Buffalo burghers
Octopus may be to their taste, but it seems a tad inaccurate. I would suggest that it would be much more precise to liken the weight of the flying manhole cover to 50kg of calamari.
The New Statesman has pulled off a bit of a blinder by whipping out a giant octopus to helpfully explain to readers just how much a manhole cover weighs. The good burghers of Buffalo, New York, were recently menaced by a flying metal disk as the result of an underground explosion, apparently prompted by an electrical cable …
The correct answer, of course, is some pedantic dissertation on different kinds of ounce used for different materials, something like troy ounces for gold, but avoirdupois for feathers, but I can't be arsed to look it up. Let's hope the Register units don't get as fragmented as the imperial ones.
"I like the Giant Pacific Octopus analogy even more because Buffalo is 2500 KM from the Pacific; who said Americans are parochial?"
Buffalo, NY is also responsible for confusing a lot of people into thinking bison bison have a third pair of limbs, non-functional wings now best known for a dish that drives North American antacid sales. Like the Giant Pacific Octopus, the presence of the bovidae are not actually confirmed in the area, though they were known to be much closer to the city (shores of Lake Erie) than the octopus.
Buffalo is 2500 KM from the Pacific
It is? Buffalo to San Francisco (your example) is 2309 miles, according to the Great Circle Mapper. San Francisco isn't the closest point on the Pacific coast to Buffalo - glancing at a map suggests that's somewhere in Oregon, and indeed Coos Bay OR is a mere 2270 miles from Buffalo. Nearly 40 miles closer!
But 2500 km from Buffalo will only get you to, what, Cody, Wyoming? Which I'm sure is very nice but not a Pacific beach resort as such.
You can do Kansas City to San Francisco in under 2500 km. And Han Solo can do it in under three parsecs.1
1About 7e-11 parsec, which is somewhat less than 3.
if a giant octopus only weighs in at 45Kg how about feeding it 5 turnips prior to launching it the obligatory number of DDB's into the air.
I'm sure there is some rule about not eating and then flying but since it's probably game over for the the octopus anyway it can probably be overlooked.
"Still using Imperial units when the rest of the world has moved on to the metric Giant Squid?"
I'm afraid the incorrectly named Imperial Giant Octopus (Dodecipus Magnus Imperialis) actually has 12 tentacles, not 8. It is revered in some remote parts of the world as the physical incarnation of the Great Noodly One's offspring, and so there have been many attempts to nail it to large bits of wood. Fortunately, it's too bloody fast...
"Still using Imperial units when the rest of the world has moved on to the metric Giant Squid?"
Weird thing: most science / engineering education in the US uses metric. From grade school to university, it was mostly metric (for me - I don't know if schools have regressed since then). If Imperial units were used it was because the professor wanted to catch you off guard and see if you remembered those obscure units. Then I started an engineering career in the late 1990s and...
Them: "The Virginia's hull is aiming for a 100ksi yield strength."
Me: "Ksi...whut? Is that like megapascals?"
Them: "Is the glass transition temperature below -80F?"
Me: "Hell if I know, my data's in Celsius."
Them: "Spell out the inch-pounds for the fastener on the drawing."
Me: "Stahp..."
Them: "The alloy has a few percent Columbium."
Me: "Oh, come on, they renamed that element decades ago!"
> The manhole cover was hurled an impressive "200-300 feet" into the air, ...
Hmmm. I think those quote marks are entirely appropriate! New Statesman claims the ironwork hurl was 200-300 ft. Using g = 32 ft/s^2, and t = (2*s/g)^0.5, that would give a flight time between 7.06 and 8.66 seconds. Close, but since the bang occurs on the video at 0:05, and the cover lands again at 0:11 I think they've overestimated that height. The cover made it down again from apogee in 3 seconds, so peak height was
s = 0.5 * 32 * 3^2 = 16 * 9 = 144 ft.
It might just have touched 200 ft, given that YouTube timing can't be precise, but not close to 300 ft.