousse, resulting in the deaths of 200 people in the French town of Saint Gervais.[12] GLOFs have been known to occur in every region of the world where glaciers are located. Continued glacier retreat is expected to create and expand glacial lakes, increasing the danger of future GLOFs."
So please write to the Beeb and advise them of their minor error.
A new reference spotted here...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/guides/456900/456994/html/
"North Korea occupies some 120,540 square kilometres of land - an area roughly five times the size of Wales"
Excellent stuff!
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