Measuring cup with unusual units of measure
Harry White designed this measuring cup with units of measure like "tyrannosaurus rex brain," "vol. of body cells that die on a good day," and "enough plutonium to make a bomb." He also has a cookbook with recipes that use these measurement units. Link (Via about:blank)
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So wait... how much Tyrannosaurus Rex brains of water do you use when making white rice over brown rice?
I just bought one! Perfect geek birthday present.
I just hope they can cope with the glut of orders they get, now they've been Boing Boinged.
I call shenanigans.
I don't make a lot of brown rice, but for white rice I'd use two T.Rex brains of water and one of rice. To serve more, use enough red wine to take you over the driving limit.
They sell these beaker-style measuring cups at ikea, they're nice because they look cool and they hold 4 cups. Very useful.
Landowner (3), you're allowed to call shenanigans, but you lose a point if you can't offer an explanation for the call.
So: why shenanigans?
By the way, the reason your basic wine bottle is roughly the same size all over the winemaking world is that it's the same volume as the air in a set of human lungs.
uh-huh. And amphora were based on what it took a Greek to get throughly pissed.
I suppose Fatherland Security will now arrest the maker for disclosing nuclear secrets.
@Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator
Citation needed - or I might start calling shenanigans!
Lung size varies widely: 4,000 and 6,000 cm3
Fred & Friends came out with a very similar measuring cup some time ago called "Equal Measure".
http://www.worldwidefred.com/equalmeasure.htm
Does the "Enough red wine to take you over the driving limit" line move if you weigh more? What sort of magical markings did they come up with to do that? Oh.. They just assumed we all weigh 100lbs/45kg. That's no fun...
It would be cooler if it used odd, but precise units. Otherwise it might be geeky, but it fails at nerdy.
Product author must live in a mighty wet state as a T-Rex brain would likely be enough red wine to get you over the top in Arizona.
In my posting I should add Mr. Harry White designed Fred & Friends cup also.
GabrielM, I think it was a museum docent. If I remember more than that, I'll post an update.
Old winebottles vary too, but the volume does hover right around a lungful.
Damn... Same product Fred & Friends shows the other side.
Note to Self:
1. Research
2. Post Results
Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish these were available in the U.S.!!!
Teresa Nielsen Hayden
That beaker is putting fairly specific numbers on measurements that would vary greatly from person to person.
The amount of bacteria in my gut, for example, would fill a 32oz big gulp.
Teresa, that sounds a bit shenaniganny to me. The implication, I take it, is that wine bottle are standardized around the volume it takes to hold an amount of wine one can drink in one long swallow without having to stop and breathe, right?
But there's no reason to assume that the rate at which a human being uses up the oxygen in his lungs is the same as the rate at which a volume of wine will pour down that same human's throat. Especially since the pouring rate of the wine will be constrained by things like the diameter of the bottleneck and the drinker's throat. And by the drinker's experience at chugging, which will vary greatly across a population of drinkers.
Four cups and wide mouth to accomodate any stick blender. Looks like they would be perfect for making smoothies.
That bottles were blown by hand, so to speak might have something to do with equivalent capacity.
For those missing the obvious, the wine bottle ~= lung size comes from the bottles being blown glass.
There's probably a correlation, yes, but I don't see enough evidence to imply causation. A glass blower can make a bottle however big they choose. Now, if it's some sort of tradition or something, that's another matter.
@#16 Rose Queen
These will be available on Amazon on April 6, 2008 and are available for pre-order now.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_k/103-3404943-7251811?url=search-alias%3Dgarden&field-keywords=equal+measure&x=0&y=0
From a quick google search, (I'm not a historian), it seems Kenelm Digby is seen as the father of the modern wine bottle, and perhaps it was partly due to him that they arrived at a standard size.
According to the Wikipedia folks, it seems there is not exactly a single standard, however.
I'm sure the internet will quickly tell me if I am wrong...
probably turn out to how big a fluid filled bottle survives ordinary handling. Nothing like spilled drink to lead to spilled blood. A"strengths of materials" issue.
Assuming the cup's marked in milliliters, the "enough plutonium to make a bomb" level (about 580 ml, it looks like) is actually 11 kilograms worth, the unreflected standard density spherical critical mass.
In other words, not "enough to make a bomb" (which is actually 4-6 kg depending on model), but "Fill to this level and kaboom".
A wine bottle is simply 1/6th of a gallon (26 2/3 fl oz) or 1/6 of 4.5 litres = 750ml
@25
so, if you were to pour it in fine powder form slowly, would you get a prompt critical and flash before reaching the mark?
@27
Fine powder has lower density than normal metal, so you'd need more of it.
If you for example fabricated two cylindrical slugs each with 5.25 or so kilograms, put one in the bottom of the mug, and dropped the second one on top, you'd replicate the Godiva and Slotkin criticality excursions.
To actually make a large explosion you need a lot more than one critical mass (a lot of compression, reflection, or more than one critical mass to start with). But assembling one full critical mass has typically been lethal to anyone nearby in the room.
The Demon Core?
ever watch these?
http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/The_Monju_nuclear_reactor_leak
Huh. The glass-blowing thing totally never occurred to me. Still, I took a glass-blowing class once in college, and as I recall, you don't generally knock a piece out all on a single lungful. (But then, I really sucked at it. Wound up dropping the class.)
"Vol. of body cells that die on a good day"
That's a little disconcerting.
I've never blown glass myself, but I've reverently watched it done many times. It takes A LOT of effort to blow glass. You don't get a bud vase in one blow, let alone a wine bottle.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that once you get it to a certain largeness, after many blows, you don't have enough air pressure in your lungs to make it any larger?
this is awesome! reminds me of a cup i saw recently in the tate modern shop. it's called "meniscus" and the measurements on the side are of "one sip", "one gulp" etc. very nice!
here's the link to the shop. unfortunately not a very good picture!