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Shaq-inches? Not at City Hall you don't

Menino inches

It was a busy day today at the Mayor's Hotline office in City Hall - more than 2,700 calls by 2 p.m. I spent some time there, will have a report later, but for now, here's an image showing how they measure snow at City Hall.

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Yes, but how many Smoots in a Menino? And how many Meninos in a Shaq? And how many Shaq's in my snowbank?

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I don't know from your snowbank friend, but...

1.04 Smoot = 1 Menino

1.21 Menino = 1 Shaq

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Harv just said Boston's now up to 70.5 inches of snow this season, which equals:

  • 1.05 Smoots
  • 1.00 Meninos
  • 0.83 Shaqs
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. . . The Great Snow of 1717. What do you think the penalties were back then for not clearing the snow in front of your house? Public whipping or just a day in the stocks?

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IIRC, Smoot is 5'7", but the Wikipedia page says the non-SI standard measure is 170.18cm. If Mumbles really is 5'10", or 177.8cm tall, 1.044 smoots. Shaq is 7'1", which is 216cm or 1.269 smoots.

Or working the other way, a Menino is 0.819 Shaqs, and a Smoot is 0.7878 Shaqs, or 0.961 Meninos.

Clearly I'm so fried from working from digging that there's only one thing left for me to do: make an Excel spreadsheet to handle these calculations more easily.

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Be careful. Given that the heights of Menino, Shaq and Smoot are all popularly reported in English - not Standard metric - units, you need to be mindful about producing results with more siginificant digits than are justified.

Although there is some debate about whether Shaq is 7' 1" or merely 7' 1/2", the other two gentlmen's heights are only reported in whole inches. Therefore - using 1 inch as the unit basis for measurement - it seems prudent to assume accuracy of no more than 1 part in ((7*12)+1)= 85. Yes, I took some liberty by assuming 1 part in 100 - ie - two siginifcant digits. But any more than that is untenable.

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We wouldn't want to repeat the mistake of the Mars Climate Orbiter and get SI and Imperial units mixed up. The result would be a disaster for the whole snowfall-compared-to-famous-person system, possibly leading to a loss of funding.

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Google lets you type

"How many Smoots in 70.5 inches" or whatever and get the results. So at least for Smoots, we're covered.

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like I did up above in this same post an hour ago?

Do ya not read yer own website?! ;o)

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You, Brett and Swirly spend more time on the website than Adam does.

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Brett doesn't actually post a lot; he's just, um, loud? Noticeable? Memorable?

Kaz posts a lot. Don't forget Kaz. Oh, and Ron Newman. Gotta have Ron.

(Let's not talk about The Zak.)

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