The London bus SI unit
Apr 28th, 2008 by handolio
You can take your SI units and all your battles between imperial and metric measures and shove ‘em, because, as the BBC will tell you, there is only one true measure of size: the London double-decker bus.
This is probably my single favourite thing about the BBC News website. Whenever there’s a Big Thing, you know, like, really big and stuff, they commission an illustrator to tell us exactly how much bigger it is than the dearly departed Routemaster.
Any Big Thing you care to name, you can almost guarantee there’s a diagram somewhere on BBC News comparing it to a bus. Want to know how the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A380 stack up, for example? All very well, but it’s meaningless without our little red chum parked on the tarmac.
In fact, it’s hard to find something big enough that the omnipresent omnibus doesn’t get a look-in. I eventually found this side view of Cunard’s RMS Queen Mary 2, and even here I reckon there’s one camouflaged somewhere near the propellers.
And wait, doesn’t one of those lifeboats look somehow… different?
